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On a slightly different note, it's beyond me why heroin isn't prescribed to addicts on the NHS. It might upset the good folk of Middle England, but for those of us who have to live with the day-to-day possibility of being involved in drug-related street crime (ie anyone who lives in a decent-sized city) the benefits of a policy that accepted that the methadone programme, as it's currently organised, really isn't working would far outweigh the possible downside. Which would be, simply, that addicts were being prescribed heroin by the government.
This is a bit annecdotal, but after an incident I'd rather not go into (not, I should stress, because it was particularly bad, but just because I don't like talking about anything too personal on the internet,) I had to go down to the local police station to look at their records of convicted burglars recently, and pretty much every single photo I saw (and there were a lot of them) seemed to be of someone in the throes of a fairly serious drug habit. While I wouldn't claim to be an expert, there was a certain pinched, burned-out look that that they almost all seemed to have in common, I mean really, to an alarming degree. Poverty would have something to do with that, of course, and I don't know how you'd go about dealing with the crack issue (it would be very difficult to prescribe that, given that it basically encourages volatile behaviour patterns in the long-term user) but even so, if a change in the way heroin addicts were treated in Britain would seem likely to a)reduce street crime, b)improve the life of the user, c)cut into the profits of organised, international crime, and all of this fairly dramatically, and if such a policy might arguably go some way towards stabilising the situation in Afghanistan, say (this is more contentious, but the heroin would need to be bought from somewhere, and I'd imagine the average opium farmer would much rather sell his crops in an at least quasi-legal, controlled marketplace,) then surely it's at least worth a try?
I'm not suggesting that all heroin addicts are prone to violent criminal behaviour, incidentally, so much as saying that if heroin addiction is a significant contributing factor to the crime statistics in Britain, as it seems to be, then it might be better to try and deal with the problem in a manner that might actually work.
I'm not sure if methadone is cheaper to supply than heroin, but even if it is, by a fairly large amount, it still seems possible that the actual cost of the UK's drug problem, in terms of police time, to be hard-edged about it (which is to say nothing of the less-easily quantifiable benefits of living in a society where there's basically less victim-based crime) would be greatly reduced.
I'm not holding my breath about any of this though, obviously. |
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