Police chief: We’ll hand out free heroin to addicts
Force unveils astonishing plan to finance ‘shooting galleries’
POLICE will give free heroin to addicts in a controversial bid to cut drug-related crime, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Durham Constabulary is the first force in the country to draw up detailed plans for the Class A drug to be handed to long-term users.
In an exclusive interview, Chief Constable Mike Barton told this newspaper that police money will be used to supply heroin to addicts to inject themselves twice a day in a supervised ‘shooting gallery’.
The force – rated the best in England by watchdogs last week – will fund the programme from its already stretched budget.
Mr Barton admits the plan will attract criticism but insists it will reduce crime because the addicts will no longer have to steal to pay for their fix, and dealers will lose customers.
‘We need to get over our moral panic about giving people heroin as part of a treatment plan,’ he said. ‘Police were set up to prevent crime, not to arrest people.
‘Our primary concern is to prevent crime. If we’ve got people who are addicted to Class A drugs committing crime, it makes good sense to get that person off drugs. Addiction is a medical problem, not a criminal justice problem.’
In Scotland, plans to open the UK’s first ‘shooting gallery’ for heroin addicts are already under active consideration.
The project would see the creation of a facility in Glasgow where 450 addicts, some of them teenagers, would be able to take Class A drugs under supervision and, importantly, without fear of arrest.
Police Scotland has given the proposal – already proving a success in Scandinavia, Australia and Canada – a cautious welcome, saying any ‘new ideas’ should be carefully examined.
But last night, in response to the Durham plans, critics said it wasn’t the place of police to provide illegal drugs to users and claimed it would attract addicts rather than help them get clean. Professor Neil McKeganey, director of the Centre for Substance Use Research, said: ‘I think the worry here is that once you set up a centre like this, it will attract addicts and they will remain dependent on heroin, undermining services committed to getting people off drugs. I think it’s extraordinary if the police budget is being used in this way.’
MP David Burrowes, who sits on the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: ‘I’m sure the public will be surprised and dismayed by this. It’s one thing for public health money to be used in this way, but it’s quite another for the overstretched policing budget. I’m sure this money could go to catching suppliers of drugs rather than propping up addicts.’ Heroin addicts are usually treated by GPs who prescribe them the substitute drug methadone. Anyone caught possessing heroin can be jailed for up to seven years. But in Durham, both the Chief Constable and the county’s Police and Crime Commissioner support the decriminalisation of drugs. They claim medical evidence shows it is more effective to give heroin than methadone to addicts to help them get clean and stop committing crime. They have asked public health experts to help make the radical plan a reality by commissioning an ‘options paper’ that will suggest different ways it could operate and the likely costs.
The service, known as Heroin-Assisted Treatment, would be provided for a small number of the estimated 2,000 heroin addicts in Durham’s rundown former mining towns.
Pharmaceutical heroin – diamorphine – would be prescribed by the NHS to a clinic where it could be locked away.
Heroin users referred to the scheme could attend twice a day to inject themselves under the strict supervision of health professionals to ensure they do not overdose and to prevent the drug getting to the black market.
Experts estimate it costs about £15,000 a year to provide one patient with supervised injectable heroin, three times as much as keeping them on methadone because of the cost of staff required to monitor them.
Mr Barton believes that giving heroin to addicts as part of a plan to get them off drugs is better than keeping them on methadone, which is highly addictive and can leave users seeking other illegal highs.
He said: ‘What I would want is a facility for a small number of people to be provided with heroin rather than methadone... it’s got to be supervised because we don’t want any leakage of the heroin.’
‘This money could go to catching suppliers’ ‘Public will be dismayed by this’