Mood:
quizzicalNow Playing: Expert Witness
Topic: Drugs FAQ
TO PRESCRIBE OR NOT TO PRESCRIBE? SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT GIVE HEROIN TO HEROIN ADDICTS?
IN THE UK, as in most Western lands, the standard treatment for heroin addiction is prescription of daily oral methadone.
Though many junkies do reduce their intake of illicit heroin and some feel stabalized enough on methadone to cut out heroin all together, most do go on using "on top" of their daily methadone doses.
Because the statistics say that the majority of crime is drug-related, an English police chief, reasoning that cutting down on drugs will cut down on crime, proposed that instead of methadone, addicts should be treated with the very drug they crave.
This old chestnut has been cropping up increasingly frequently of late. The Netherlands and Switzerland both do diamorphine treatment — apparently with great success.
The very idea of dishing out heroin to junkies flies so far in the face of the accepted War on Drugs "wisdom" that no Government has been willing to put anything more than a few very low-key experimental schemes into operation.
This most recent proposal, by the Northern England police chief Howard Roberts, provoked some colourful comments in last Monday's Daily Mirror's letters column.
"What next, giving robbers money so they don't rob or giving car theives cars so they don't steal cars?" demanded Sharon M Moore from Dunstable, Bedfordshire.
"I was disgusted to read of the suggestion to give free frugs to heroin addicts. I suffered asthma all of my life and I have to pay for my inhalers, without which I would need hospital treatment... Is this any way to treat a law-abiding citizen, while addicts may get their treatment free?" said D Kelly from Liverpool.
(Actually, heroin addicts pay the same prescription fees for methadone as everyone else.)
"Drug abuse is not an illness, it is self-inflicted," said Ken Bishop of Carterton, Oxfordshire.
(Smokers and drinkers also cause self-inflicted illness. Their rights to treatment aren't called into question...)
"Most people are under the misconception that drug addiction, like alcoholism, is self-inflicted. It isn't — it's a disease like any other and shuold be treated as such. That's why I support... Howard Roberts's suggestion that doctors should prescribe heroin to addicts. The examples of Holland and Switzerland prove it works. Crime has been cut and the number of users has fallen. The current system isn't working so at least we should give it a try." M Webb of Brighton, East Sussex.
Until the early 1970s heroin prescribing was the first-line treatment for addiction in the UK. However over-prescribing and abuse of the system lead to an about-turn in policy and Britain has been a methadone state ever since.
As for addiction being an illness; drugtaking is not a sickness in itself in the beginning. But as addiction gradually takes over over time, the condition most definitely develops into an illness.
Can't people see that this condition begins as a self-inflicted "choice" — but turns into a state where drugs are used with no choice — they are used automatically at every available opportunity, without thinking about it.
That's what "habit" means.
