Shooting-Galleries on the NHS – A Counsel of Despair, Surely?
Civitas, 27 April 2010
At the annual conference of the Royal College of Nursing of which he is general secretary, Dr Peter Carter called for the NHS to provide heroin addicts with regular supplies of the drug in specially dedicated facilities similar to those established in Switzerland.
He said: “Critics say that you are encouraging drug addiction but the reality is that these people are addicts and they are going to do it anyway… If you are going to get people off heroin, then in the initial stages we have to have proper heroin prescribing services.”
It is curious how Dr Carter’s argument is the precise diametric opposite one to that advanced for such facilities by the director of one such facility in Bern catering for some 210 addicts.
After a ten year experiment which led Swiss voters to approve them, Dr Christopher Buerki argued for such facilities by saying of the addicts who attend his:
‘Their average age is 40 now, and they have an average of 13 years of heroin addiction before they enter this programme. Basically we are aiming at a group of people where everything else has failed… These are patients with a chronic, relapsing disease that might go with them for the rest of their lives.’
The case for such facilities cannot be both that they provide the best initial environment for weaning addicts from their addiction, and that they provide a safe haven for those for whom the addiction is so great that they will never be able to rid themselves of it.
Faced with a choice as to what to believe about what function such facilities would actually provide addicts in relation to their habit, I think one must be inclined to accept the argument from experience advanced by the Swiss doctor, rather than the a priori purely conjectural considerations proffered by his British counterpart.
For the NHS merely to control addiction by supplying addicts with their drugs is to abandon medicine in favour of its becoming a drug-pusher and perpetuating the problem.
Drug addiction is a tragic problem that afflicts the lives of all too many vulnerable people. However, it cannot surely be right for the authorities to become part of it by effectively throwing in the towel and abandoning therapeutic endeavour.
Terminating addiction is ultimately a matter of will and resolution on the addict’s part, but the appropriate beginning steps will never be taken if addicts are enabled to continue their habit indefinitely.
For an interesting take on the whole subject of overcoming addiction, read the article by Dr Stanton Peele of Morristown, New Jersey.