Oh dear. Iain Dale’s just been very nice about me and my blog and now I’m about to be vicious back. Perhaps I should put it this way, this is perfect evidence for why I could never be considered a conservative: rather a radical, progressive, liberal (for certain values of radical, progressive and liberal, of course).
Richard Brunstrom is the whacky Chief Constable of North Wales. You know, the one who persecutes motorists on his day off. Here’s what Iain had to say about his latest idea:
His latest wheeze is to sanction plans for a vending machine outside
Colwyn Bay Police Station, which will dispense needles to drug addicts.
He also wants to provide a steel bin for used needles. The scheme will
be paid for by the Welsh Assembly (actually, it’s the poor bloody UK
taxpayer who will be footing the bill as usual).
Clearly and obviously an excellent idea. The public health costs of the sharing of dirty needles (and the disposal of such around the streets) are hugely greater in terms of AIDS, Hepatitis C yadda yadda than the provision of a few tens of thousands of needles a year and a steel dustbin. This is, in fact, an extremely cost effective idea, one that will pay for itself over and over again.
The only possible objection would be that we should not simply accept that intravenous drug use will happen with or without clean needles, we must wipe it out. Well, if anyone’s got any ideas about how to do that without wiping every vestige of freedom from the country, do let me know. There are others interested as well: the US has so far spent a trillion (yes, that’s one thousand thousand millions) dollars over the past few decades and drugs are cheaper and more easily available than ever. It would appear that amelioration of some of the side effects is all that is possible. Iain then asks rhetorically:
Why don’t they just go the whole hog and provide free shots of heroin too?
And I would offer, non-rhetorically, the answer, "Damn good idea". We might then be able to ameliorate more of the side effects of the taking of opiods. For example, no one would go out and steal to get their hit, would they? Crime rate halves. There would be no turf wars, no gangs, no drive by shootings, crime rate falls. We would stop what is possibly the most absurd and counter-productive policy currently operative: we leave the distribution of a highly addictive, highly profitable substance to criminals.
Addicts would get pure drugs (no, not 100% heroin, but uncut by rat poison for example) so fewer would die of their addiction. It’s well known that on pharmaceutical grade drugs (the main source of which is, I believe, Tasmania, for factoid geeks) addicts can and do live healthy and useful lives for decades.
In fact, given that the cost to the NHS of a day’s worth of heroin is less than the cost of a prescription, it all sounds like a remarkably good idea.
Let’s give the addicts free heroin, cut disease, halve the crime rate and drive at least some of the criminal gangs out of business.
Now, clearly, as everyone knows, I’m a nutter, prone to offering completely absurd solutions to the ills of the world.
However, I’ll leave you with Richard Brunstrom’s post (yes, he is the Chief Constable who blogs) on the matter of the needles and the dustbin.
One question for you. Of the three of us, Iain the mainstream Conservative, myself, the raving nutter and Brunstrom, the decidedly weird copper, who is the most rational on this one specific subject?
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