Drug addicts are being given injections of heroin on the NHS under a government-backed plan to deter them from comitting robbery and theft to fund their habit.

Up to 150 addicts at three treatment centres in England will take part in the trial, which until now has been kept secret. The centres will report the results to ministers, police and doctors.

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

Two clinics are already operating. One is at the Maudsley Hospital, South London, and a second is in Darlington, Co Durham. A third is expected to open later in a trial that 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 but the practice was abandoned after a series of scandals in which half a dozen London doctors were overprescribing.

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

Last month a report by Neil McKeganey, head of drug misuse at Glasgow University, showed that fewer than 4 per cent of heroin addicts managed to beat their habit with methadone.

Details of the new trial were revealed yesterday as one of the country’s top police drug-crime experts called for the prescription of heroin to be more widely available for addicts.

Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire and deputy head of the Association of Chief Police Officers drug 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 consequen-ces of relatively uncontained addiction for too long.”

Mr Roberts, who is a police representative on the Government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, said he was not suggesting the legalisation of heroin but a way of ending a crime wave that ranges from burglary to murder.

He said that up to 60 per cent of crime in the UK could be drug-fuelled. He acknowledged that treating addicts with heroin could cost £12,000, compared with £3,000 using methadone, but said that the sum was outweighed by the cost of crime committed to fund drug use.

Mr Roberts, 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 the Netherlands 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 reported a drop in crime committed by the addicts. In Switzerland most of the patients had no criminal convictions while in treatment.

Martin Barnes, the chief executive of Drugscope, supported Mr Roberts, and said that 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.

Action on Addiction, a research charity, is helping to oversee the pilot scheme. Nicky Metrebian, a researcher for the charity who has examined the Swiss and Dutch schemes, said: “There is evidence to suggest that there is a potential role for the medicalised prescribing of injectable opiates in supervised injecting clinics as a last resort for hard-to-treat heroin addicts.

“Action on Addiction’s scientific study will test whether this treatment is effective in reducing illicit heroin use, improving health and reducing criminal activity among a particular group of hard-to-treat heroin users.”

The price of addiction

23-35
tonnes of heroin smuggled into Britain each year

300,000
heroin addicts

£15,000
a year needed to fund an addiction

£45,000
The cost of the crimes committed each year by a heroin addict

432
The number of crimes committed a year on average by each addict

Source: ACPO, Howard Roberts and EU

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