A COUNSEL OF DESPAIR TO SUGGEST HEROIN SHOULD BE LEGALISED

I AM grateful to Professor Richard Hammersley and colleagues for
responding to my opinion piece in The Herald (Letters, October 27). I
think it is important to point out, however, that I was not
advocating intolerance towards drug users so much as intolerance
towards illegal drugs. Hammersley and colleagues have assumed that
intolerance to the one must mean intolerance to the other when in
reality drug users are not reducible to the drugs they are using.

The second point I would like to make is that while one may call for
efforts to tackle social exclusion, it is important to recognise that
there are many people living in the most deprived circumstances in
Scotland, and elsewhere, who are not using illegal drugs and who
would never use illegal drugs. To suggest that social exclusion
causes illegal drug use is an affront to all those who are choosing
not to use illegal drugs.

Hammersley and colleagues clearly favour drug legalisation since they
suggest that the currently illegal status of drugs such as heroin and
cocaine serves the interests of those in the drugs trade more than
anybody else. However, there is hardly a greater counsel of despair
than to suggest that the best we have to offer in the face of a
heroin problem that is barely 30 years old in Scotland is for the
drug to be legalised.

There is a reason why heroin and cocaine are illegal and it is
because of the fact that both of these drugs are incredibly
addictive. If we feel there is a route to harm reduction which is not
in essence about reducing the number of people using illegal drugs,
we need only to look at the thousands of young people in Glasgow, and
beyond, who are instantly recognisable as the living dead of our
addict generation. They have found to their cost the enormous damage
that drugs do.

Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research, University of Glasgow.