Heroin made available on the NHS in Britain - nobody notices

[MikeH]

I noticed. It's great.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Now you've done it. Haven't you heard that the U.S. is conducting a War on Drugs? Now we're going to have to invade your sorry little island.

But that's not the sad part. The sad part is that Blair will support us.

[MikeH]

This is a good part of the war on drugs.

People get addicted. Best thing to do is help them manage their addiction, get them off drugs if you can. If you can't then if you give them the drugs they aren't stealing to get them, and the money isn't going into the pockets of the criminals.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by MikeH
This is a good part of the war on drugs.

People get addicted. Best thing to do is help them manage their addiction, get them off drugs if you can. If you can't then if you give them the drugs they aren't stealing to get them, and the money isn't going into the pockets of the criminals.

Well said. I was, of course, joking. Well done, Britain.

But it will be interesting to see if the US responds; they went fairly ballistic for a while (to no effect) when the Netherlands legaized coffee-house consumption of dope.

[Dr Strangelove]

Narcotics are not the only means to treat chronic addiction. It is believed now that chronic pain often is a result of changes that occur in the CNS secondary to some disease or injury that initially induced prolonged pain. Medications that are often effective in allieviating this condition include anti-depressants and anti-convulsants. With a co-operative patient these treatments, sometimes accompanied by behavioral training and physical therapy are highly effective in allieviating chronic pain.

Quite often I will see a patient who presents with a story that he or she is moving into the area, has been under treatment with pain with such and such heavy duty narcotic, and needs to get a doctor in the area to prescribe it. The person will maintain that absolutely every non-narcotic treatment in the book has been tried. What I do in these situations is that I request that the person have records of these previous treatments sent to me. Usually no records ever arrive, or when they do it becomes apparent that the person pulled the same hoax on their last physician, or that the last physician was utterly negligent in his workup.

Frankly I don't feel that it's my job as a physician to go along with a lie. The use of a substance to which a person is addicted to as a treatment for that addiction is a lie. I've worked in detoxifixation centers. Properly monitored withdrawal from herione is really no great shakes. Treating hundreds of patients I never lost one, nor was I ever forced to even transfer one to a medical floor to treat the effects of a severe withdrawal. The images you see in movies of junkies cowering in the suffering from hallucinations and pain don't happen if you monitor them for signs of withdrawal and administer various medications to prevent the more severe symptoms. The addict who insists that he can't quit his habit is doing nothing more than holding society hostage.

[Solly]

"If you can't then if you give them the drugs they aren't stealing to get them, and the money isn't going into the pockets of the criminals."

All this does is reduces demand on the illegal market for heroin, pushing down price, and increases the amount of heroin people can buy and people taking it.

[MikeH]

We should just shoot them then.

[Solly]

Find alternative policies.

[MikeH]

This policy is better than putting them in prison: Easy access to drugs in prison, very expensive to the tax payer.

A good policy would be to provide enough rehab places for anyone that wants one.

The ideal policy would be to improve peoples lives enough that they don't feel the need to take smack to escape from how crappy their lives are and get into this situation in the first place. That means loads of good old fashioned left wing economic wealth distribution policies.

[Solly]

That assumes that it's only the poor who take smack. The rich take vastly more of it.

Also, it also depends what your aim is; reduce the number of drug users, or reduce the amount of drug crime?

[MikeH]

I bet you have no evidence to support that statistic and that it's totally wrong.

You might get the odd rock star smack addict but the vast majority of users are poor as dirt.

Heroin addiction in itself is most destructive in the way it makes the user spend their entire life scraping together money for heroin. The aim should be to cut drugs crime 'caused by people who've stupidly got themselves into a situation where they are commiting crime from a need rather than a choice.

[Solly]

"You might get the odd rock star smack addict but the vast majority of users are poor as dirt."

And you've got no statistics for that!

Taking smack might **** up their lives that they become poor, but I doubt they were poor to begin with as they wouldn't have been able to afford it.

"The aim should be to cut drugs crime 'caused by people who've stupidly got themselves into a situation where they are commiting crime from a need rather than a choice."

So you don't mind the government effectively increasing the supply of heroin, lowering its market price, and thus incrasing the number of users?

[MikeH]

Heroin is already cheap. Cheap enough that the odd hit here and there at first is cheap anyway. You don't have to be rich to start taking it otherwise how would all the estate kids get started?

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by MikeH
This is a good part of the war on drugs.

People get addicted. Best thing to do is help them manage their addiction, get them off drugs if you can. If you can't then if you give them the drugs they aren't stealing to get them, and the money isn't going into the pockets of the criminals.

There is no rational use for Heroin as a pain control medication. It is not the most potent pain reliever. Morphine, Dilaudid and Fentanyl are more potent. Heroin does have more unwanted side effects, like hallucinations, and is more addicting. Opiod narcotics work by binding endorphin receptors in the brain. There are three types of receptors. One is the primary mediator of the pain blocking effect, the others are the primary mediators of other effects like hallucinations and addiction. Opium binds all three receptors well, which explains why opium smokers consistently experience hallucinations. Heroin was discovered during an attempt to find a drug that could be used to cure opium addiction. It binds the receptors that induce hallucinations less than opium, but still binds enough that some people experience hallucinations. Morphine and the more modern narcotics are all better in that respect. Currently there is one pain reliever, Tramadol, that comes close to being completely non-addicting. Unfortunately it is not as potent as the higher grade narcotics.

[MikeH]

Not talking about as a pain reliever, talking about as a way of weaning users out of the criminal culture so that when they go into, are waiting for a place to get into, and come out of rehab they aren't straight back into the environment where they were taking them.