The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Drugs policy failings go back years, says expert
Dundee academic claims methadone scheme has played part in today’s crisis
Decades of systematic failure in drugs policy have led to the “Trainspotting generation” and made Dundee’s shocking death toll unavoidable, an expert has claimed.
Instead of “curing” addiction, Professor Tim Hales said users have simply replaced their heroin dependencies with methadone use.
Prof Hales has spent years researching the impact of opioids in the UK and overseas and is the head of neuroscience at Dundee University.
He argued decades of underfunding and negative societal attitudes towards addiction may have contributed to the rising number of people dying from drug use.
“There is a stigma associated with addiction which isn’t associated with cancer or diabetes and it is not helping with resources,” he said.
“The problem has been decades in the making. If you look back to the 80s, heroin misuse was high and on the rise, so there was a conscious effort then to try to enrol people into methadone programmes.
“This had a beneficial effect in that it reduced the number of people using intravenous heroin, but the downside is that you have shifted people from a dependence on heroin to a dependence on methadone – they are not cured and are still vulnerable to misusing the methadone.”
Prof Hales pointed to this group of older drug users – dubbed the “Trainspotting generation” – as a key factor behind the rising number of drugs-related deaths experienced in Dundee and Scotland over the past 10 years.
He added: “The methadone maintenance programme has probably enabled these users to survive longer than they would have done if they hadn’t been on it, because they would probably have died earlier due to something like hepatitis or HIV.
“The people who are dying now in their 50s are not all on methadone maintenance but some of them are certainly those who have been on such programmes.”
Prof Hales, who spent almost two decades in the US working on research into pain management, voiced his support for the controversial idea of safe consumption rooms but urged caution when deciding on the best approach to dealing with problematic drug use.
He added: “If we can get evidence that supports the idea that safe consumption rooms are helping to reduce drugs deaths then I think that would be a good basis for moving forward.
“If you really want to address the problem, you’ve got to do it in a very holistic way and you need to deal with the root cause.
“In the long term we need to try to reduce deprivation and there needs to be more time and resources spent on understanding the relationship between genetics, deprivation and addiction.”