Based on an article in today's Metro:
£400m drug plan cures just 7,300 ... A record 202,000 people were treated for drug abuse last year but just 7,300 – 3.6 per cent – were cured of their addiction. They were put through treatment programmes at a cost of £400million – meaning each success story cost the taxpayer £55,000. And of the successes, the government has no idea how many relapsed into drug use, although the figure could be as high as 57 per cent.
Right. The article is accompanied by a photo of somebody shooting up, so let's assume it all relates to 'treating' heroin/methadone addicts, of which there are 333,000, allegedly. Let's divvy that £400million up between 333,000 users = £1,200 each* per annum, that would be about £3.30 per day. AFAICS, that would just about cover the cost of providing them with a fresh needle and safe dose of heroin per day.
1. That would reduce the number of deaths from 1,000 per annum to negligible. So that's a good start.
2. It would free up a lot of police time to target pushers who sell to minors, but I doubt whether minors are a particularly lucrative market anyway, as they have less money to spend etc, and pushers would know that they'd lose a customer the minute he reached the age of eighteen.
3. According to FRANK, a heroin habit can cost "up to £100 per day". That's probably wildly exaggerated, but whatever the figure is, it would deprive criminal gangs of billions of pounds of income.
4. And with a regulated, legal market for heroin, our troops in Helmand wouldn't need to wage this stupid war against the drug-funded Taliban, they'd be out there sourcing the raw materials at their lowest cost; ensuring some sort of financial stability in the region.
What's not to like?
* Any user aged eighteen or over would just need to register with a GP and get his prescription renewed every three months or six months.
Quick update
2 hours ago
6 comments:
MW
Surely you're not advocating a return to the benign pre-1967 regime when the UK had, what, 600 registered drug addicts who received prescriptions from their GPs and whose worst crime was selling their surplus drugs to those who couldn't be bothered to register. Any disinterested observer would, of course, prefer the current scenario of 330,000[1] users, attendant rampant criminality and the ludicrously expensive, patently futile and spurious "crack-downs" (boom! boom!) on drug addiction by the politicos via the quangocracy and the "health" mafia.
[1] I would also be surprised if this is not a gross underestimate
And there's another advantage (or disadvantage from the point of view of the banners): pharmaceutical-grade Heroin taken in sterile conditions is not even very damaging to users, unlike methadone which is nasty (and satifyingly punitive, therefore, of wicked pleasure-seekers) and considerably more dangerous. You can drive safely on Heroin; you can scarcely walk safely on methadone.
Good point. The way I interpret official statistics, deaths-per-user are five times as high for methadone that for heroin.
I'e always thought that legalising all drugs was a good idea - but that all drugs should also be free of taxation beyond the amount needed to cover the cost of maintaining a standards checking facility.
By lowering the price to remove the greedy criminal element, and offering a checking facility to ensure that quality was at pharmaceutical levels, the cost of drugs to society would be down to the same level as doughnuts and cream cakes!!
V, I'd base it on alcohol/tobacco taxation. The tax should be high enough to raise proper money but not so high as to encourage bootlegging or smuggling.
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