I remember hearing a story on National Public Radio a long time ago (say 15 or 20 years ago) about a program to deal with drug addicts that was either in effect or proposed. There are doctors and I guess lawyers involved. Assuming you are a hopeless druggie in trouble with the law, Britain has/had a program where they lock you up and give you as much of your drug of choice as you want until you either
a) die
or
b) express a sincere wish to get into rehab
and this way, they figure, you’re not out on the streets hurting people and stealing stuff to get money for drugs.
Questions:
Why do they need to give the addict drugs? Just lock him up!
Are there civil liberties type organizations in Britain that would argue that you are taking advantage of some poor bastard’s addiction and that the state has no business helping someone to kill himself in this way?
Is the idea that if you’re going to kill yourself from a drug addiction eventually anyway, why not help you get it over with so society doesn’t have to deal with you any more?
Are you still locked up while you’re in rehab?
Does this make any sense to you or did I just misunderstand or misremember what I thought I heard all those years ago?
I’ve never heard of anything like this, and it doesn’t sound like the sort of idea that would float, as it absolutely requires breaches of medical ethics and curtailment of basic rights.
Is it possible you’ve misremembered the program in certain British cities (e.g. Liverpool I think) which attempted to manage heroin addiction by giving addicts just enough to keep them from going into withdrawal while allowing them to function otherwise normally in society? As I recall that was a big success in terms of reducing crime and mortality among heroin addicts but was cancelled when the tabloids made a big stink about it.
As you describe it, no, I can’t see that happening. I think there are, however, small pilots going on of harm-reduction based drug treatment - in Brighton, for example - where addicts are provided with controlled doses of a clean version of their drugs, to cut down on the crime associated with drug use, with a longer-term programme to cut down on the drug use itself and help people become clean.
Having written all this, I can’t find a cite, though. So take the above with a pinch of salt and I’ll come back if I can find a relevant cite; I heard of it through debates about funding for drug treatment, so it’s possible that the pilot has been closed down now, in any event.
This sort of thing is usually referred to as ‘Shooting Galleries’ in the press - here are links to both an outraged, and a ‘liberal’ article concerning the piloting of these: