VICTIMS GETTING OLDER AS DRUGS TAKE TOLL

Heroin used to take young lives. Now it takes old ones too, as
Scotland's annual toll of drug-related deaths revealed yesterday.

There were 421, more than ever before, and all but 69 were over the
age of 25 while 70 were over 45.

The newspaper headlines 25 years ago, at the beginning of the heroin
epidemic north of the Border, were about parents who had lost their
children to the drug. Today, the story is about children losing their
parents.

advertisement "We have had a large-scale heroin problem since the
early 1980s," said David Liddell of the Scottish Drugs Forum. "We have
now got people in their 40s and even 50s who have been taking drugs
ever since.

"These are people who have damaged their health in various ways.
People who, with that length of addiction, despair of ever escaping
their addiction. They've reached the point when they almost don't care
if they live or die."

Yesterday's figures, for all drugs, were higher than ever before. Is
this a symptom of the sheer longevity of Scotland's heroin addiction?

Neil McKeganey thinks so, at least partly. A professor at Glasgow
University, he has been studying the epidemic for years.

He said: "Part of the difficulty is the fact so many of the drug users
in Scotland are at the end of the road of their drug use (which in
many cases started in the 1990s) and they are in a very poor state of
health, with very low expectations of surviving.

"This rather makes them somewhat immune to advice as to the risks they
are running continuing to use the drugs they are injecting."

Fully 280 died from drug abuse last year, matching the all-time record
of 2002. The rest of the 421 were made up of a tragic catalogue of
accidental, deliberate and undetermined poisonings.

Academics in England are already questioning the definition of a drug
death. Right now, it only includes those who died directly from
narcotics, not any of the many of deaths from side effects or
consequences of a drug-using lifestyle. One of those consequences is a
remarkable reduction in life expectancy.

Professor McKeganey last week highlighted the dangers of older drug
addicts. Their children, he said, should be monitored by CCTV in their
homes, to make sure they are safe. In reality, children of heroin
addicts can't even count on getting a social worker.

Older addicts clearly find it harder to quit. Many registered users
are on methadone, the catch-all heroin substitute, but it kills too.
There were 97 deaths after taking the drug last year and treatment
remains hard to get.

Mr Liddell stressed that the resources just aren't there to deal with
the sheer scale of addicts - around 50,000 "problematic" users who
need treatment.

In Greater Glasgow, which accounted for a third of deaths, there is
hope. Not for a cure or a boom in scarce treatment, but for a
practical way to keep some drug users, old and young, alive.

The city's addiction services team have started dishing out UKP5 doses
of a medicine that can save the lives of those who overdose. It is
part of a year-long pilot project, launched this spring, to see if
free Naloxone for users and their families will make a difference to
the tally of drug deaths. It already has. Four users have been saved
by Naloxone since March. They were all given the medicine by other
addicts.

The whole project, supported by the team's superiors at the local
council and health board as well as Scottish Drugs Forum, costs UKP26,000.