I've never been an illegal drug user, not even to experiment, but I do take drugs. My drug of choice is legal, I have to pay for it and because it's expensive that does control my intake. My drug is nicotine. I'm not in the least proud that I use this drug and I struggle endlessly to finish the habit. One reason I started blogging was to take my mind off the 'need' for a cigarette.
The NHS in Scotland has a methadone problem which is spiralling out of control. We know vast sums of money is ploughed into this problem, we know there are programmes which have proved successful, but still there is no improvement. The Sunday Post has discovered at least twice as many methadone users, per head of the population, in Scotland than in any other European country.
Hundreds of addicts have been on methadone for more than a decade even though experts advise a maximum of two years.
Almost 10,000 state funded methadone prescriptions, costing taxpayers £320,000, are issued by chemists every single week.
The number of people dependent on the highly addictive drug has soared by a third in 5 years.
The probe also revealed that a third of those prescribed methadone are continuing their heroin habit, increasing their risk of overdose.
I've never understood why a highly addictive drug is used to wean users off heroin. That's rather like me changing to menthol cigarettes thinking I'll be able to stop smoking altogether within a short time. I know that's just nonsense and I would, more likely than not, become addicted to the menthol cigarettes.
David Liddell, director of the Scottish Drugs Forum said "Methadone has helped people escape street crime and stabilise their lives and also played a part in reducing HIV in the 1980."
I'm quite sure he is correct, but surely he recognises those who receive methadone and continue to have a heroin habit, have to find the money somehow. There doesn't seem much point in suggesting users are charged for methadone because many will not have the money. Doctors who prescribe long term methadone start to feed a habit rather than starve it, but GPs say there are no support services available, so they continue to supply their patients. This is all part of a horrible vicious circle which is exceedingly hard to break.
Perhaps the prescribing of methadone should be taken out of individual GPs' hands and centralised. Its distribution would then be much more tightly controlled and addicts may ask for help more quickly rather than languishing in the chemical world of methadone.
The tried and tested programmes are expensive but, in the long term, it would be worth while spending money on these rather than endless doses of methadone. Leaving addicts on this drug is creating a larger drug addictive class in society and the longer we allow it to survive and thrive, the harder it will be to resolve.
Just look at how today's 'benefit culture' developed for proof, if proof is needed.
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My "outlander" view was that Methadone was always a halfway house in the rehabilitation of heroin users not a semi permanent refugee camp.
So why has there no real movement from the State being the dealer rather than the "free" market?
Cynical me?
Ni I don't think you're cynical in the least Billy. You make the point much better than me.
Auch ma heid's jist fair birlin' efter readin that wumman's drivel.
As I said in another thread she is being paid to write such tripe and the people paying her in the general sense, are going bust publishing it.
They are murmurings that in order to keep put "free" (and unbiased) press we the great unwashed need to subsidise it (codespeak for receive Government money)
We would then get a completely client dependent press. A bit like Methadone eh, to bring the post full circle.
My bucket of sympathy has a hole in it. Sod them.
Only prescribe methadone for a fixed period - say six months. The dosage will be reduced during this period. After that - get clean. No alternative.
Got kids and still addicted? Kids go into care. Will probably save them from being killed or ending up junkies themselves.
Commit crime to feed your habit? Go to jail.
Sod them. This taxpayer-funded trip must end.
I'm sure there are many who feel like you Jess. Two chances should be offered and paid for by taxpayers then they're on their own.
It's not only the addicts fault this present situation though, it's the drug pushers including doctors.
Why not just supply them with heroin? It would be cheaper and the only negative health effect of using heroin is constipation. The side effects of methadone treatment can include hypotension, vomiting, weight gain and stomach pains.
I've no idea scunnert, none whatsoever. As Billy says, methadone was hailed as the great 'half cure' towards all heroin addicts becoming clean.
Now it has become another 'free' drug in the cupboard of the heroin addict - in some cases.
I do know used effectively it has helped some but they have also be given good support. There are some who don't want any treatment, they are quite happy being addicts.
do you realize how pervasive this drug taking has become. The other day i went to a chemist a small one just off a side street. Normally i use boots which has an area set aside for addicts to drop in and take their methadone.
anyway i put in me scrip for me medication and sat down to wait.when a lad rode up on his bike had a word at the counter and the pharmacist mixed up his methadone and he went into a side area for his dose.
What surprised me was this was just a little chemists in a back street and yet was geared up for supplying drug addicts
Prohibition as a policy to stop drug use has failed but no-one in Government is going to admit to that and no-one is going to anything radical to try and solve the problems of drug use in Scotland.
I think the scunnert's suggestion is the best way to deal with heroin addiction. The addicts get clean heroin, if the heroin is supplied by a doctor they come into regular contact with medical help, it stops them stealing to fund their drug habit and it cuts the legs out from under the dealers.
However the "Drug War" has become institutionalised to the point of being a religion and not only that a lot of government agencies and law enforcement officers rely on the "Drug War" to justify their existence. I don't think any move to making drugs a medical not a criminal problem will get support from them.
Another problem is that the "Drug War" is driven by the United States and this country in its present form will never deviate from the US philosophy on drugs, a philosophy which still hankers back to the days of the prohibition against alcohol.
A lot of the drugs out there are powerful and addictive but prohibition has failed and I can't see any way to deal with drug use other than trying to control the use of drugs through education and treating those who are addicted as a medical problem not a criminal one.
I think that everyone should look at Portugal for a way forward.
They have decriminalised the personal possession and use of all drugs not dealing or pushing and tied it into a network of support and treatment.
So I have been told.
Their statistics of continuing use I believe are much lower than Scotland.
Cut and pasted from Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Article begins
Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
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The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.
"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.
But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.
At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.
"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.
The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."
Article ends
Legalise the lot - sell it for buttons then help the people who want out of it. If people want to take the stuff let them. Selling it cheap will knock out the illegal trade. The stuff sold by the Govt would be regulated in quality and price. Keep sensible rules in place like no driving or operating machinery or being in work stoned
In a nearby small town about 20-25 drug addicts appeared out of the blue shortly after the Police House was closed down.
On Monday morning they all go to the Surgery to collect their weeks supply of scrips for Methadone and Benzos ( Benzodizapam & etc. ), they have to go at the same time to avoid upsetting the normal people during the rest of the week. Those considered to be the least in control get 6 daily scrips rather than a weeks worth and the GP and Pharmacies are rewarded accordingly for more work.
Off they go to one of 4 pharmacies then gather in the town center park by the School just in time for lunch. They sell both their Meth and their Benzos to the schoolchildren, colour coded for simplicity, 50p for blue one, £1.00 for a yellow one and £1.50 for a genuine red one just like smarties ( details made up but the fact remains that in this most pefect of markets the sellers and the buyers all know the price and relative merits of the goods on offer ).
Apart from the issues surrounding children using unprescribed Meth & Benzos the addicts get enough cash to pay for perhaps half of their weekly Heroin 'needs' ( supplied by one well known family monopolistic gang ) which topped, up with their Social and a bit of shoplifting, may well get them through to next Monday without the need to rob and stab each other or even mug a member of the public ( which remains extremely rare in that town).
This situation is not of my imagination, it is the accepted general knowledge of all who know how that town works and has been so for at least 15 years.
My point is that the main supplier of recreational drugs in that town is and remains The NHS.
Niko I think every chemist will be geared up for it. They've all got to make money somehow, even the small ones.
Doug, I think that was suggested a few years ago but was never seriously considered. I wonder if there has been any pilots run in that manner.
It's very true about people relying on the Drug War for their existence. Few of these agencies inter-relate because, if they do, they may well be amalgamated then staff will lose jobs and funding will be cut, so they stay divided.
Interesting posts Billy, thanks.
Dram, that could work but DougtheDug gives the reasons it won't be considered.
Banned, a Canadian once told me the biggest drug pushers in Canada were doctors. That's why prescribing should be taken out of doctors' hands.
Ah!
One thing though, I wouldn't say that a Methadone culture was in its infancy, its gone some way past that to be described as infancy.
Having just started reading "Flat Earth News", theres an interesting section on the rise of Heroin.
Yes Allan you're right. Time flies quicker when you're older!
I shall read that I promise.
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