Treat adicts like patients... not crimnals
By PROFESSOR SIR IAN GILMORE
Published: 18 Aug 2010
Add a comment (27)  
ONE of the country's leading doctors provoked a storm yesterday when he called on the Government to decriminalise heroin.
Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the former president of the Royal College of Physicians, said that taking a fresh look at drug laws could help to slash crime rates, improve health and save public money.
Writing for The Sun, here he reveals the reasons behind his shocking statement.
I HAVE felt very strongly about this issue for a long time. At the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, where I work, we see patients every day with complications from heroin addiction.


Storm ... Sir Ian Gilmore
These problems do not come from the drug itself but instead from dirty needles, the awful lifestyles people are pushed into or a contaminated product.
Our drug policy for almost the past 40 years - since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 - has been dominated by an aspiration to create a drug-free society.

But we've now reached a tipping point. Many experts, including top lawyers and other doctors, are admitting that the policy of putting drug users in prison has very clearly failed.

We're never going to eliminate hard drugs from our society.

I'm not saying we should completely legalise heroin and let everyone try it.

What I'm calling for is a fresh look at how we tackle drugs.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that the best method of tackling heroin is to accept that there will always be hard drug users. But instead of treating them as criminals, we should treat them as patients.

Heroin addiction is an illness and we should treat it as such, instead of acting on a knee-jerk reaction and putting people in prison.

Evidence suggests that government money is much more efficiently spent on helping drug users, rather than trying to stop it being sold on the street, or preventing people from growing fields of poppies thousands of miles away.

Several pilot schemes in the UK have given addicts clean, pure heroin and clean needles.

Purge

Not only have they found that some of these people have been able to integrate back into society but some have even returned to work.

Advertisement

Most important, crimes committed by this group have gone down, as users haven't had to resort to petty crime and theft to feed their habit.

Some countries in South America have taken this approach and have actually reduced intravenous drug use.

Although it wouldn't completely eradicate problems on the street, it would certainly help reduce them.

And, crucially, it would help purge areas of drug dealers and drug barons and the violence associated with drug gangs.

But different types of drugs require different laws and I should make clear that I am only discussing heroin, not other drugs such as cannabis.

Many people in our society are frightened of drugs and worried that decriminalisation would lead to an increase in the problem.

It isn't a magic wand and I'm not saying it's a perfect solution - but I think everybody would agree that our aim to be a drug-free society is not working.

If drug use is out in the open, and managed by health professionals, I believe this would be a much better solution for public health and, ultimately, the country.