By Dan McCurry
One of the great quandaries of drug policy is the question of whether the price of heroin should be high or low. If the price is high, we’d like to think that this will act as a disincentive to consumption. However, a high price causes an addict’s life to descend into greater chaos. Once the addict’s savings have been spent he inevitably begins to steal, but can only steal barely enough to feed the habit. Once the bills are red and the landlord’s patience exhausted, the addict becomes vagrant and begins to lose his health, leaving him to face either eventual death, or rehabilitation with a price: permanently damaged health for him, and for us, a considerable burden upon the state through the provision of healthcare and thereby the entitlement to social housing.
The price of heroin acts as a gauge in the war on drugs. An increased street price demonstrates that the authorities are successfully combating the amount that appears on the street. A lower price demonstrates that the drug industry has the upper hand. Yet the problem with this concept is that is feels like something of a competition, or maybe like a Saturday afternoon game of football, whereby if our team scores we all cheer but if their team scores, we’re miserable. It doesn’t address the central issue that really matters here; the blight on the lives of our sons and daughters by the scourge of drug addiction. We do need to consider the effect of a lower price on greater consumption, but we also need to consider the effect of price on those of our sons and daughters addicted and the knock on effect this has on society as listed above.
I had a 17 year old client today who came off heroin a couple of months ago, and each day since, at 10am, he goes to his local pharmacy to get his script (prescription) of methadone. However, immediately after his script, he’ll go to the high street with the £5 given him by his supportive mum to stop him stealing, buys cider and hangs about with the winos on park benches. A therapist would argue that this is not addressing the addiction at all, but simply replacing one substance with two others, however, I disagree. This lad has taken the first step in dealing with his problem; to acknowledge it by making a commitment to the methadone program, even if his commitment is flawed. His next step would be therapy to establish why he feels the need to obliterate reality, but the fact that he’s engaging in the methadone program brings him into contact with the state, making a future course of therapy readily available. My point being that he is engaged and real engagement is a greater weapon than flouted law or ineffective principles.
Huge amounts of heroin are confiscated each year, yet the state will only prescribe substitute methadone due to ethical arguments against the supply confiscated drugs. However, is it ethical to force addicts to continue to rely on ruthless criminals whose objective is to keep them addicted in order that they can make a profit, when they could come under the care of the state, whose objective is to guide them out of their tragic predicament?
Many addicts take part in the methadone program, but far more continue to waste away in their addiction; always desiring an end to the misery but forever afraid to take the first step. If a program of Heroin scripts existed alongside the Methadone program the addicts would come forward and the program could be made conditional on their engagement with a drugs worker.
The program would cause the street price of heroin to fall, but this would not be due to the success of the drugs business, but due to the shrinking of their market and the consequent reduction in their margins. The Heroin program would considerably reduce acquisitive crime, while undermining the traffickers and dealers, reducing their resources and therefore their security, and the consequence of this would be to considerably increase prosecution opportunities in the war against drugs. Although a lower price would increase consumption in the short-term, the likely long-term outcome of this scenario is that importers would consider their reduced margins and concentrate their efforts on supplying other markets thereby reducing the amount of drugs arriving in this country.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
The enormous waste of money spent fighting the 'War on Drugs' is criminal.
Even in societies with draconian laws, drug users exist and the criminal supply chains emerge to meet demand.
Many - perhaps most - who have dabbled with drugs have emerged (relatively) unscathed. There will always be those who by choice or innate susceptibility will be lost to drugs. Like the poor, they will always be with us.
(For some, the dark allure of drugs and intoxication is part of the human condition - and even socialist haven't succeeded changing that yet).
The realistic - and truly moral - approach is to decriminalise all drugs, regulate supply, cut-out the criminal element and make better use all round of limited public resources.
Someone returning to an area with a previous addiction or criminal friends can all too easily fall back into old ways as habits get triggered or friends try to charm them back into the fold. A new area for a minimum of five years can help people get properly over their old habits and find new and hopefully better friends.
Marijuana can be grown domestically like any other plant. There's no need for added costs or slave labour.
Perhaps, the biggest issue with drugs is the culture. Other cultures like those in South America have integrated drug use in a spiritual and responsible way. The over-consumption and crime associated with drugs in the west is mostly an artifact of our culture like binge drinking.
"Many of the health problems caused by illegal drugs are due to the other stuff that is in them. If Drugs were legal there would be standards to be followed."
I agree, about the illegality, but not about the health problems caused by other additives, heroin can be cut with many substances, but it is the opiate that it is addictive not the additive, it is the addiction which causes the problems.
However I totally disagree with your inital premise.
"Loss of morality? If an adult wants to use a drug, and does not hurt anyone else in doing so then what is the problem?"
The problem is that it is not legalised, standards are not in place, people are being exploited in growing, processing and distribution. This is not make believe.
Anyone who uses drugs in the UK needs to know that there is an ethical and moral standpoint to their actions, and in the current legal climate this means that end users sanction that exploitation of everyone who supplies them wherever and whoever they may be. This also includes the wider context of the criminality that surrounds the trade.
If you are morally and ethically opposed to the exploitation of the working man, whoever and wherever he may be. Dont use drugs because they rely implicitly and explicitly on just that exploitation!
Even marijuana uses exploited labour both in the UK and abroad.
Why didn't you say that in the first place?
Although I agree with your funding analysis.
... unless, of course, your son or daughter is an addict, in which case I'm very sorry to hear that, why don't you spend more time with your family instead of writing political blogs, they might feel less neglected?
If you are going to talk about NHS resources being wasted, I look forward to your comments on alcohol, a drug that costs the NHS and taxpayers far more.
I would also argue that if the NHS sold Heroin to those that wanted it, the VAT could help fund the NHS. The current drug industry is worth billions a year, is totally unregulated and pays no taxes.
Re the exploited workers. Again if drugs were legal there would probably be a fairtrade option, or locally made options.
No government has ever done a cost-effectiveness study of Prohibition, yet just about every other government policy/initiative requires one.
Transform have released one this year. It's very interesting reading
http://transform-drugs.blogspot.com/2009/04/transform-publishes-comparative-cost.html
They completely ignored my letter, but that is my view.
A cautious approach to this issue is a productive approach and radical enough.
There was a report on the radio last night about a program in Germany of scripting heroin which was more successful than meth. I didn't refer to it in this article because I'd finished writing it, but I think we have to look at the bigger, wider picture anew.
On the positive side of jail, I have know addicts in jail who actively don't want to be released on a tag or whatever as they are only halfway back to recovering their health. So they actually instruct me that they want to remain in jail for another couple of months in order to add a stone or two of weight, and then be released.
Not to mention the the exploited workers in the growth, production, and distribution of the drugs - there is no part of the process that is not damaging to almost every part of the production and supply chain.
Someone always gets hurt - just because the end user neither knows nor cares, doesnt mean that it doesnt happen.
Let's have free cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, cannabis, Rizlas, lighters, alcohol, Playstations, flatscreens, DVDs, Sky+, Vauxhall Corsas, Adidas trackies, pizzas and council housing.
That would reduce crime dramatically. The great unwashed would be in Paradise.
And if they stay out of jail for three years, they would be entitled to a free tattoo of their choice.
The currently illegal drugs need to be re-legalised, controlled and taxed. The "war on drugs" can never be won.
What we continue to fail to address is that the only workable solution lies in sentencing reform. We simply send too many people with too many problems to prison, often for short periods of time, where they would be better helped in the community. With reduced numbers in custody, resources could then be properly applied to give those in prison the treatment they require. At the moment, the government’s own evidence suggests that prisons actually create drug habits, with one in five men reporting that they first used drugs in custody. Given the relationship between drug addiction and crime, our overcrowded prisons are signally failing to keep anyone safe.
I don't believe the methadone programme is any good. I understand the high isn't the same quality heroin addicts have come to expect and methadone use carries a health risk that pure heroin doesn't have. It strikes me as being a fudge that doesn't solve anything and makes existing problems worse for the sake of industrialised medicine and a handful of armchair shrills.
I've lost track of this issue but it certainly used to be the case a few years ago that a number of treatments were on offer for medical conditions that created more problems and rendered the patient more unsafe to drive than heroin users. That's the ridiculous nature of double standards and why I'd like to see the government stand up for a better programme and call this nonsense for what it is.
The State could then manufacture heroin and any other drug to a safe purity standard and charge a very low price for it. It would start to drive drug-related crime out of existence and allow Police resources to be diverted to taking the illegal traffickers and larger dealers including organised crime. Furthermore it would help pay for a massive increase in drug education, rehabilitation residential courses.
Very radical but we are kidding ourselves to think that the 'War on Drugs' could ever be won. This is not admitting defeat, this is another path to removing a large element of criminality from this country and getting addicts cleaned up.