The Government’s Fix and How to Fix it

Civitas, 24 December 2004

Due to the recent enforced closure of the Merseyside-based firm that supplied the NHS with flu-vaccine and diamorphine, it is reported in today’s papers that the country’s hospitals face the prospect of running out of supplies of the painkiller in a mere matter of weeks.
This is no laughing matter, since diamorphine is used in the analgesic treatment of cancer patients and others with serious and terminal painful conditions.

The Department of Health seems not overly concerned. It is reported as having spoken of switching to the use of alternative painkillers like morphine.
Clearly, however, since diamorphine was its previous drug of choice, the prospect of its not being available for hospital use cannot but be very serious.
In not having anticipated this crisis and formulated contingency plans to deal with it, the government displays a staggering degree of complacency and incompetence — unless its recent legalisation of living-wills is its contingency plan!
Since the government seems incapable of organising the medical equivalent of a seasonal celebration in a brewery, I would like to end the year on a note of seasonal good-will to it by making the following suggestion, while recognising the problem in question is no laughing matter but one of appalling suffering shortly to occur as a result of its incompetence.
‘Diamporhine’, as is well-known, is the medical name for heroin. Now, the newspapers are constantly telling us the streets of England’s cities and villages are awash with the substance, as they are with practically every other drug known to man or beast.
Until the government can find a more reputable alternative source of supply, why doesn’t it announce a moratorium for those who possess quantities intended for illegal sale and offer to buy up the entire stock at some agreed above street-level price?
That way, those in genuine need of the drug could gain it, and those who are not in genuine need could be spared being made to acquire such need of it.
Admittedly, this would be only a temporary fix. But, then, as every junkie will testify, that is all that those in quest of the drug are ever after.
Wishing you a happier 2005 than 2004, but doubting whether for all too many it will be!