HOW CAN WE TRUST POLICE TO PEDDLE A DRUG CURE?

Guest vocals: Max Cruickshank

THE METHADONE debate has gone on for 10 years. It is back on the
agenda now because we are at last coming to understand that using
this heroin substitute to ease addicts off their expensive and
dangerous habit is not working well.

In Scotland well over 50% of heroin users, and 80% to 90% of women
prisoners who use the drug, have undiagnosed, untreated mental health
problems. Those problems are certainly not solved by prescribing
methadone or substitute heroin.

So why is a senior policemen trying to persuade us to import another
miracle-cure drug for heroin users? Have the police learned nothing
from the years we've been importing one failed US rehabilitation
scheme after another?

If we are now going to offer addicts heroin to solve their heroin
problem, without putting in place all the essential services of care,
to help them rebuild their seriously damaged lives, then this is just
another way of parking the problem for later.

I am suspicious of drug solutions pedalled by the police. It was the
police, after all, who persuaded David Blunkett and Charles Clark to
reclassify cannabis - and look where that got us.

The police seem to glory in mounting drugs raids, media in tow, to
show us how clever they are. Unfortunately the media don't follow
that up by visiting those communities further away which find the
drug dealers have moved into their area.

The clamour to test school pupils for drug-use is another
police-supported initiative which will only make things worse. More
schools will simply have confirmed what drugs workers know already:
that every school has a drug problem, not just some of them. Testing
school children will lead to more exclusions, so where will these
kids be educated? In some sink school in a deprived area.

I do not want people to think that there is no point at all in using
methadone or heroin as a way of getting drug users on the road to
recovery. There is no doubt at all that, for some, that has been a
very positive thing.

I am arguing that we need to listen to the views of far more people
and we need to have a far wider range of medications and therapies
made available to those trapped in addiction.

The public will have to face up to the fact that rehabilitation does
not come cheap. We have to get real and allow our politicians to dare
to consider that it might cost UKP36,000 a year to imprison a drug
misuser or upwards of UKP50,000 a year for top quality rehabilitation.

Which, they should ask, has more chance of curing the problem?