Heroin prescribing
6 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| December 2015
The game of
history is
usually played
by the best
and the worst
over the
heads of the
majority in
the middle.
Eric Hoffer
‘I feel like they are waiting for the last
handful of us to die off and that will be the
end of heroin prescribing in Britain, as we
know it’, I said miserably.
Gary Sutton, Release’s head of drugs
services, turned and looked at me seriously
through his spectacles: ‘If we don't try and do
something now there will be no diamorphine
prescribing left anywhere in the UK.’
Gary tapped away on the computer in
front of me, putting the last few lines on a
letter to yet another treatment service who
had been forcibly extracting a long-term client
off his diamorphine ampoules and onto an
oral medication. It was proving to be a painful
and destructive decision for the client, who
was experiencing a new daily torment as his
once stable life began to unravel around him.
The drug team and its helpline (known
affectionately as ‘Narco’), all part of the UK
charity Release, receives phone calls from
people in drug treatment from all over the UK.
By doing so it serves as the proverbial
stethoscope clamped to the arrhythmic heart
of our nation’s drug politik and bears witness
to the fallout from Number 10 affecting the
individual, on the street and in treatment. In
other words, we witness the consequences of
policy and treatment decisions, and try to
support or advocate for the caller.
But as winter draws the shades on yet
another year in the drugs field, we find we are
bearing witness to a tragedy, one of small
proportions but with huge implications. It
involves the last vestiges of the British system
of drug treatment, the ‘jewel in its crown’ –
heroin prescribing – and the decline of the
NHS, under assault from a mercilessly
competitive tendering process and the crude
procurement that is defining its replacement.
Is that where we are really heading?
Forcing stable people off their heroin
scripts and into chaos is evidence of a
British drug treatment system in terminal
decline, says
Erin O’Mara
‘If we don't try and do
something now there will be no
diamorphine prescribing left
anywhere in the UK.’
GARY SUTTON
It may be true to say that to try to define
the old ‘British system’ is to trap its wings
under a microscope and allow for a possibly
contentious dissection; the late ‘Bing’ Spear,
formerly chief inspector of the Home Office
drugs branch, might be first in line by
reminding us that the implications of
‘“system” and “programme” suggests a
coordination, order and an element of (state)
planning and direction, all totally alien to the
fundamental ethos of the British approach,
which is to allow doctors to practise medicine
with minimal bureaucratic interference’. His
point being that the essence of the ‘British
THE STATE
