{"id":9074,"date":"2013-10-22T09:53:59","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T09:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=9074"},"modified":"2013-10-22T09:53:59","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T09:53:59","slug":"supply-of-drugs-without-sanction-only-feeds-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2013\/10\/supply-of-drugs-without-sanction-only-feeds-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"Supply of drugs without sanction only feeds demand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Legalising heroin would cost the NHS and damage the UK<\/span><\/p>\n

The siren call for drug legalisation sounds again.\u00a0 This time it issues from Mike Barton, the Chief Constable of Durham.\u00a0 The NHS should be used to supply addicts, Class A drugs should be legalised and drugs \u201cprohibition\u201d must be ended, he advises.\u00a0 It is a solution loved by top police officers and is no doubt borne out of a sense of frustration at the apparent intractability of drug-infected gangland crime.<\/p>\n

It seems so seductively simple.\u00a0\u00a0 Except it is not.\u00a0\u00a0 Mr Barton is at the coalface of a drugs policy regime that is paying a high price for its liberality.\u00a0 It is a confusing place to be: officers are expected to give clean needles to the addicts they should be arresting.\u00a0 Prohibitive it is not.\u00a0 The UK citizen is more likely to be convicted for defaulting on his TV licence than for possessing and using illegal drugs.<\/p>\n

Muddled thinking follows muddled practice.\u00a0\u00a0 Much as the Chief Constable would like it otherwise, an addict is no more likely to be transformed by being sent to the doctor for his daily fix than than a legal market would put his supplier out of business.<\/p>\n

The system Mr Barton suggests is already in place.\u00a0 The NHS spends \u00a31 billion a year supplying the Class A synthetic opiate methadone to 150,000 addicts. Replacing methadone with heroin would put it up by several more billion.\u00a0 Mr Barton might stomach this cost, but I doubt a British public waiting for hip, heart and cancer operations would.<\/p>\n

Improved health and reduced crime outcomes are overestimated.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201csafe\u201d (heroin is anything but safe) injecting sites integral to this policy \u2014 at least one for every market town and city centre \u2014 would not even sanitise the problem, let alone solve it.\u00a0 That is the experience of countries that have tried it.<\/p>\n

Vancouver\u2019s InSite programme is far from living up to its promises to reduce the spread of HIV, get clients into treatment and off drugs, or cut deaths from overdosing.\u00a0 It\u2019s a policing problem in itself.\u00a0 Here in this country addicts on expensive NHS-funded opiate-prescribing trials were given daily injections and intensive nurse supervision, but still stayed street-drug dependent and continued to commit crime.\u00a0 That is the nature of addiction: addicts always want more.<\/p>\n

The legal supply of heroin would no more undercut illicit demand than sate addicts\u2019 desire.\u00a0 It would encourage drug tourism, black-market dealing (by adding to the supply) and the gangland crime that Mr Barton want to escape .<\/p>\n

Supply without sanction feeds demand, which in turn feeds rates of use and, inevitably, harm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kathy Gyngell is a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0 The Times\u00a0 28th September 2013<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legalising heroin would cost the NHS and damage the UK The siren call for drug legalisation sounds again.\u00a0 This time it issues from Mike Barton, the Chief Constable of Durham.\u00a0 The NHS should be used to supply addicts, Class A drugs should be legalised and drugs \u201cprohibition\u201d must be ended, he advises.\u00a0 It is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-sector"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}