By pushing methadone to inmates, the State has become the dealer-in-chief in Britain’s jails - Melanie Reid, Times 10/12/09
Naive people — by which I mean most of us — struggle with the idea that prisons are awash with drugs. We struggle even more with the notion that within prisons street drugs are now topped up with the heroin substitute methadone, administered by the State along with the porridge.
Call us stupid, but we can’t quite grasp how illegal drugs can circulate within the most controlled environment in the country. Nor can we understand precisely why the authorities have taken on the role of drug-dealer-in-chief, rather than regarding a spell in jail as an ideal opportunity to wean people off drugs. But, like I say, we’re deeply naive.
Last year almost 20,000 prisoners in England and Wales, a rise of 57 per cent on the previous year, were put on methadone in jail as a form of detox. And instead of questioning the logic of prescribing addicts with an addictive substance to detoxify them, let’s just marvel that many prisoners can get their daily fix from shiny automatic methadone dispensers mounted on the prison wall.
What is so interesting about these figures is: (a) they’re astronomical and (b) they have actually provoked a row within the prevailing orthodoxy of the drugs harm-reduction industry, which believes that methadone is the one true way to God. Only non-believers, you understand, are silly enough to think that we should try to get people off drugs.
Mike Trace, a former drugs adviser to Tony Blair, and therefore an original apostle of harm reduction, complained that the huge rise was down to official attempts to “control” drug treatment. The Department of Health, he suggested, was trying to impose its policy on the Ministry of Justice. (Think of it as squirrels fighting about who supplies the nuts.) This meant, Mr Trace said, that thousands of inmates had been diverted from alternative schemes to get them off heroin, and those who wished to become drug-free were having their motivation undermined.
This was a miraculous U-turn, but it matters not. Without him, the harm-reduction behemoth rolls on, wedded to the process that says addiction should be managed rather than recovered from. This effectively means parking people on methadone, often until they die.
What began as a well-meant, compassionate, health-based policy — a practical response to a problem too big for law enforcement to cope with — is now a car crash. The State hands out opiates willy-nilly and has given up any thought of abstinence. Why? Because harm reduction is cheaper and easier, and delays any solution — which to us naive people seems the very opposite of compassionate. But who are we to know?
Would a genuinely caring society be creating dependency in prison, or would it be weaning inmates off all substances? The moral argument is clear, but so too is the practical one.
Consider the case commonly put for methadone in the community. First, it is a way of reducing criminality. Prison already does that, doesn’t it? Second, it reduces the use of illicit drugs. Well, being in prison should do that too.
Third, it is argued that methadone stabilises an addict’s life. That too is a feature of being in prison. Fourth, research in Scotland, the magic kingdom of methadone, found that only 3 per cent of those treated with the drug were drug-free after three years. Additionally, methadone was no better than other treatments at cutting drug dealing, housebreaking, shoplifting and personal theft. What harm reduction?
There is a danger, too, that the ubiquitous use of methadone will change the nature of prisons, turning them from places of custodial sentence into surrogate drug treatment centres. The element of punishment will be lost; and inmates will become what some in the harm-reduction lobby have always regarded them as — patients.
Besides, if methadone use increases exponentially, it’s only a matter of time before prisoners sue the authorities for failing to protect them from becoming a drug user as a result of the prison environment. We have seen brazen legal action succeed before: the Home Office settled out of court (£7,000 apiece) with 150 prisoners who claimed a human right to receive methadone.
So the lunatics are running the asylum. We know that. I am assured by those in the know that drugs can never been kept out of prisons without changing the social dynamics dramatically — ending non-barrier contact between inmates and visitors; and with unacceptable surveillance of prison officers. There is no will to do this.
But we must hang on to the idea of prison as an opportunity to rehabilitate. One alternative is a drug-free area within prison, where inmates are drug-tested. In return for staying drug-free, they could win privileges and shorter sentences.
Otherwise, England can only look to Scotland for the future, where recent government year-on-year figures showed a 26 per cent leap in deaths among addicts. Methadone was present in the bodies of one third of those who died — almost double the level of the year before. In other words, the State’s primary response to the drug problem is now part of the problem itself.
The naive grasp that better than the experts.