Heroin, Criminal or Legal?

Shamus is our undercover man; he works for Liverpool City Council at the sharp end of dealing with 'problem' families.

Ms Z sits in her front room feeding her newborn baby with a milk bottle. The room is shrouded in darkness except for the light emanating from the television, which is permanently on. Ms Z has a partner who lies asleep on the sofa, and her two older children sit huddled together on the floor eating from a packet of chips. The house is a simple two up and two down with basic furnishings and little food in the kitchen.

Ms Z is a registered heroin addict along with her partner. The Health Visitor and the Social Services are actively involved in the family and are monitoring the progress of Ms Z's care of the infant.

Her middle child, Craig aged eight, has been diagnosed as having social and behavioural problems and is receiving his education in a special school. Her oldest child, Ged, is fifteen and has not attended school for the past twelve months. Ged is a mature boy who has taken on himself the burden of looking after his mother and two younger siblings. In private, he admits that he despairs of the future and that the family's social worker has told him that he faces being placed in care if his mother does not co-operate with the authorities. The children are on the "at risk" register, and Ms Z has often failed to attend any meetings various professional agencies have arranged for her to discuss the children's welfare and her drug habit.

Ms Z is aware of the real possibility that her children could be placed in care but she talks in vague terms of getting a job, moving from the area and putting her children first. As I talk to Ms Z, at least three people have knocked on the front window with a coded knock and on seeing me quickly withdraw with petty excuses. I know from previous experience that these people have called to either sell drugs or to encourage Ms Z to venture into the city centre to shoplift.

Ms Z feeds her drug habit primarily through stealing and is responsible for contributing to a crime boom that is responsible for £1.5bn worth of burglary, theft and shoplifting each year - drug addicts steal £3.5m worth of property a day. Ms Z admits that she often steals to order. Her most common orders are for designer clothes, jewellery, DVD's, domestic products such as washing powder and food.

Ms Z's contribution to the local black market has led to the area where she lives characterised by empty houses and shops limited to fast food outlets, video stores and off licences. Local trade has long ago moved out because of constant burglaries and petty theft from heroin addicts, and the community has further declined because neighbours retire behind their front doors or leave the area altogether.

Heroin, despite its negative image in the national media as the root of all evils and the scourge of civilization, has actually for centuries been used for medicinal purposes. Most medical reference books states that heroin is regularly used for controlling pain in patients including children, adults, the elderly, women in labour and even premature babies.

The truth is that, properly prescribed, pure heroin is a gentle drug. Heroin only becomes highly dangerous when it is controlled by the black-market. On the black market, heroin is mixed with drain cleaner, sand, brick dust and even curry powder. The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine records that a large proportion of the illness experienced by black-market heroin addicts is caused by wound infection, all due to unhygienic injection technique. Ms Z's partner injected into his veins diluted heroin, which formed clots, cutting off the supply of blood to his leg and toes. This resulted in gangrene establishing itself in his leg, which had to be amputated

Drug users sharing injecting equipment, according to the World Health Organization, is responsible for 40% of recent Aids cases and the spread of hepatitis C, which can kill by causing cirrhosis and sometimes cancer in the liver. The official estimate is that 300,000 people in this country are now infected. And almost all of these victims are black-market drug users who contracted the disease by sharing dirty injecting equipment.

Is there an answer? Well, those who want to legalise heroin can point to the Swiss three-year experiment in 1997, which prescribed heroin to 1,146 addicts in 18 locations. They found that health and social circumstances improved drastically, including a steep fall in crime.

Dr John Marks' clinic in Liverpool throughout the 1990's prescribed heroin to addicts. Independent research reported a 96% reduction in crime among his addict patients and more importantly, deaths from HIV infection and drug-related overdoses fell to zero. But within two years of the clinic closing down, 41 drug addicts died as a result of taking drugs from the black market.

The bald fact is that it is not the drug itself that has reduced Ms Z to a skeleton; forced her to the ranks of a beggar; constantly on the verge of prison or facing losing her children to the social services. It is the illegality of the drug on the black market. Should we let Ms Z continue to obtain her drugs from the black market or have it supplied via GPs and specialist clinics?

What do you think?