LEGALISATION OF HEROIN IS RULED OUT BY HEALTH MINISTER

THE DRUG used by Britian's most prolific serial killer, Dr Harold Shipman,
to murder 15 elderly female patients is to remain on the banned substance
list in the Republic.

A proposal to legalise diamorphine better known as heroin under strict
medical supervision has been ruled out by an expert group in a report to
the Minister for Health, Micheal Martin.

The drug, Dr Shipman's chosen instrument of death, is used extensively in
Britain to relieve severe pain in cancer patients and following operations.

Despite its efficacy, Mr Martin is expected to reaffirm the ban on heroin,
which has high abuse rates worldwide, when he issues the report by the
National Advisory Committee on Palliative Care this week.

Dr Shipman killed 297 patients during a 24-year career of murder. Large
quantities of diamorphine were discovered by the police in his surgery.

The former GP was convicted in January last year of murdering 15 elderly
women patients in the Hyde area of Greater Manchester by administering
lethal injections of heroin.

The World Health Organisation has urged member states to ban diamorphine,
because it considers it more addictive than other opiates. Britain and
Canada have not complied with the request.

The arguments for and against were considered by the National Advisory
Committee on Palliative Care, set up by the then Minister for Health, Brian
Cowen, 18 months ago.

The case in favour was that patients living in Britain and Northern Ireland
who came to the Republic on business, or holidays, or to stay here, were
suffering unnecessarily. But this was rejected on the basis that there were
better opiates in use here, such as morphine and hydromorphone, or
Pallidone, which is more potent in terms of concentration.

Dr Liam =D3 Siorain, of the Irish Cancer Society, told the Sunday
Independent: "There was never a medical need to have diamorphine and I
guess because of the anxieties around heroin etc, and people carrying it,
there was no great sense of wanting to have it, or needing to have it in
terms of practice. So we have always used hydromorphone, which,
internationally, would be seen as a better agent. It is used widely in the
United States, where there is no diamorphine, either."

"Why introduce into Ireland a drug to facilitate the occasional visitor
from abroad? We do not actually need it," said Dr =D3 Siorain, who works in
Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, Dublin.

Dr Tony O'Brien, a consultant in palliative care at Marymount Hospice,
Cork, who chaired the National Advisory Committee on Palliative Care,
agrees that there is no medical case for using diamorphine. He said: "I
think we have an adequate number of potentially strong opiate medications
in a range and variety of formulations available in this country."