ADDICTS STEALING POUNDS 11,000 A YEAR

DRUG addicts steal property or carry out frauds to the sum of pounds
11,000 a year each in order to feed their habit, say researchers.

Those who inject drugs, primarily heroin, need pounds 324 a week to
buy their supplies and resort to a range of crimes including
shoplifting, car theft, housebreaking, mugging and fraud. Researchers
at the NHS Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health
based their calculations on interviews with nearly 1,000 injecting
drug abusers contacted in the community, through treatment centres and
needle exchange schemes.

In Glasgow, where the study was carried out, they estimate that goods
to the value of pounds 194 million a year must be acquired illegally
every year in the city by the drug users, most of whom are on low
incomes. This sum does not include earnings made from prostitution or
from drug dealing.

"This sample is as representative as you can get," Sharon Hutchinson,
statistician on the project, said yesterday. "Four out of five in our
sample said they had committed crimes in the previous six months. Of
these 69 per cent said the crimes were theft. In all 87 per cent of
them said they had been imprisoned since they started to inject, 16
per cent of them more than 30 times."

The on-going research, reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry
was initially involved with injecting drug abuse and HIV infection and
extended to include questions on crime. Half of the addicts said that
93 per cent of their drug spending money was illegally obtained. For
the whole sample the average figure was 71 per cent.

The most frequently used drug was heroin, with 90 per cent of the
respondents saying they had used it in the previous six months, 97 per
cent used more than one drug. Miss Hutchinson said that where abusers
had been treated with methadone in the previous two months, there was
likely to be a 20 per cent reduction in the amount spent on drugs.