HEROIN SURGE IN USE OF DRUG ON OUR STREETS
Dealers target rough-sleepers with bags costing just £5 Price war luring users off super-strong Spice:
A DRUGS price war is having a devastating impact on Manchester city centre.
Heroin dealers have slashed their prices to lure users away from super-strong Spice, and signs of increased use are coming out of the shadows and into the city’s public spaces. The dealers are giving out £5 bags ‘on tick’ – on the understanding users can pay them back after a few hours’ begging.
The problem of open use has become so bad one councillor has suggested the city might need even need to introduce ‘drug consumption’ rooms to tackle the public safety risk. Those who work with the homeless have seen the problem escalate as rough sleeping numbers continue to grow. “As a roughsleeper, you now have dealers coming to you”, Hendrix Lancaster, of homeless charity Coffee 4 Craig, says.
“They are coming out in the morning, giving you the drugs and then coming back two or three hours later – when you’ve begged enough money – and claiming the debt.”
Hendrix, who has worked in Manchester for 10 years, says in the last few weeks he has helped four addicts who have overdosed.
“There had been a massive decline in heroin and opiates use when Spice was legal, because Spice was cheap and you could walk into a shop and get it.
“What’s happened now is that a lot of people have reverted back to heroin. All the heroin dealers were losing so many customers that they cut it down to a fiver a bag.”
It is a picture described by several others in the field.
Jonathan Billings, of Stockport’s Wellspring homeless centre, does outreach work in the city centre. He says the price of a ‘one and one’ – a hit of heroin and a hit of crack – fell from around £25 or £30, to as low as £5, after Spice was outlawed.
The grim trail left by desperate users is raising concerns of the risk to public health. On Lever Street in the city centre the M.E.N. found heroin needles, cooking-up spoons and an unidentifiable pile of large red and white pills, all discarded inches from passersby. Doorways on the back-street behind Mosley Street, a favoured shooting-up spot, are littered with human excrement, a tell-tale sign of both heroin and Spice use due to the way drugs affect addicts.
East of the city centre, we found an empty needle packet in the litter gathered against New Islington primary school’s fence.
At the car park next to New Islington tram stop – at the heart of an area being redeveloped for housing by the council’s £1bn partnership with Abu Dhabi United – we found needles, elastic bands and spoons.
A Freedom of Information request made by the M.E.N. last year reveals reports of discarded needles tripled in the city centre between 2014 and the start of 2017.
Residents of Ancoats and New Islington complain of blatant dealing in Cutting Room Square, of heroin use around the nearby primary school, outside the Chips building and around Pollard Street.
Ben Amponsah, 49, has been living in Islington Wharf for a decade and says the heroin problem has got visibly worse in the last two years.
“It was actually quite a shock when I saw people using – it wasn’t particularly late at night,” he says.
“I’m not a sort of reactionary, I work as a psychotherapist and I firmly believe the government has got it all wrong on drug use. It’s directly related to our homelessness
We need to have a grown-up conversation about whether it’s decriminalisation Coun Rosa Battle
crisis, which we’re all aware of. I don’t think there’s a month goes past that I don’t see used needles.”
Conscious of the growing needle problem, Manchester council is currently reviewing the location of needle exchanges – of which there are two in the city centre, one in Ancoats and the other in Strangeways – but admits discarded needles are a ‘challenge’ it takes ‘very seriously.’
“If anyone is concerned about discarded needles or other hazardous waste we would urge them to report it to us and we will remove it urgently within a day,” says Nigel Murphy, executive member in charge of neighbourhood services.
“Where it is on private land, we will also do all we can to ensure landlords act. And of course if anyone is aware of illegal drug-taking activity we would encourage them to report it to the police.”
The M.E.N. has witnessed heroinusers injecting in the middle of the day on a surface car park off Ducie Street, while lock-keepers on the Ashton Canal say a large part of their job involves clearing floating needles from the water.
City centre Pc Andy Costello believes Spice has become weaker after a surge in strength last year, potentially driving users to seek a bigger hit through injecting heroin.
“We have recently been getting multiple complaints from residents regarding drug use increasing,” he says, adding that the police have an ongoing operation targeting street dealing and have upped patrols in the Northern Quarter. Coun Rosa Battle, who set up the Ancoats and New Islington forum this month, argues a radical policy is now needed – not only to help users, but to resolve the public health problems associated with discarded needles. That could, she believes, include the opening of ‘drug consumption rooms’ – safe spaces similar to those in Holland and Germany, where addicts can shoot up and dispose of paraphernalia.
“Users are obviously very vulnerable and need support which they’re not getting,” she says.
“That’s also causing distress to residents and children in the area, so we need to have a radical look at our drug policy and perhaps look for other cities that have dealt with this in different ways. At the moment, we are investing a lot of public money but getting the same results we’ve had for years. We need to have a grown-up conversation about whether it’s decriminalisation or introducing drug-user rooms and how we target intervention, policing and neighbourhood services.”
The Home Office has said it had no plans to allow drug-user rooms, suggesting it would lead to a rise in crime.