A Nurse with PTSD Used Drugs to Self-Medicate. He's Been Jailed for Three Years.

The family of a nurse traumatised by working in Europe’s refugee camps has criticised his harsh imprisonment for drug offences.

Pip Orchard, 29, was caught last August ordering around £165 worth of drugs – three grams of cocaine and 15 Xanax pills – over the internet to his home in Guernsey, an island off the coast of France. 

In court, his defence team outlined how Orchard had suffered post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when he returned home from working as a volunteer medic over six years, treating hundreds of asylum seekers at United Nations-run camps in France and Greece. The court heard he regularly had to drag dead bodies out of the surf, that his mental health declined and that he turned to drugs as a way to cope. 

Orchard was sentenced to three years in prison earlier this month at Guernsey’s Royal Court for importing the drugs. The court heard customs officers intercepted the drugs at the post office and arrested Orchard when he came to claim them. Police told the court the drugs were worth up to £560, even though Orchard is believed to have paid around £165 for them. After his arrest, Orchard was caught drink driving, an offence for which he was sentenced to an extra six months on top of the two-and-a-half years he received for the drugs offences.

“He went to court with many excellent character references and evidence of his mental breakdown. However, the judge ignored this evidence and was determined to make an example of him with a big prison sentence,” Pip’s father, Tom Orchard, told VICE World News. 

“When our son had his mental breakdown, we thought the ideal place for his recovery from trauma would be his home island of Guernsey. Little did we know how unsympathetic the authorities would be to his plight. Instead of helping him, they just wanted to dig the knife in even further,” Mr Orchard added. “Pip is serving a three-year sentence in a grim prison environment, instead of benefitting from the love and support of his family and the wider community who care about him.”

So far, more than 3,000 Guernsey residents have signed a petition calling for Orchard’s sentence to be turned into a non-custodial one, and the introduction of a health-based approach to drug-related offending on the island.

Speaking on a prison phone about his mental health problems after returning from Greece, Pip Orchard told VICE World News that he self-medicated by using drugs: “I was struggling to cope. I hadn’t managed to access mental health support due to the long waiting lists. I returned to Guernsey, where I could receive support from my family and the local Alcoholics Anonymous.” 

It is not uncommon for frontline workers in refugee camps to come back home suffering from secondary trauma. Zarlasht Halaimzai, director of the Refugee Trauma Initiative, which helps refugees and workers with mental health problems, said her charity has helped up to 3,000 frontline staff in five years: “We have seen a high instance of workers suffering vicarious trauma from being exposed to the horrific experiences of refugees. We have helped people returning to the UK with symptoms of PTSD who are also dealing with a horrible sense of injustice and helplessness at what is happening in Europe.”

Guernsey, a self-governing British Crown Dependency and one of the Channel Islands, is well-known for its tough stance on controlled substances. Last year, 22-year old chef Hayden Price was locked up for three years for possession of a single ecstasy pill. 

A study of Guernsey’s record on punishing people for drug possession, published last year, found the jurisdiction had far higher rates of locking up offenders than in England and Wales. It found that, in Guernsey, two-thirds of people caught in possession of drugs ended up receiving a custodial sentence, compared to 4 percent in England and Wales. In 2018, one in five people entering prison on the island was sentenced for a drug offence.  

The report found that being sent to prison for drug offences often had “long-lasting effects upon the physical and mental health of individuals, particularly for younger offenders, and the families and partners of prisoners”. 

Professor Harry Sumnall of Liverpool John Moores University, author of the report, said: “It’s important that legal responses are proportionate, targeted and have the intended effect. If the objective is to reduce drug-related harms to the offender and others, then a prison sentence is unlikely to be successful.” There is public support for alternatives to imprisonment for drug users in Guernsey, according to the report, with over 50 percent of respondents to a Justice Policy review in 2019 agreeing that sentences for drug use are too high. 

Another report into Guernsey’s criminal justice system, carried out by consultant Crest Advisory last year, concluded that the island’s “historically tough” punishment for drug trafficking and possession offences conflicts with its goals to boost child welfare, long-term employment prospects for individuals and economic prosperity for the community.    

Lucia Paglione, Coordinator of drug policy reform group the Guernsey Drug Strategy Campaign, said: "Our courts are failing to use their discretion. We still have some of the harshest sentences in Europe, and they're failing our community.” She said Guernsey courts used outdated sentencing guidelines which are discriminatory against drug users. “It’s time our politicians are held accountable for their failure to reduce the severe harm of drug sentencing on the community.”