DRUG ABUSE IN PRISONS

Sir - It is unfortunate that your Health and Children Correspondent,
Padraig O'Morain, relied almost exclusively on the press release of the
Irish Prisons Service when reporting on our survey of hepatitis B and C and
HIV in Irish prisoners (The Irish Times, July 27th). Prison management is
sceptical of our finding that approximately one fifth of prisoners who
inject began doing so in prison. The reason for this scepticism is the
known propensity of prisoners to blame their health troubles on the
authorities rather than themselves.

Having carried out two surveys in Irish prisons, the results of one of
which has just been published in the British Medical Journal, we believe
that those with authority to introduce change in the Irish Prisons Services
should look at their own practices rather than seek to spin their way out
of accepting responsibility for what has been acknowledged for some time as
a seriously deficient system.

Yours, etc.,

Jean Long, M.Sc., Shane Allwright, Ph.D., Joseph Barry, MD, Department of
Community Health and General Practice, Trinity College, Dublin 2