A new after-care facility for post-rehab narcotics addiction patients, the Napier Centre 4 Healing, will open in the Ekukhanyeni Mission not far from Verulam in the Iqadi region of the KZN North Coast, in early 2018.
What is the purpose of the NC4H?
To provide a specific high-quality residential response to the needs of street-dwelling drug users in and near Durban.
Will this address the needs of all street-dwelling drug users?
No, but we hope it will demonstrate an effective and viable model of rehabilitation that can be used to inform efforts by Government and wider society to comprehensively address the crisis.
What is the level of the crisis?
Statistics indicate that nearly 4 million South Africans were regular users of narcotics in 2013. The 2016 HSRC survey of homelessness in Durban identified 4 000 people regularly sleeping rough in the CBD. Of these just over 2 200 admit to regularly using illegal drugs and about 1 000 people using drugs such as whoonga and cocaine (as opposed to just dagga). This is the experience of the Denis Hurley Centre, which sees hundreds of homeless people at our feeding scheme every day, would support these rough proportions.
Do homeless addicts want to get off their drugs?
Sadly, there are some who do not; but there are many who do. The role of the Denis Hurley Centre will be to identify those who genuinely want to and are ready to commit to a programme. Since many became homeless for lack of work, they realise that addressing the addiction is necessary if they are ever going to be able to get a job and get off the streets.
In what sense will NC4H be Catholic?
NC4H – like the Denis Hurley Centre – will be ‘inclusively Catholic’ not ‘exclusively Catholic’.
The programme will be based on a strong Catholic ethos in terms of a whole-person approach to healing, a belief in grace-filled personal transformation: the Catholic tradition of ‘conversion’ means a ‘turning round of the heart’. It will also build on the long Catholic tradition of education and formation, as evidenced for example, through the Church’s novitiate programmes. It will have the support of the local Catholic communities, the parish and the Oakford Dominicans.