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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Editorial: Can't Quit, Won't Quit
Lead Editorial New Scientist
Saturday 10 Nov 2001 What Many Addicts Need Is A Safe Supply Of Drugs THE WORLD may be on the brink of a recession, but for one business prospects have never been brighter. World heroin production has tripled in ten years, and cocaine production doubled. Hard drugs are no longer the preserve of the affluent. A hundred years ago the typical opiate addict in the West was a middle-class woman in her forties. Now it's a young, uneducated male. Even nicotine continues to enjoy steady global growth, as people in the developing world embrace the habit. Despite all the health campaigns and the billions spent on law enforcement, there are more addicts living today than at any time in modern history. Governments hooked on "zero tolerance" policies are condemned to locking up ever more drugs offenders, and footing the soaring bill for the crimes they commit-or in the case of smokers, the medical treatments they need. There has to be a better way, and it's there for the asking-the alternative philosophy of harm reduction, in which the aim is not necessarily to wrench addicts away from their drug, but to minimise the harm drugs do to users and society. Take nicotine. What kills smokers is not the drug they are addicted to but all the disease-causing gunk in the smoke they inhale to get their fix. The good news is that there are now much safer ways of taking nicotine; the bad is that governments are failing to ensure these products are taken up. Across Europe, for instance, cigarettes containing all sorts of untested additives continue to be sold. Yet a comparatively safe form of chewing tobacco is banned (see p 28). Even more bizarrely, governments still lack the power to compel cigarette manufacturers to make their products safer. A method already exists, for example, to reduce the levels of cancer-causing nitrosamines in tobacco smoke, and major manufacturers are said to be interested. The catch is they want to continue selling all their usual brands and market the new cigarettes as being "safer". This is like car manufacturers demanding the right to sell cars with and without seat belts in the name of consumer choice. The difference is that governments can insist on seat belts, but not on specific safety measures for cigarettes. Acquiring such powers should be an urgent priority. It's not so very different with heroin addiction. As with nicotine, the dangers have been massively distorted. Heroin does not rot your brain or body: if heroin addicts look haggard and thin, it's because they're spending every waking moment worrying where their next fix is coming from, and spending their last cent on black market drugs rather than food. True, many heroin users lead risky lives. But this is mostly due to the unhygienic and dangerous conditions in which the drug is bought. Forced to go to criminals, addicts pay excessive prices for erratic supplies that are likely to be bulked up with harmful substances. Recently heroin has turned up on the streets containing the nerve toxin scopolamine, a deadly Clostridium bacterium and even anthrax spores. Worse, addicts soon learn how to eke out their erratic supplies by mixing heroin with other drugs. And it's this-not the heroin itself-that kills most addicts. To take a typical set of figures, out of 84 deaths linked to opiate abuse in Dublin in 1999, 73 victims had two or more drugs in their body. And a majority of the victims had no remnants of heroin in them at all, only methadone, the substitute drug that's often prescribed to addicts to wean them off heroin. The answer seems obvious. If the black market is the source of harm and methadone is more dangerous than heroin (as the evidence increasingly suggests), why not let doctors prescribe "clean" heroin? Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany are already piloting the approach, and even Britain is now quietly licensing doctors to prescribe heroin to addicts who seem unable to give up. But such schemes are limited in number and are still bitterly opposed by many politicians and anti-drugs campaigners. At best, they are tolerated rather than enthusiastically endorsed. This is a pity, but hardly surprising. Addiction is never a good thing and nearly everyone has some moral qualms about it. But the fact is that some people will always seek out drugs and there are no miracle cures for addiction on the horizon. For now, harm reduction is the best strategy we have. For too long we've been forcing addicts to choose between prison, abstinence or therapy. What many of them really need is the drug of their choice, supplied to them in the safest possible way.
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