Free Heroin

[dinger]

It has been in the news this week about a plan to have special places heroin addicts can go to get their supply of drugs for free. It has also been in the news about cancer patients who are being denied life saving drugs due to the cost for the N H S . I feel any money spent should be spent on the patients who have been hit with illness through no fault of their own not to people who have self inflicted by indulging with illegal substances thus becoming dependant on them. What are your views ?

[dragonfly]

I agree with you Dinger. It is just another mad thing that governments decide to do.

[cindy]

I agree Dinger. All the govt. are doing is encouraging them

[jazzactivist]

I think that it is a very sudden and strange announcement by the government and can't see it working in the UK, or being a vote winner. A few years back I went on a work trip to Amsterdam to find out more about this type of intervention. In Amsterdam there is a free heroin on prescription system for the most long-term addicts and they wait at home or at designated places on the street for a medical van which comes around twice a day to dispense their drugs. Each time the person has a health check and is dispensed just the right amount of heroin for maintenance which they have to take there and then. However, as Holland has generally more liberal laws and a good backup system of other health care it is just a few people who have been addicted for many years who get this assistance. I found that they were usually people who became addicted during the hippy era or through travel, which is much easier on the European mainland, and are not in good enough shape or have the connections to get involved in anything else, and it is viewed as purely a medical need.

In the UK drug addiction usually comes with all sorts of other associated crime and social problems, as heroin distribution is organised by criminal gangs. Even with prescription methadone, addicts often sell their prescriptions to illegally buy other drugs to use and sell on as part of this type of operation. Just providing heroin to the most seriously addicted isn't going to solve all the other problems. There is a new development with young men who have been injured in the armed forces becoming addicted to morphine as a painkiller and I saw a TV documentary about it a while back where Simon ? (the man who was badly burnt in the Falklands War) was suggesting that prescription heroin could be provided for them. Maybe this is what is influencing the government now?

[Ivy]

It works over here and has done so for quite some time. There are patients who have gone in and out of clinics committing crimes and have been assessed as incurable. The ethos behind handing out free Heroin is that they are patients like everybody else. A person who has lung cancer that MAY have been caused by smoking ( there still isn't any proof what actually causes it) won't be denied treatment so why should an addict be denied the only substance that makes him able to manage his day? It#s considered to be a kind of crime prevention too. Don't know whether the new government will keep it up though....