Source: Hull Daily Mail, UK

Pub Date: 8 February 2002

Author: Carl Wagner

Hull and East Riding DAT have no right to claim credit for a reduction in heroin related death, particularly 2 months before the figures are due.

As recently as June 2001, forty people across Scotland, Ireland and as far south as Brighton died as a result of heroin contaminated with a bacteria from the same family as tetanus and botulism.

This could happen anywhere in the country at any time and these deaths, like most drug related deaths, were not a result of drug use, but a direct consequence of present prohibition policies.

Three decades of prohibition has increased heroin addiction from 500 in the late sixties, to anything up to 500,000 today. With the addicts come £3.5b of property theft, gang warfare, street robbery, countless deaths and disease.

In the mid 90s, the World Health Organisation estimated that 40% of recent Aids cases internationally had been caused by drug users sharing needles and by June last year, 1,000 black-market drug users in this country had died of Aids believed to have been contracted from dirty needles.

Worse still is 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, but Dr Tom Waller, who chairs Action on Hepatitis C, says the truth is likely to be much worse.

Almost all of these victims are black-market drug users who contracted the disease by sharing dirty needles.

The war on drugs relies on ignorance and fear, it is biased against class, contemptuous of basic human rights, wastes billions of pounds of taxpayers money, corrupts policing, penal and judicial systems, and is used by political parties to dodge the responsibility to ensure adequate health, housing and education for all citizens.

It's a war on people and to blindly carry on is both dangerous and immoral