THE BEST TREATMENT FOR HEROIN ADDICTS? ARREST THEM

The Latest Idea From the Police Is a Nonsense

Right and wrong have absconded from the police vocabulary. In their
place we have the false reasoning of the morals-free utilitarian.

This week Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of
Nottinghamshire, said that heroin should be prescribed to drug
addicts to curb crime. Speaking to the Association of Chief Police
Officers in Manchester, he crudely calculated that such a scheme
would cost the taxpayer UKP12,000 a year per addict, offsetting the
UKP45,000 that a heroin addicts annually steals to feed his habit.
We've been here before: four years ago Brian Paddick proposed that
cannabis should be legalised to cut crime on his patch in Brixton.

However much one might sympathise with the police who are
overstretched by drug-related crime and with householders who have
been the victim of pilfering junkies, Mr Roberts's suggestion is
fundamentally flawed -- it is amoral, defeatist and illogical.

Those who seek to legalise narcotics cry "the war on drugs has been
lost". One might as well also argue that "the war on murder has been
lost" or that "the war on rape, theft, fraud, larceny and pyromania
has been lost". Like drug abuse, these are malaises that will always
be with us, and no sane person believes they will ever be totally
abolished. Rather we just do our best to ensure that they are
minimised -- and we do this by enforcing the law and the threat of
punishment. Just because you can't eradicate a crime doesn't mean you
have to surrender by legalising it.

If the police really want to stop heroin addicts committing crime
then the best method would not be a ready supply of heroin on the NHS
but to arrest heroin users. The frequently employed language of
"compassion" is misplaced and misleading in this case; the most
caring and the practical thing to do would be to prosecute and
imprison users -- to stop their habit.

Contrary to the media myth perpetuated by movies such as
Trainspotting, the typical heroin addict is as likely to be a
sensitive, fragile, middle-class graduate as an aggressive,
working-class misfit from the roughest of council estates.

Many use this narcotic to escape from their worried reality and into
a world of dreams. Addicts are just as likely to be akin to William
Burroughs and the Lake Poets -- troubled and tormented neurotics --
as Renton and Spud from that iconic movie.

And it is precisely because these heroin addicts need understanding
that they need the fear of punishment. Most people develop a
life-debilitating heroin problem because they know that the arm of
the law won't seize them if they do. According to Gordon Heald's
Drugs: A Study Among UK Heroin Addicts, the three main reasons for
becoming dependent on drugs are "the need to get a buzz" (39 per
cent), "the need to escape from problems" (34 per cent) and "boredom"
(31 per cent).

Heroin users, or would-be users, need the countervailing force of
punishment. Of course, fear of an unenforced law is bound to be
non-existent, which is why the police are part of the problem. It is
certainly the case in Ireland, and particularly Dublin, which has a
notorious heroin problem. I should know. In 1998, two of my cousins
died within three weeks of each other, both from heroin overdoses.
They were like so many other heroin users: imaginative, ethereal and
delicate. In journalism, I've also worked at the same desk as a
habitual heroin abuser, who was of a similar disposition.

All these sensitive souls -- hardly natural outlaws -- would have
forced themselves to quit their habit had they faced the serious
prospect of prison, a fine, or bringing shame on their family. But
this simple point has been lost in the sociology classes that new
police recruits are subjected to.

I remember, after we found my cousin dead, my mother remonstrating
with the policeman: "Don't you ever enforce the law? Drugs are
against the law, you know." To which he dutifully replied: "Drugs are
a social problem." Ireland may be a different country, but it appears
that the Gardai, the Metropolitan Police and Nottinghamshire Police
have all had the same sociology lessons.

While most proponents of legalising or decriminalising heroin portray
themselves as "caring", the reality is that their utilitarian mindset
renders them devoid of humanity. They see only crime figures and
statistics, not human beings. Mr Roberts wants to save money, not, it
seems, lives. Martin Barnes, chief executive of the drugs charity
DrugScope, added: "There is compelling evidence that heroin
prescribing, although more expensive than some forms of drug
treatment, is cost-effective in reducing drug-related crime and other
costs to communities." This is technocracy at its most cold and callous.

And then there is that panacea: methadone. Nicola Metrebian, of the
charity Action on Addiction, says that her organisation was doing
research that would "compare the effectiveness of injectable
methadone and injectable heroin to oral methadone". Methadone is no
cure-all for heroin; it is (in Dublin at least) a bigger killer than heroin.

Mr Roberts, in his bureaucratic-minded search for a quick-fix way to
treat the problem, has failed to spy the proverbial elephant in the
room: that the best way to prevent people illegally taking heroin is
to prosecute those who do.