REMOVE ADDICTS FROM SOCIETY

As there is no consensus in the community in favor of supervised
injecting rooms, it is time to consider alternatives.

Many people believe that more should be done to provide treatment for
addiction, and others that addiction should be treated as crime. A
wide range of attitudes to heroin addiction can be reconciled by
accepting that heroin addicts should be removed from the community,
for their own good as well as that of the community.

If a person brought before a magistrate were found to be a heroin
user, that person should be placed in detention in an institution
operated in accordance with a medical model. A detained person could
prove non-addiction through absence of withdrawal symptoms after a
prescribed period, and be released.

An addicted person might volunteer to enter a detoxification program
and/or begin a methadone program and, when stable, be released into
the community. Detected relapse would result in return to detention.

Detained persons who elected not to enter a treatment program would be
provided with sufficient narcotic administered under medical
supervision to prevent withdrawal. That is, addicted persons may
choose to retain their heroin-using lifestyle but forfeit their
freedom in doing so.

Many lives would be saved, the nuisance aspect of drug addiction in
the community would be minimised and the community would, I believe,
understand the ethical and humanitarian nature of the proposal.

The only issue of substance is the libertarian one. We already have
the concept of the involuntary patient in a psychiatric hospital who
is detained for his or her own benefit, or the community's benefit,
until safe to be released.

R. G. ARNOLD,
Burwood