QUICK FIX FOR THE HEROIN EPIDEMIC IS A COUNSEL OF DESPAIR

BACK in the days when I was a crime reporter in Newcastle, I got to
know a heroin user. To fund his habit, Sean became a self-styled
"Border reiver". He and his team would make trips to Scotland where
they would carry out raids on social clubs, petrol stations and
newsagents. On his return, he would stop off at a house in the former
pit town where he lived and emerge with a piece of paper containing
his next fix.

Sean was in and out of prison, but it didn't stop him using or
offending. Always in some scrape or other, he died in his 20s. And,
despite the efforts of police and Customs officers to crack down on
dealers, there were plenty more users to fill the gap.

Today, there are an estimated 240,000 heroin addicts in the UK,
committing an average of 435 crimes a year each to raise the
UKP30,000 it costs to keep them in the drug. They differ from Sean
only in that their crimes are more often perpetrated in their own
backyards: against poor people living in tower blocks on deprived estates.

With their total damage to society estimated at UKP45,000-a-head each
year, and methadone programmes widely believed to exacerbate rather
than alleviate the problem, it is little wonder police chiefs are
urging the government to take a more radical approach to heroin use.

The suggestion last week by Howard Roberts, deputy chief constable of
Nottinghamshire Police, that the most problematic addicts - those who
have abused for 10 years or more - should be prescribed the drug on
the NHS (and the revelation that small trials were already ongoing)
caused a predictable moral panic in some quarters. The Daily Mail
accused the government of putting junkies before cancer or
Alzheimer's patients, who are being refused certain drugs on the
grounds that they are not "cost-effective". They missed the point,
since the move would be aimed at providing relief not so much to the
heroin addicts themselves as to the beleaguered communities who bear
the brunt of their habit.

In fact, from a financial perspective the argument for dispensing
heroin is incredibly seductive: if the average drug addict causes
UKP45,000 of damage a year, then spending UKP15,000 on giving them
heroin means an overall saving of UKP30,000-a-year per addict. And
that's without taking into account the cost of drugs deaths and the
benefit to the economy if some of those addicts are able to
reintegrate into society.

Proponents of this strategy tend to cite Switzerland, where heroin
has been given to a small proportion of hardened addicts since the
mid-Nineties, as a beacon of good practice. There, drug-related crime
has dropped and the lives of some long-term users have been turned
around to the extent that they have had their children returned from
care and are able to hold down jobs.

Because the heroin is pure and is administered in clean, safe
surroundings, the incidence of infections, abscesses and Hepatitis C
has decreased, and the number of overdoses has dropped dramatically.
Those who sign up to heroin programmes tend to stay on them, and many
gradually reduce their consumption over a number of years.

A decade after Trainspotting, the UK's affair with the heroin shows
no sign of abating and so it makes sense to launch a damage
limitation exercise. And yet isn't there is something a little
desperate about placing our faith in a strategy that can at best
provide palliative care to a limited number of hardened users, and,
at worst, might actually increase the number of addicts? By so
cynically presenting the prescription of free heroin in terms of
profit and loss, aren't we reducing human life to an exercise in accounting?

What the police chief is selling as an inspired way out of the drugs
morass is in fact an admission of defeat. The message it sends out is
not that we could be at the cutting edge of treating heroin
addiction, but that, when it comes to drugs, we are clutching at straws.

The problem with using the Swiss model as a template for our approach
to heroin addiction is that it leaves so many questions unanswered.
Without a doubt the lives of many of those involved have been
stabilised. But can three quarters of people remaining on a drugs
treatment programme be judged an overwhelming success when the
treatment involved is the provision of the drug they wanted in the first place?

And what of those whose addiction is not judged serious enough to
merit free prescription: those who have abused the drug for only
eight or nine years, for example? Is their offending likely to be
reduced? What motivation do they have for trying to detox if they
know that in a year or so they will be able to get the drug for free?
And there is always the danger that the legally-prescribed drugs will
find their way into the illegal market place.

Even if prescribing heroin doesn't exacerbate the problem, it seems
to channel resources too far down the line, when addiction is already
entrenched. Wouldn't it be better to invest these sums of money
earlier on, when there is a realistic prospect of weaning people off heroin?

Detox programmes tend to be dismissed as useless, with the majority
of people who go through them eventually returning to heroin. But
then they are desperately underresourced. Those who decide they are
ready to come off the drug often find themselves on a waiting list of
up to 18 months, services are disjointed and there is a lack of
aftercare. I can't help wondering what would happen if we invested
UKP15,000 per addict a year (UKP3bn) more on improving the work done
in such centres.

It's not that I'm against prescribing heroin to addicts per se. Sure,
do it in the short-term to cut crime and help a handful of socially
dysfunctional people play a more productive role in society. But
don't let's present it as anything other than a stop-gap measure
until we come up with something better. A society that consigns tens
of thousands of its citizens to a life of heroin addiction is not one
that has seen the light: it is one that has given up hope.