By way of introducing the young man who was with them, two parents said to me recently, ‘You might not recognise him. This is our son, a taxpayer.’ It is true that I did not recognise him as the thin, ill, heroin addict who I had met a few years previously.
Back in 2002, I held an inquiry into heroin misuse in my constituency of Bassetlaw. According to government figures made available that year, heroin misuse in coalfield areas was 27 per cent above the national average, and Bassetlaw was no exception. My inquiry had the aim of investigating the measures undertaken at all levels by the criminal justice system, treatment providers and community schemes to deal with the epidemic.
What I discovered was that not only was drug treatment patchy, difficult to understand and subject to long waiting lists, but it was also extremely inefficient and expensive. Treatment provision was dependent upon an addict ‘proving’ that he was dedicated to the detoxification process by staying clean, without assistance, for a given period of time.
Aside from the fact that a heroin addict does not have freedom of choice – it is one of the first things his addiction takes away from him – the physical effects of withdrawal are often so horrendous that few can bear it without medical assistance. Our drugs policy was setting up addicts to fail, and wasting money in the process.
The first step in reforming the situation in Bassetlaw was to break down barriers to treatment. Requiring addicts to spend time understanding the local bureaucracy and then leap through hoops to access help is self-defeating. With support from the community, several local GP practices began treating heroin addicts in their local surgeries – as they would any other client with a long-term, relapsing disease such as asthma or diabetes. In July 2002, there were only two addicts being treated for heroin misuse; today there are over 400, and burglary in Bassetlaw has fallen by 75 percent. The facts speak for themselves: accessible treatment through primary care works.
Four years on, and Bassetlaw has been transformed. Communities that had once been rife with heroin are beginning to recover, former addicts are receiving treatment and getting jobs in the local industries, and crime has been slashed.
Effective, GP-led treatment has had a wider impact on the local area, as well as being significantly cheaper than the previous system. For example, a number of addicts told me that they purposefully got arrested in order to access the mandatory drugs treatment available within prisons. Given the cost of incarcerating a prisoner combined with the current shortage of spaces, this seemed to me to be less than cost effective.
It has been estimated that drug misuse costs the UK up to £18bn per year; and yet for every £1 spent on treatment £3 is saved in criminal justice costs alone. Furthermore, most heroin addicts cannot hold down a job, and 67 per cent are dependent upon benefits and crime to feed their habits. It has been estimated that such an addict can cost the taxpayer up to £100,000 per year. But the Bassetlaw system shows that, if effective medical treatment is placed at the heart of drugs policy, we can turn someone who is a drain on the local community and the welfare state into an active contributor to the UK economy.