THE HEROIN CHALLENGE

Create A Treatment-Led Service

Special Report: Drugs In Britain

Should heroin be legalised? To raise the question is to risk being placed
in the paddock reserved for the politically irrelevant and irresponsible.
Remember the way the national commission into drugs misuse laws last year
was met with a glacial ministerial response for suggesting much more modest
reforms, like the reclassification of cannabis from B to the less serious C
category. Yet wait. Would you want to withdraw a drug, which medics think
has no rival among natural compounds in relieving severe pain - a drug
helping terminally ill patients, such as cancer victims, suffering
excruciating pain? Heroin and morphine both come from the same base: the
dried milky juices of the unripe seed capsule of the opium poppy. Heroin is
faster acting than morphine, which is why it is used in more severe cases.
The poppy's power to produce both a euphoric effect and sleep dates back
6,000 years.

Once upon a time the UK had a benign approach to the narcotic drug. Its
addictive properties were recognised but so was the fact that apart from
this serious defect, the drug did not cause physical harm to the body or
mind. Addicts were regarded as in need of medical help and support. GPs
were allowed to prescribe the drug. There were only 500 registered addicts.
But when this liberal era closed at the end of the 60s, the black market
took over. As Nick Davies, our special investigative reporter, charted in
his 7,000-word report over the last two days, it has been all downhill since.

There are now up to 500,000 heroin addicts in the UK. No longer under the
benign supervision of GPs, where it remained pure and unadulterated, the
drug has become a social menace: it is cut by blackmarket dealers with
drain cleaners, sand, sugar, starch and a variety of powders - milk, gravy,
curry. The list of adulterants is much longer than this. They have wreaked
havoc when injected into the veins. Even more damage has been committed by
sharing needles: wound infections, septicaemia, HIV/Aids and hepatitis C.
Worse still, the easiest way for new users to fund their habit is to sell
drugs too. Hence the escalation of numbers. These problems were not caused
by the drug but by the blackmarket. Yet politicians persist in presenting
the drug, rather than the blackmarket that prohibition created, as the threat.

What should happen now? A government which boasts of evidence-based
policy-making should look at the evidence. The world's leading
pharmacologists are agreed the drug does not pose a physical threat, but
does contain a serious addiction problem. That was why the old approach
made sense. Yet when bold doctors, like John Marks in Merseyside, have used
special Home Office licences to resurrect the old approach, they have been
met with serious government resistance. Not one patient in the 10 years of
Dr Mark's project died. In the first two years after it closed, 41 died.

Treatment funds have increased since 1998, when they represented a mere 13%
of the 1.4bn spent on tackling drug misuse, but the service still receives
far too little compared to the enforcement agencies. There is no chance of
access with an addiction problem - only addicts with criminal convictions
or HIV get help. This week's removal of the drug tsar, Keith Hellawell, was
understandable. He was floundering, but giving the lead to the Home
Secretary is wrong. It is not more enforcement that is needed, but more
treatment. Successive governments have conceded this point, yet the
imbalance remains. Time for a "joined-up" approach. Tony Blair should
insist the UK's approach is treatment-led.