Why plan for state to help heroin addicts inject is a moral obscenity

By Graham Grant

THE children play contentedly in the crèche in an atmosphere of calmness and tranquillity.

Their parents sit in nearby cubicles, with drug paraphernalia laid out on spotless tables before them.

Vigilant medics are on hand as the heroin addicts get their longed-for ‘fix’, their toddlers just yards away.

This dystopian scene may soon be a reality in Glasgow where health and council chiefs hope to set up a ‘shooting gallery’ so that addicts can inject in the sanctuary of a state-funded clinic.

The rationale is that the status quo simply isn’t working: in some areas, discarded syringes litter the streets because of ‘open air’ drug injection, creating a public health hazard.

Addicts would bring in their own heroin, but legal changes are likely to allow some junkies to be given medical-grade heroin at taxpayers’ expense.

Health and council bosses will meet tomorrow (WEDS) to discuss the scheme, which is gathering political momentum.

Indeed, prosecutors met the planned clinic’s supporters in June last year, five months before the official unveiling of the plan, though the Crown Office insists it has yet to make up its mind on legal approval.

Glasgow Central SNP MP Alison Thewliss is a passionate backer of the project.

She took me on a bleak tour of her constituency where we saw evidence of illicit drug-taking, including blood-filled syringes in several locations.

The proposals also follow figures showing that drug deaths in Scotland are at a record high, with fatalities rising to 706 or roughly two a day.

The plan for the heroin clinic, where medical staff are always nearby in the event of an overdose, is based on a supposedly compassionate and morally neutral approach.

Based on this argument, heroin clinics are becoming popular around the world.

A walk-in facility has been given the go-ahead in Dublin while last year a Paris hospital opened France’s first shooting gallery.

But there is another reason for the spread of the state-backed shelters for junkies.

Many of their supporters have a clear long-term agenda: the full-scale decriminalisation of drugs.

Indeed, if the Glasgow plan gets the go-ahead, there will effectively have to be localised decriminalisation of the possession of heroin.

Indeed it could also be dished out by the NHS, at a time when some cancer patients are denied life-saving treatments because they are deemed too costly.

In early meetings about the proposal, Police Scotland voiced ‘strong opposition’ on legal grounds – albeit this is the same force that issues Recorded Police Warnings for possession of cannabis, a gateway drug for heroin.

It now says that it welcomes ‘new ideas which may keep vulnerable people and the wider community safer from drug-taking and associated criminality’.

In Dundee, plans for a shooting gallery have also been raised.

Last year SNP councillor Ken Lynn, the city authority’s lead spokesman on health and social care, said the move could help to tackle the area’s drugs problem.

Candidly, he also said he believed ‘we should be looking at legalising and decriminalising drugs’.

The esteemed British Medical Journal last year said that doctors should push for the legalisation of drugs because laws against drug use have harmed people across the world.

It said doctors have ‘ethical responsibilities’ to campaign for change.

They contend that drug abuse is a health and not a criminal justice issue, or indeed a moral one.

The minor inconvenience for this powerful lobby is that the laws on drug misuse are crystal clear, based on solid foundations.

They were also introduced by politicians who were – unlike the practitioners championing shooting galleries – accountable to the public.

Nor is it in anyone’s best interests for the state to send out a signal that it is acceptable to feed a potentially lethal habit.

United Nations drugs consultant Dr Ian Oliver has said that ‘by setting up these drug-injection facilities, you are promoting drug use and you risk sending out harmful and conflicting messages to young people’.

Supine law enforcement and a soft touch justice system have failed to bring a legion of drug-dealers to heel.

But the proposed solution is effectively to give up – even to provide addicts with warm, comfortable clinics, or ‘safer consumption’ facilities as they are euphemistically known.

Since heroin addiction became a major problem in the 1980s, it is estimated that there have been more than 11,000 drug deaths north of the Border.

But despite the growing problem, prison terms for drug offences are at a record low – while those jailed for fewer than four years are automatically freed at the halfway point.

Prosecutors are now allowing some people found in possession of drugs, including Ecstasy, to be spared court appearances and criminal records.

Justice Secretary Michael Matheson authorised the national rollout of the Fiscal Work Order (FWO) scheme, introduced despite a tripling in the number of deaths from Ecstasy drug since 2008 and a rise in narcotics crime overall.

Drug-users – and violent thugs – are instead allowed to carry out tasks such as decorating, gardening or helping in a charity shop in their spare time, at evenings or weekends.

The SNP came to power promising a reduction in the bill for methadone, the heroin substitute.

The plan backfired as methadone spending rose, and promises of more emphasis on ‘abstinence’ were quickly forgotten.

Indeed, a Scottish Government report in 2013 said that doctors who help drug addicts to go ‘cold turkey’ are subjecting them to ‘torture’ as it is a breach of their human rights.

The gradual surrender of the criminal justice system has helped to fuel a social catastrophe.

But the symbolism of the state lending junkies a helping hand to administer their ‘fix’ is nothing less than an obscenity.

You can also rest assured that none of the most vocal backers of shooting galleries will live anywhere near them.

Drugs expert Professor Neil McKeganey, who believes that getting addicts off drugs is the best way to ‘reduce the harms of our drug problem’, raises one of the most worrying objections to the clinics.

He said: ‘In the event that a drug consumption room were set up, it would effectively mean that any drug-user stopped by the police in possession of illegal drugs could claim immunity from arrest by stating that they were en route to the drug consumption room.’

Junkies slumped in the street, needles in hand, are a common sight in the neighbourhood surrounding a controversial ‘supervised injection’ facility in Vancouver.

Addicts can walk into Insite, as the centre is called, at almost any time of the day or early hours of the morning to inject heroin or cocaine.

At a cost of £1.6million a year, it offers 12 injection ‘stations’, a medical emergency room, counselling offices – and even a ‘chill-out’ room where users can socialise or simply relax after their ‘fix’.

It is administered by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and monitored by Health Canada under a constitutional exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Opponents call it a ‘monstrous’ scheme that fuels public disorder and fails to tackle the problems underlying drug addiction.

Overdose deaths in the vicinity increased in the first three years of the centre’s operation.

As Dr Oliver warns, ‘people use these facilities as information exchanges to find out where the best dealers are and to supplement their existing “fix”.’

He said: ‘To believe that by allowing addicts to bring their own drugs to these centres and inject them on the premises that you are helping them or addressing the drug problem, is nothing short of madness.’

The decriminalisation lobby in Scotland must not be allowed to railroad through a proposal that will give succour to dealers – and do nothing to help their wretched clientele.