Great Britain: Secret NHS heroin injections for criminal addicts

The Times (U.K.) ^ | November 22, 2006 | Stewart Tendler

[Stoat]

Secret NHS heroin injections for criminal addicts

Stewart Tendler, Crime Correspondent of The Times
 

Trials with heroin cost more than methodone, but their advocates say that the cost of crime makes them justified

Drug addicts are receiving injections of heroin on the NHS under a government-backed plan to wean them off crime sprees to pay for their doses.

 

Up to 150 addicts at three centres in London, South-East England and the North of England will take part in the experiment which has been kept secret and will report to ministers, police and doctors.

The addicts have been chosen because they have very serious addiction problems. They receive the drug doses daily under supervision of nurses and doctors at the treatment centres. The use of heroin by doctors is not illegal but they require licences from the Home Office.

 

Two clinics are already operating with one at the Maudsley Hospital in south London and a second in Darlington, Co Durham. A third is expected to open later in an experiment which will run for several years. 

Heroin has not been routinely prescribed for addicts since the 1960s when the "British system" was abandoned. Doctors were allowed to issue prescriptions to addicts they were treating but the system was abandoned after a series of scandals surrounding over-prescribing by a group of half a dozen London doctors.

At the moments addicts are usually prescribed a synthetic substitute called methadone which addicts often say is not strong enough or lacks the punch of heroin. Prescriptions are sold on the illicit market and addicts revert to heroin.

Last month a report by Professor Neil McKeganey, head of drugs misuse at Glasgow University, showed that less than four per cent of heroin addicts managed to kick the habit with methadone.

Details of the heroin experiment were revealed today when one of the country’s top police drugs experts publicly called for the prescription of heroin to be more widely available for seriously addicted patients.

Howard Roberts, the number two in Nottinghamshire police and deputy head of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ drugs group, told a national police conference: "We take offenders out of crime and treat their addiction in a closely monitored treatment programme. Of course people getting people off drugs altogether must be the objective but I do believe we have been left with the consequences of relatively uncontained addiction for too long."

Mr Roberts, who is a police representative on the government’s advisory council on misuse of drugs, said he was not suggesting the legalisation of heroin but a way of ending a crime wave that stretches from burglary to murder.

He said up to 60 per cent of crime in the UK could be drug-fuelled. Mr Roberts said he accepted the cost of treating addicts with heroin could be £12,000 against £3,000 for using methadone.

But he pointed to the costs of crime. Addicts, he said, need up to £15,000 a year to feed their habit which would mean crime costing £45,000 a year. Home Office research showed addicts committed 432 crimes a year, ten-fold the number carried out by non-addicts.

The police chief, who has the backing of other senior officers, said that the benefits of using heroin were supported by research including studies on heroin prescription in Holland and Switzerland.

The research found that there were significant reductions in illicit drug use among those receiving the treatment and both the Swiss and Dutch found a drop in crime committed by the addicts. In Switzerland the majority of patients had no convictions while in treatment.

A spokeswoman for Action for Addication, a research charity which is helping to oversee the pilot schemes, said: "These trials are a last resort for those hard-to-treat addicts and see if this has a potential as a last resort."

Support for the project and Mr Roberts’ call came from Martin Barnes, the chief executive of Drugscope, who said prescribing heroin could be the best route for some drug users to escape their addiction. "There are positive net gains not just to the individual drug user but within the community generally," he said.

[Stoat]

See Also:

The Sun Online - News 'Give junkies heroin on NHS'

 
NHS addicts ... call to prescribe heroin

'Give junkies heroin on NHS'

 
By MARK PRISSELL
November 22, 2006
 
 

 

 

 

 
JUNKIES should be given heroin on the NHS to stop them committing crime, a senior police officer says.

 

Prescribing the drug would cost £12,000-a-year per addict.

But Howard Roberts, deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire Police, said it would be cheaper as chronic users steal at least £45,000 worth of property a year to feed their habit.

He told the Association of Chief Police Officers: "There is an undeniable link between addicted offenders and appalling levels of criminality.

"Heroin and crack cocaine addicts commit crime from burglary to robbery, to sometimes murder, to get the money to buy drugs to satisfy their addiction.

"The resulting misery to society is huge.

“Therefore the logic is clear, I suggest, that we take highly addicted offenders out of committing crime to feed their addiction, into closely supervised treatment programmes that, as part of the programme, can prescribe diamorphine."

Mr Roberts stressed the first objective of such schemes would be to get addicts - who currently receive heroin substitute methadone - off drugs.

At present, 300 to 400 drug users receive heroin under a joint Home Office and Department of Health pilot project.

Similar trials in Holland and Switzerland reported users turning away from crime to feed their habits when they were prescribed drugs.

Martin Barnes, chief executive of drugs charity DrugScope, said: “There is compelling evidence that heroin prescribing ... is cost-effective in reducing drug-related crime and other costs to communities.”
 

[Canard]

Interesting trial. What is undeniable is that the prohibition of heroin in the UK over the past 40 years has been a failure.

[weegee]

Are they used seized drugs of varying quality or refining their own?

[Brad from Tennessee]

[Prescribing the drug would cost £12,000-a-year per addict.]

This stuff must be produced by the pharmaceutical industry. Why not just have the British Army in Afghanistan buy heroin there and ship it back?

[Stoat]

Are they used seized drugs of varying quality or refining their own?

I would guess that in order to control purity and to shield themselves from legal action the Government would need to produce it. 

[Paleo Conservative]

The NHS should increase the doses.

[rawcatslyentist]

>"The NHS should increase the doses."

Pile it as high as an elephants eye.

The problem will solve itself shortly.

[M. Dodge Thomas]

The problem will solve itself shortly.

Actually, from a medical standpoint heroin addicts do pretty well if they have access to a accurate does of a pharmaceutical grade product, clean needles and medical care - certainly better than if one or more of these factors is absent.

[Canard]

Yes, and that was the case in the UK prior to the early '70s, so it's not like someone making such a statement is theorising.

The only things prohibition has done is make heroin addicts more likely to indulge in criminality to keep up their habit and more likely to overdose, be poisoned or become ill from the by-products of the illicit supply of the drug.

[DBrow]

England's heroin problem is karmic payback for the Opium Wars.