Drug addicts are receiving injections of heroin on the NHS under a government-backed plan to wean them off crime sprees to pay for their doses.

Up to 150 addicts at three centres in London, South-East England and the North of England will take part in the experiment which has been kept secret and will report to ministers, police and doctors.

The addicts have been chosen because they have very serious addiction problems. They receive the drug doses daily under supervision of nurses and doctors at the treatment centres. The use of heroin by doctors is not illegal but they require licences from the Home Office.

Two clinics are already operating with one at the Maudsley Hospital in south London and a second in Darlington, Co Durham. A third is expected to open later in an experiment which will run for several years.

Heroin has not been routinely prescribed for addicts since the 1960s when the "British system" was abandoned. Doctors were allowed to issue prescriptions to addicts they were treating but the system was abandoned after a series of scandals surrounding over-prescribing by a group of half a dozen London doctors.

At the moments addicts are usually prescribed a synthetic substitute called methadone which addicts often say is not strong enough or lacks the punch of heroin. Prescriptions are sold on the illicit market and addicts revert to heroin.

Last month a report by Professor Neil McKeganey, head of drugs misuse at Glasgow University, showed that less than four per cent of heroin addicts managed to kick the habit with methadone.

Details of the heroin experiment were revealed today when one of the country’s top police drugs experts publicly called for the prescription of heroin to be more widely available for seriously addicted patients.

Howard Roberts, the number two in Nottinghamshire police and deputy head of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ drugs group, told a national police conference: "We take offenders out of crime and treat their addiction in a closely monitored treatment programme. Of course people getting people off drugs altogether must be the objective but I do believe we have been left with the consequences of relatively uncontained addiction for too long."

Mr Roberts, who is a police representative on the government’s advisory council on misuse of drugs, said he was not suggesting the legalisation of heroin but a way of ending a crime wave that stretches from burglary to murder.

He said up to 60 per cent of crime in the UK could be drug-fuelled. Mr Roberts said he accepted the cost of treating addicts with heroin could be £12,000 against £3,000 for using methadone.

But he pointed to the costs of crime. Addicts, he said, need up to £15,000 a year to feed their habit which would mean crime costing £45,000 a year. Home Office research showed addicts committed 432 crimes a year, ten-fold the number carried out by non-addicts.

The police chief, who has the backing of other senior officers, said that the benefits of using heroin were supported by research including studies on heroin prescription in Holland and Switzerland.

The research found that there were significant reductions in illicit drug use among those receiving the treatment and both the Swiss and Dutch found a drop in crime committed by the addicts. In Switzerland the majority of patients had no convictions while in treatment.

A spokeswoman for Action for Addication, a research charity which is helping to oversee the pilot schemes, said: "These trials are a last resort for those hard-to-treat addicts and see if this has a potential as a last resort."

Support for the project and Mr Roberts’ call came from Martin Barnes, the chief executive of Drugscope, who said prescribing heroin could be the best route for some drug users to escape their addiction. "There are positive net gains not just to the individual drug user but within the community generally," he said.

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