TREATING HEROIN USE AS AN ILLNESS RATHER THAN A CRIME WILL EASE CRISIS
IN OUR JAILS

Heroin addiction in Scotland is a disaster, with deaths running at
more than one a day, and prisons overcrowded, with the majority there
because of drug-related crime.

Society's response has been a combination of legal penalties and
treatment. Even though criminalising possession and use of an
addictive substitute has clearly failed, experts such as Dr Alistair
Ramsay (your report, 31 August) appear to advocate more of the same,
with more money spent on rehabilitation programmes. What is required
is a new approach.

First, possession and use of heroin should cease to be a criminal
offence. This would remove large numbers of offenders from courts and
prisons.

Second, heroin should be prescribed on the NHS for those who require
it. This would mean establishing injection clinics with help for the
majority who want to achieve abstinence. Such facilities would
undermine the black market and the crime it creates.

This is not to suggest heroin should be legalised, which would start
an unstoppable industry, as happened with tobacco. Nor is it suggested
that illegal suppliers should not be rigorously pursued and prosecuted.

Rather, this is a plea that heroin possession and use should be
medicalised rather than criminalised. Such a change in law would
greatly reduce crime and the pressures on police and prison services.
It would also require doctors to treat addicts as patients with an
illness, rather than as deviants who need to be controlled. However,
so long as experts such as Dr Ramsay continue to dismiss such new
approaches the situation will only get worse.

David Hannay,

Kirkdale Carsluith, Wigtownshire