Part of me thinks if the tax payer gives these people a hit, they won’t brake into houses and steal stuff to fund another hit. But then part of me thinks they will anyway.

But then again, prescribing heroin from an already overstretched NHS, is it a good idea? Will it help society as well as the individual?

Cabbages.

Who knows.

What we do know is that the current situation doesn’t really work for anyone.

But then again, prescribing heroin from an already overstretched NHS, is it a good idea?

How much more expensive than prescribing methadone? if that’s still even a thing.

How much more expensive than prescribing methadone

Fair point.

Methadone still is.

Been in my Pharmacy, and the dodgy lot just turn up, and get given something, and go. I go in for regular meds, and have to order, then go home, maybe it turns up a week later, go back. Now I can’t actually get my meds, so spend my time phoning round seeing if any pharmacy has it….

No ones yet to overdose in a treatment room, surely that’s a good thing?
There’s plenty of evidence which backs up treatment rooms and de-criminalisation. See Portuguese drug policy for further details.

Christ, are we actually taking this original post seriously?

It’s like something from a drunk Daily Mail reporter.

Having witnessed the ruin it causes to ‘these people’ and their families I would respectfully suggest that the professionals involved are better placed to judge.

Aside from avoiding the overdoses that accompany variable quality drugs, when an IV drug user injects enough brickdust/talc whatever other shite the dealers cut the stuff with, they eventually get a really nasty infection and it often needs injectable antibiotics to treat it. For several weeks.

You can’t even find a vein in some of these poor bastards, so you likely have to put in a long-lasting long-line iv cannula because you can’t risk losing the access again.

Option A: So now they’re in hospital, with guaranteed access to their venous system and a bunch of mates or a dealer all too happy to deliver to the premises. Nip out for a “ciggy”, more brickdust down the line, line infection, pulmonary embolus, whatever. Nightmare for them and the NHS

Alternative option B: Really long-lasting antibiotic that really only needs 2 big doses a week apart to complete the treatment and so doesn’t need a long line inserting. Win !

Guess how much option B costs ? (clue – it rhymes with “free house and grounds”)
Option A – even more

… and neither stops the whole shitshow recurring in a month or two’s time

they won’t brake into houses and steal stuff to fund another hit. But then part of me thinks they will anyway.

They will , and do , that you can be assured….

But then again, prescribing heroin from an already overstretched NHS, is it a good idea? Will it help society as well as the individual?

helping the inflicted indulge in their poison only prolongs the problem , it doesnt help anyone

actually if they are going to get two hits a day then they will not be breaking into houses and turning tricks for the next hit. A junkie who is not rattling is no problem to society other than being dull and unproductive.

Saving to the country is huge. Heroin is cheap IIRC – much cheaper than methodone ( not sure on this)

Harm reduction. The netherlands took this approach years and years ago. Now heroin addiction is a much smaller issue there than it is here

the other thing about doing this is that it kills the illegal market – again why heroin addiction is much rarer in the netherlands.

Methodone substitution does not work. Its more addictive, its expensive and it does not satisfy the cravings properly so they still go looking for heroin.

If we gave every junkie heroin in a shooting gallery then withing a generation the whole heroin addiction / illegal market would be dead. this is the experience from countries that have done it. Crime would be much lower as well. In some parts of the country 70% of the crimes that people abhor – muggings and housebreaking are done by addicts to raise money for a fix. Same as much prostitution is from the same cause

One thing I would do is make the whole experience as drab and dull as possible

Lets do what the evidence says works – and this is one of those things.

Been in my Pharmacy, and the dodgy lot just turn up, and get given something, and go. I go in for regular meds, and have to order, then go home, maybe it turns up a week later, go back. Now I can’t actually get my meds, so spend my time phoning round seeing if any pharmacy has it….

Well they’re probably on a repeat order, often daily supply initially, so they’ve had the same process as you followed by trudging in for multiple repeat visits rather than going home with a nice one-off couple of months’ worth like you can

(I admit that supply shortages are a **** embarassment but that’s not the fault of your pharmacy or your heroin fans. If you can, pick a regular pharmacy to always go to and get your prescriptions sent there in advance by your GP. Then phone them and get them to ensure they order in plenty of time – that may help a bit, unless there’s a total outage)

Brownsauce just dropped his Daily Mail.
Plenty of people with addictions of different kinds, different levels of functioning in society.

I agree with TJ on this (but not on lots of other things).

JP

A stopped clock JP? Right twice a day?

Its one area of public policy where the evidence is pretty clear.

There was a project run in Liverpoolin the 1990’s that did exactly this. It ran for circa 10years before the British government were squeezed by the good old USofA administration.

I’ve referenced it on here before, it was successful in so far as the majority became functioning addicts, in other words they became normalised members of society, got jobs, homes etc etc and many of those actually stopped using. I forget the numbers now and it’s late, however reference is available online and also a book called Chasing The Scream by Johann Hari. An excellent read on the history of the war on drugs and it’s futility and need for it to continue.

Unsurprisingly the war on drugs… it’s all about the dollar!

I’m not going to comment on whether it’s good or bad.

What I can comment on is that the so called war on drugs is well and truly lost.

It’s a social /health pandemic. It’s not working.

So what’s wrong with a change of tack?

This is an area of public policy that I am interested in having worked both in the criminal justice system and with drug rehab

Its a classic example of prejudice over evidence as can be seen from the treatment of Proffessor Nutt and in the fuss over the appointments to the government panel looking into it ( anyone who had ever expressed the idea that drug law could be softened is excluded)

The evidence of ” what works” is out there. Prohibition has failed, costs huge sums of money and increases harm. Harm reduction should be the aim

Different drugs require different approaches. Plenty of countries have tried harm reduction approaches of different types and its easy to look at them and to take the best approaches from that experience. In harm reduction you need to look at harm to individuals and harm to communities.

I could write a much longer essay on this but anyone who doubts harm reduction is the right way to go should look to the Netherlands, Portugal, Uruguay, Switzerland and look at the harm reduction approaches there and see the outcomes. One of the clearest is from the Netherlands and heroin usage. Heroin usage is much lower, junkies are much older on average and deaths from heroin usage are rare compared to the UK ie few new addicts each year, a very small black market, junkies live longer

I certainly support it being trialled extensively, it’s not a cure-all but has been shown to have some positive effect in other countries and for sure the current situation is only getting worse. To be honest, from knowing and talking to addicts, I can see I could have ended up becoming a heroin addict if I hadn’t had certain advantages in life and had ended up just on existing on benefits with little to no prospects – anything that helped pass the monotony of just barely existing day to day would have some appeal.

Not excusing it and more help needs to be provided than just a safe room, free drugs and a needle but it’s a start

Its a massive and concerning issue for sure.

Re. TJ’s comments about harm reduction make a lot of sense. Don’t they prescribe Heroin in Switzerland? Drug related crime is virtually non-existent (I think), the issue is not pushed under ground, but dealt with transparently.

I’m not massively well up on the subject, but it certainly seems to work.

I think so BSN. Not checked recently

IIRC its done this way – shooting galleries. Very dull and bureaucratic so its hardly a rebellious experience. It becomes like signing on

The Portuguese and Dutch approaches are clearly superior but the problem won’t go away until we start addressing the issue of structural inequality. Spice is also a major issue, just walk around Manchester and see the homeless zombied out.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/27/parts-of-england-have-higher-mortality-rates-than-turkey

With legal cannabis there is no market for spice

Bring it on, the sooner we stop trying to solve the problem with a bigger problem (methadone) the better. Good money after bad and harder to kick.

In total and full agreement with TJ on this.

Anything is better than the current situation.

With legal cannabis there is no market for spice

Not sure that’s true, it would have to be very high strength skunk to mimic some of the effects of spice. A lot of people aren’t doing spice in an attempt to get high – they’re doing it to completely zone out from their lives.

With legal cannabis there is no market for spice

Spice when it was a legal high was styled a as an synthetic canabis

however its effects are vastly different

Legal canabis to treat spice heads would be like using cocodamol to treat smack heads. It’s not strong enough and the effects are different.

The Portuguese and Dutch approaches are clearly superior but the problem won’t go away until we start addressing the issue of structural inequality. Spice is also a major issue, just walk around Manchester and see the homeless zombied out.

This. Address the issues that means people end up being addicts.

Well… the war on drugs has been working so well for the last 40 years, I’m sure we’ll see the end of all illegal drug use any day now.

But seriously, you can treat addicts as criminals, keep them in the cycle of crime to feed their habit, robbing houses, mugging people, shoplifting and prostitution to keep lining the pockets of dealers.

Or you can treat it as a public heath crisis. Break that cycle, put the dealers out of business, stop the crime and yeah some will never quit, but some will.

It’s by far the cheaper option, yeah the NHS us underfunded, but so are the Police. Their are around 300k Herion and Crack addicts in England alone, they need between £15k and £30k a year to fund their habit each. You can’t steal a £500 TV and sell it for £500, they might get £50 for it, if they’re lucky. It varies a lot, but worst case a £30k a year addict will have to steal goods to a value of £500-£800 a DAY, that’s £180k-£300k a year, and there’s 300k addicts in England.

The NHS already supplies Heroin, under it’s more formal name diamorphine, it’s used in end of life care and rarely for labour pains.

Well worth a listen for those with time.

Quicker the better incorporated with access to rehabilitation services, housing and social care. A lot of very damaged people choose heroin as a warm lovely blanket to blot out their reality. For the average Baghead there is little support for coming clean and as they can be one person crimewaves it’s very foolish not to offer more help to them. The so called war on drugs was lost before it began. A new approach is needed but would probably be seen by most as political suicide due to misinformed hysteria.

Marin has it for me – evidence of whether it works or not won’t cut much ice. Doubling all taxes on private motoring and spending the money on public transport will reduce congestion, climate damage and pollution, but I’m afraid people just will not vote for it. Democracy is a pain sometimes innit…

Treating it as a health problem costs less than letting it become a crime problem and the outcomes are better for individuals and society.

People involved in this know more than you https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/ex-undercover-cop-says-widnes-11854487

We need to ditch the moralistic bullshit and deal with it as a public health issue. We deal with health issues by actually following the evidence as to what works and what doesn’t.

Treatment rooms and dealing with addicts medically has been shown to be massively more effective than the criminal justice approach.

I think it a good idea. Not so sure it will popular with the general public though.

The ongoing “war on drugs” has cost billions of pounds and thousands of lives world wide, and clearly isn’t working. Addicts forced into crime to pay for their drugs, dealers fighting turf wars, it just seems to be an endless downward spiral. Criminalising those involved takes them out of employment, education, breaks up families, huge ongoing societal costs for Police, prisons, justice system, probation, health and social services.

I can’t see any way of breaking the cycle other than offering a safe, legal supply in conjunction with treatment and therapy. Would be an expensive, long term generational shift in policies and attitudes. And potentially a failed experiment with real peoples lives

the problem won’t go away until we start addressing the issue of structural inequality.

Indeed. We need a much flatter spread of incomes across the social spectrum, housing for all, properly thought out welfare and an NHS which is able to focus on helping people be healthy rather than just fixing broken ones (and that’s not a criticism of the NHS).

Oooh, something to distract me from the depression in the election thread. 🙂

Mrs Daz was a drug worker in Manchester for 15 years, It’s quite an interesting subject, and one where prejudice, morality and political motives have absolutely no place. She used to prescribe diamorphine unsupervised to some clients, others were on methadone, either supervised or not, some on other drugs like subutex. Treatment options were based on what was judged to be the most effective chance of stabilising a client’s addiction and reducing harm to themselves and others. She had every type of client including chaotic junkies, gangsters, sex workers (lots of them sadly!), victims of sexual abuse and violence (also lots of them), plumbers, accountants and lawyers. Most of them led either perfectly normal lives, or turned their lives around. Some poor sods died from overdoses, usually after coming out of prison and massively overestimating what was a safe dose. On the whole though harm reduction worked.

Then the f****** tories came in and policy switched from harm reduction to ‘curing’ people, with targets and everything else, including an austerity-driven 20% pay cut because drug worker jobs weren’t seen as the social work/nursing roles (Mrs Daz was a qualified social worker), and more of a simple assessment and monitoring job. There were two major impacts of this change in policy, the first was that the number of people successfully detoxing went up. The second was that those who weren’t ready to detox (the system encouraged it, as funding was linked directly to the number of people on detox programmes) ended up dying after relapsing and misjudging the amount they could safely use, resulting in a not insignificant increase in the number of deaths. The swtich from harm reduction, whilst good for some, caused more addicts to die when previously they led relatively ‘normal’ lives, and for that reason Mrs Daz is no longer a drug worker.

Oh, and to answer the OP, she’s a big fan of treatment rooms and thinks they would have a huge positive impact. She’s also pro-legalisation.

Common sense suggests better to do this than not – controlled environment, known quality of drug, (possible) opportunity to build relationships with social services network, no shows could be noted and possibly followed-up.
Would also impact on dealers.
It’s a far from perfect approach but massively better than what exists today.