Heroin
Give addicts heroin, says officer
Howard Roberts said prescribing heroin to criminals would cut crime
Heroin should be prescribed to drug addicts to curb crime, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire has said at a drugs conference.
Howard Roberts told an Association of Chief Police Officers' conference in Manchester the idea should be assessed.
He said the treatment would cost £12,000 a year per addict but added that drug users steal property valued at an average of £45,000 a year.
The idea is being piloted in London, the South East and North of England.
'Terrible consequences'
"At the moment across the country we see levels of burglary, robbery and murder being committed by drug-fuelled addicts who are doing so in order to get the money to buy the drugs," Mr Roberts told the conference.
"One of the things I have found is that as a treatment it has been highly effective in actually helping to reduce crime.
"We've seen good levels of falls in drug-related acquisitive crime.
"However, there is still a considerable problem and what I am suggesting is that we need to explore, as part of a treatment programme, the prescribing of heroin to addicts in order to take them out of the illegal market."
Q&A: Giving addicts heroin
He added: "Of course, getting people off drugs altogether must be the objective.
"But I do believe that we have lived with the terrible consequences of relatively uncontained addiction for far too long.
"If we are to make a greater impact we need to fundamentally address the method of operation of the criminal market-place for heroin."
Improve treatment
The manager of a Nottinghamshire-based support service for families of drug users supported the police chief's call.
"I'm delighted that police are taking drug treatment options more seriously and have been doing so over the last few years," said Nina Dauban, manager of Mansfield-based Hetty's.
"In the past police have been forced to go down the enforcement and criminal justice route that doesn't always solve the problem.
"There is a lot of criminality around drugs, reducing the level of criminality is really important in improving treatment for addicts.
"All tribute to him saying this. It is typical of Nottinghamshire Police not to be frightened to speak about their convictions.
"We're not here to win a popularity contest - we're out to improve services for drug users."
Martin Barnes, chief executive of drugs charity DrugScope, said: "There is compelling evidence that heroin prescribing, although more expensive than some forms of drug treatment, is cost-effective in reducing drug-related crime and other costs to communities."
Nicola Metrebian, from the charity Action on Addiction, said they were doing research which would "compare the effectiveness of injectable methadone and injectable heroin to oral methadone" for a group of hard to treat heroin users.
In the Department of Health pilots, 300 to 400 drug users receive heroin for their addiction.
Similar schemes in Holland and Switzerland reported some users turning away from crime.
THE WAR ON DRUGS
That is of course what it is from a certain mindset, it is a war against an evil substance. The whole term was coined to be more appealing to the public, prohibition was to bland. The connotations given to it and the ensuing propoganda that has indoctrinated the masses have given any idea of a utiliterian solution a distinct feel that people are collaborating or giving in to criminals.
"Giving in to criminals"
The brutal truth is that heroin users exist and will always exist. As long as they do, and we have proven an unremarkable inability to stop it, they create a vast proportion of crime and fill massive amounts of jail space. Soemthing we in Britain have a particular problem with. Now if people could get over themselves and give in to the fact that prohibition increases usage and increases the criminalisation of users and therfore the War on Drugs is giving in to the criminals.
We are actually creating a black market, funding organised crime and giving them tremendous profits. We create people like Pablo Escabar. If having heroin so readily available is such a bad thing and the war on drugs a good thing how is that I can go out and find a heroin deal with in twenty minutes.
COST
Just to focus on a couple of those points look at what heroin costs a society from the distrubution process to the end byproducts of heroin use.
1. First of all we have criminal gangs who are highly organised bringing drugs into the market.
2. The police in the war on drugs.
( I can only imagine how much the USA spends on it, wow staggering somewhere in the region of $20 billion I suspect. )
3. Addicts responsible for up to 50-60% of the crime in the UK, constant reoffendors who may steal up to 45000 pounds to fund a 12000 pound a year habit.
4. The jailing which costs 23000 pounds a year.
5. Rehabilitation, court and legal costs of the users when they commit crimes.
6. The treatment of the various infections that are endemic in Heroin taking. Infections, diseases, overdoses, death and well they are listed in detail below in gruesome detail.
7. The cost in finance to the victims of the crime and the increases in insurance costs that go hand in hand with the relative criminal acts due to claims from victims.
8. The cost in police manpower to take care of said crime.
USAGE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin
Heroin is also widely (and usually illegally) used as a powerful and addictive drug that produces intense euphoria, which often disappears with increasing tolerance. It is thought that heroin's popularity with recreational users, compared to morphine or other opiates, comes from its somewhat different perceived effects.[7] This in turn comes from its high lipid solubility provided by the two acetyl groups, resulting in a very rapid penetration of the blood-brain barrier after use. Heroin can be taken or administered in a number of ways, including snorting and injection. It may also be smoked by inhaling the vapors produced when heated from below (known as "chasing the dragon").
Many users in the United Kingdom dissolve the drug together with crack cocaine in a so-called "speedball" or "snowball", which is injected intravenously. This causes an even more intense rush but is more dangerous than heroin alone because the mixture of short-acting stimulant with longer-acting depressant increases the risk of overdosing on one or both drugs. Cocaine is an irritant to all bodily tissues causing eventual necrosis at any site with which it is in frequent contact. Because crack must be acidified with extra citric acid or vitamin C to allow it to dissolve in water, worse vein damage may result than from injecting heroin alone.
CRIME
http://www.parliament.the-stationery...t/30428w55.htm
House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 28th April 2003
Mr. Bercow: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what percentage of recorded crime in the Buckingham constituency was drug-related in (a) 2000, (b) 2001 and (c) 2002. [108515]
Mr. Bob Ainsworth: Recorded crime figures include statistics on drugs offences, such as possession, and on acquisitive crimes, such as burglary, but do not record whether the latter are related to an offender's drug habits.
However, the New English and Welsh Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (NEW-ADAM) research programme, which involves interviewing and drug testing those arrested by the police, confirms a link between drug misuse and crime, although the conclusions do not relate specifically to Buckingham. Analysis of the data from the first eight sites in the survey, collected during 1999–2000, shows that 65 per cent. of arrestees provided a urine sample that tested positive for one or more illegal drugs. The analysis also shows that up to 29 per cent. of arrestees tested positive for opiates (including heroin) and/or cocaine (including crack).
As a guide to the proportion of crime that is drug-related, analysis of the NEW-ADAM self-report data indicates that while only 21 per cent. of non-drug using arrestees reported having previously offended in the past 12 months, this figure rises to 75 per cent. for those arrestees who use heroin and/or cocaine/crack. Moreover, while users of both heroin and cocaine/crack represented just under one quarter of all arrestees interviewed, they were responsible for more than three fifths of all the illegal income reported.
In support of this, 55 per cent. of arrestees who reported using one or more drugs in the last 12 months and committing one or more acquisitive crimes, acknowledged a link between their drug use and their offending behaviour. This proportion rose to 78 per cent. for arrestees who said they had used heroin and cocaine/crack.
MEDICAL PROBLEMS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin
Risks of non-medical use:
Overdose, possibly causing death
For intravenous users of heroin, the use of non-sterile needles and syringes and other related equipment leads to the risk of contracting blood-borne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis, as well as the risk of contracting bacterial or fungal endocarditis and possibly Venous sclerosis
Poisoning from contaminants added to "cut" or dilute heroin
Chronic constipation
Many countries and local governments have begun funding programs that supply sterile needles to people who inject illegal drugs in an attempt to reduce these contingent risks and especially the contraction and spread of blood-borne diseases. The Drug Policy Alliance reports that up to 75% of new AIDS cases among women and children are directly or indirectly a consequence of drug use by injection.
Depending on drug interactions and numerous other factors, death from overdose can take anywhere from several seconds to several hours. An overdose is immediately reversible with an opioid antagonist injection. Heroin overdoses can occur due to an unexpected increase in the dose or purity or due to diminished opiate tolerance. However, many fatalities reported as overdoses are probably caused by interactions with other depressant drugs like alcohol or benzodiazepines.[12]
The LD50 for a person already addicted is prohibitively high, to the point that there is no general medical consensus on where to place it. Several studies done in the 1920s gave addicts doses of 1,600–1,800 mg of heroin in one sitting, and no adverse effects were reported. This is approximately 160–180 times a normal recreational dose. Even for a non-addict, the LD50 can be credibly placed above 350 mg.
Street heroin is of widely varying and unpredictable purity. This means that an addict may prepare what they consider to be a moderate dose while actually taking far more than intended. Also, relapsing addicts after a period of abstinence have tolerances below what they were during active addiction. If a dose comparable to their previous use is taken an overdose often results.A risk of aquiring heroin illigally
A final source of overdose in addicts comes from place conditioning. Heroin use, like other drug abuse behaviors, is highly ritualized. While the mechanism has yet to be clearly elucidated, it has been shown that longtime heroin users, immediately before injecting in a common area for heroin use, show an acute increase in metabolism and a surge in the concentration of opiate-metabolizing enzymes. This acute increase, a reaction to a location where the addict has repeatedly injected heroin, imbues the addict with a strong (but temporary) tolerance to the toxic effects of the drug. When the addict injects in a different location, this place-conditioned tolerance does not occur, giving the addict a much lower-than-expected ability to metabolize the drug. The user's typical dose of the drug, in the face of decreased tolerance, becomes far too high and can be toxic, leading to overdose.benefits would be had from legalised sanitised regulated shooting galleries
A small percentage of heroin smokers may develop symptoms of leukoencephalopathy. This is believed to be caused by an uncommon adulterant that is only active when heated. Symptoms include slurred speech and difficulty walking. Contrary to popular rumor, aluminum foil probably has nothing to do with the development of leukoencephalopathy in heroin users
Fatal viral infection
NEEDLE EXCHANGES
But despite the immediate public health benefit of needle exchanges, some see such programs as tacit acceptance of illicit drug use. The United States does not support needle exchanges federally by law, and although some state and local governments do support needle exchange programs, they continue to face harassment by police in most areas. Needle exchanges have been instrumental in arresting the spread of HIV/AIDS in many communities with a significant heroin using population[citation needed], Australia being a leader due to its early inception of needle exchanges. Needle exchange programs have also been attributed to saving the public significant amounts of tax dollars by preventing medical costs which would have been required otherwise for the treatment of diseases spread through the practice of sharing and reusing needles.
Withdrawal
Now comes the scary part for trying to see into a heroin users mind. Painful withdrawal symptoms can begin within six hours of the last dose.
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin
The withdrawal syndrome from heroin may begin starting from within 6 to 24 hours of discontinuation of sustained use of the drug; however, this time frame can fluctuate with the degree of tolerance as well as the amount of the last consumed dose. Symptoms may include: sweating, malaise, anxiety, depression, persistent and intense penile erection in males (priapism), extra sensitivity of the genitals in females, general feeling of heaviness, cramp-like pains in the limbs, yawning and lacrimation, sleep difficulties, cold sweats, chills, severe muscle and bone aches not precipitated by any physical trauma, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, goose bumps, cramps, and fever. Many addicts also complain of a painful condition, the so-called "itchy blood", which often results in compulsive scratching that causes bruises and sometimes ruptures the skin leaving scabs. Abrupt termination of heroin use causes muscle spasms in the legs of the user (restless leg syndrome). Users taking the "cold turkey" approach (withdrawal without using symptom-reducing or counteractive drugs) are more likely to experience the negative effects of withdrawal in a more pronounced manner.
There is a severe problem with Methadone. While it takes away the physical cravings it does not remove the craving for it, and it is very addictive creating its own problems. Methadone treatment has shown to be relatively ineffective in reducing our drug problems so another solution is needed.
Police chief calls for heroin to be legalised
Rosie Cowan, crime correspondent
Friday February 6, 2004
The Guardian
A senior policeman faced fierce criticism from fellow officers and politicians yesterday when he called for heroin to be legalised.
Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, said he did not advocate anyone abusing their body, but he thought the open sale of drugs would wipe out the multimillion-pound illegal trade and help cut crime.
"Heroin is very addictive but it's not very, very dangerous," he told the BBC Wales political programme Dragon's Eye.
"The question is actually not 'Am I prepared to see the government selling heroin on the street corner or through the pharmacy?' but 'Why would we not want to do that?' Our current policy is doing more harm than good."
Mr Brunstrom said dealers charged £40 a gram for heroin but the government could sell it for £1 a gram, cutting theft from addicts and violence from dealers.
But Keith Hellawell, the former drugs tsar and ex-chief constable of West Yorkshire police, said: "He doesn't represent the view of the rest of the police service. He certainly doesn't represent the views of those who have been associated with the problems of heroin."
Andy Hayman, Norfolk's chief constable and the Association of Chief Police Officers spokesman on drugs, said: "Acpo does not support either the legalisation or open sale of any controlled drug."
Hywel Williams, the Plaid Cymru MP for Caernarfon,, voiced concern about the effect Mr Brunstrom's statement would have on how young people viewed drug use.
Drugs and prohibition
Ben Goldacre
Saturday August 5, 2006
The Guardian
Certain areas of human conduct lend themselves so readily to bad science that you have to wonder if there is a pattern emerging. Last week the parliamentary science and technology committee looked into the ABC classification of illegal drugs, and found it was rubbish. This is not an article about that report, but it is a good place to start: drugs, they found, are supposed to be ranked by harm, in classes A, B, and C, but they're not; and the ranking is supposed to act as a deterrent, but it doesn't.
Watching this small area of prohibition collapse like wet tissue paper got me thinking: how does the world of prohibition match up against our gold standards for bad science, like the nutritionists or the anti-MMR movement? Have any of the prominent academic papers been retracted? Yes, they have. Professor George Ricaurte, funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse, published an article in Science, describing how he administered a comparable recreational dose of ecstasy to monkeys: this dose killed 20% of the monkeys, and another 20% were severely injured.
Even before it was announced - a year later - that they'd got the bottles mixed up and used the wrong drug, you didn't need to be Einstein to know this was duff research, because millions of clubbers have taken the "comparable" recreational dose of ecstasy, and 20% of them did not die. It's no wonder animal rights campaigners manage to persuade themselves that animal research makes a bad model for human physiology.
That's before you even get started on workaday bad science. Like the food gurus, prohibitionists will cherry pick research that suits them, measure inappropriate surrogate outcomes, and wishfully over-interpret data: a prohibitionist will observe that less cannabis has been seized, and declare that this means there is less cannabis on the streets, rather than less police interest.
For textbook bad science we'd also want to see the media distorting research: overstating the stuff it likes, and ignoring stuff it doesn't, especially negative findings. We used to read a lot about cannabis and lung cancer in the papers. The largest ever study of whether cannabis causes lung cancer reported its findings recently, to total UK media silence. Lifelong cannabis users, who had smoked more than 22,000 joints, showed no greater risk of cancer than people who had never smoked cannabis.
While no journalist has written a single word on that study, the Times did manage to make a front page story headed "Cocaine floods the playground: use of the addictive drug by children doubles in a year," out of their misinterpretation of a government report that showed nothing of the sort.
There are even optimists who believe in quick fix treatments for drug habits - the heroin detox in five days, or painless withdrawal in just 48 hours, under general anaesthesia.
Why are drugs such a bad science magnet? Partly, of course, it's the moral panic. But more than that, sat squarely at the heart of our discourse on drugs, is one fabulously reductionist notion: it is the idea that a complex web of social, moral, criminal, health, and political problems can be simplified to, blamed on, or treated via a molecule or a plant. You'd have a job keeping that idea afloat.
MPs have mounted a savage attack on the government's drugs policy, denouncing it as "based on ad hockery", "riddled with anomalies" and "not fit for purpose".
They have also challenged the basis for the ABC classification system, saying that the harm caused by drugs should be separated from criminal penalties.
The criticisms come in a report from the parliamentary science and technology select committee published today as part of an inquiry into how the government uses scientific evidence in policy making. It describes as "dereliction of duty" the failure of the government's expert committee, the Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), to alert the Home Office to serious doubts about the effectiveness of the system. "If the government wants to hand out messages through the criminal justice system then let it do so, but let's not pretend to do it on the back of scientific levels of harm from drugs because clearly that isn't the case," said Phil Willis, chair of the science and technology committee. "The only way to get an accurate and up-to-date classification system is to remove the link with penalties and just focus on harm."
The investigation - entitled Drug Classification: Making a Hash of it? - found no evidence that the sliding scale of classification deters users from taking the more harmful drugs. "We have more drug addicts today than we've ever had and we have more people using class A drugs than ever ... the classification system as a device to reduce harm to individuals and society has failed," Mr Willis said.
Even the police regarded the system as of "minor importance", he said. When asked by the committee about anomalies in the system, Andy Hayman, the chair of the Association of Chief Police Officers' drugs committee, said the system was "pretty crude" but this was not a problem because police could use their discretion.
The ABC system attaches higher penalties to more dangerous class A drugs such as cocaine than to less dangerous drugs such as cannabis, which is in class C.
Steve Rolles of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, who gave evidence to the inquiry, welcomed the report. "It's all very well to have good science at one end of this equation, but if there's no evaluation and review of the impact of the classification on key indicators the whole thing then becomes a joke, really."
The report does not offer a detailed alternative to the current arrangements but says criminal sanctions could be better linked to the level of criminality surrounding particular drugs, and that penalties could make a clearer distinction between individual use and dealing. The report falls short of calling for personal drug use to be decriminalised.
It denounces the ACMD's use of political and social criteria in its recommendations to the government. One example, according to the MPs, was methamphetamine or "crystal meth". In November 2005 the committee reviewed its class B status and concluded that although medical arguments warranted raising it to class A with heroin and cocaine, this might make it more desirable on the street.
"It is highly regrettable that the ACMD took it upon itself to make what should have been a political judgment," says the report. "Invoking this non-scientific judgment call as the primary justification for its position has muddied the water with respect to its role." In May the ACMD reconsidered its position and recommended moving the drug into class A.
The MPs also criticised the government's "opaque" approach to changes in the system and the way in which the changes often appear to be a "knee-jerk response to media storms". Neither the Home Office nor ACMD chairman Sir Michael Rawlins was available to comment.
Criticisms
Methamphetamine
The decision to keep crystal meth in class B in 2005 was criticised as "political" and the subsequent reversal looked "like the council either realised it had made a mistake, or had succumbed to outside pressure".
Ecstasy
MPs critical of failure to review evidence for class A status, given its profile and widespread use.
Magic mushrooms
The council's failure to speak out on government's decision to put fresh magic mushrooms in class A in July 2005 "undermined its credibility".
Cannabis
The timing of the second review of cannabis classification in March 2005 gave the impression that a media outcry was enough to prompt a review.
Alcohol and tobacco
Should be included in a more scientific scale of drug-induced harm.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?...*+war+on+drugs
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Da Skinna
Obviously if you prescribe heroin to any one who wants it alot more people will use it. Infact if britain decided to take this approach every smackhead in the world will be applying for asylum over here...
