Pubdate: Thu,  8 Jun 2000
Source: Scotsman (UK)
Copyright: The Scotsman Publications Ltd 2000
Contact:  http://www.scotsman.com/
Forum: http://www.scotsman.com/
Author: Kirsty Milne

STONE AGE CATAPULTS FOR A MODERN CRUSADE

MY CANDIDATE for the next honours list is a pharmacist from Aberdeen, whom 
I will call Mr Coulter for his own protection. Upright and rational, he is 
instantly recognisable as a certain type of dependable Scot. In the past he 
would have engineered bridges and administered the Empire. The modern-day 
Mr Coulter, who runs a friendly chemist's shop, is still in the front line, 
as a participant in Aberdeen's methadone-dispensing scheme.

What this means is that 30 heroin addicts come into his shop each day and 
drink their prescribed methadone with a glass of water under supervision by 
staff.

They get it safely, without fear of being attacked in the street.

Mr Coulter knows they have the correct dose of pure methadone and are 
actually taking it, not selling it. He also exchanges dirty needles for 
clean ones, a scheme which, he believes, has held back the spread of HIV in 
the Aberdeen area.

These transactions are not without hazard. "We have to be really vigilant," 
Mr Coulter told MSPs visiting Aberdeen this week. His staff, who have had 
used needles thrown at them, are accustomed to checking that customers do 
not retain the methadone in their mouths.

Fifty people have been banned altogether. Mr Coulter, who is paid by 
Grampian health board for taking part in the scheme, must also budget for 
shoplifting by addicts desperate for cash.

But he feels he is providing a service to the community. "Without the 
methadone, these people would be out mugging old ladies, they would be 
burgling your house and mine. We are helping to stabilise the problem."

It takes a lot to silence an MSP, but members of the social inclusion 
committee left the chemist's shop lost for words. Never let it be said that 
MSPs lead a sheltered existence in Edinburgh. This inquiry into drugs and 
deprived communities has taken the social inclusion committee all over the 
country, from Ayrshire to Fife. But this is not Scotland as most people 
would think of it. This is an expedition to another planet, a Scotland that 
few of us know and fewer want to visit.

MSPs are making forays into a world so alien it could be science fiction, 
where the culture and customs are different, where responsible witnesses 
stagger out of the mist with stunned first-hand reports.

The caring professions are being forced to confront the most awesome social 
problem of our age equipped with the equivalent of Stone Age catapults.

When he was at college training to be a pharmacist, Mr Coulter never 
dreamed he would end up serving heroin addicts.

Neither, it is fair to assume, did his GP colleagues imagine they would be 
hiring security guards for inner-city practices.

Trainee teachers did not expect that pupils would be dealing drugs via 
mobile phones at school.

Social-work students did not anticipate that half the children taken into 
care would have parents misusing drugs, as is now the case in Fife.

Aberdeen is known as an affluent city, but it has the Scotland's highest 
rate of drug injectors per head of population. MSPs heard from social 
workers about families where the children shuttle between the sheriff's 
court and the doctor's surgery; parents relieved to have their children 
taken away because it leaves them freer to pursue their addiction; 
grandmothers coming to the rescue and finding retirement rewinding into 
parenthood.

As if it were not hard enough to work on the front line, professionals are 
not getting the support they need. Social workers are forced to keep 
children in care because there is a year-long waiting list for the parents 
to go for detox in Glasgow. Teachers persuade a parent to admit to 
addiction in the family, then have nowhere to refer them for help. Mr 
Coulter, asked if he could rely on the police when addicts became 
threatening, replied that the police were too overstretched.

Ministers are quick to criticise public-sector workers for failing to 
modernise, slower to help them cope with modernity. The social inclusion 
committee is uncovering a shortage of treatment facilities which, in a 
country with an addict population of between 20,000 and 30,000 (estimates 
vary), is nothing short of scandalous. Aberdeen has no drug detox services; 
patients must be sent to Edinburgh or Glasgow. According to the Scottish 
Drugs Forum, which gave evidence to the committee last month, Dumfries and 
Galloway has one treatment facility, an outreach worker and a community 
psychiatric unit for the whole county.

In Inverclyde, there is a six-month waiting list for methadone prescribing.

MSPs visited Drugs Action, a voluntary organisation that specialises in 
work with prostitutes and runs a needle exchange scheme.

The project recently withdrew from the coastal towns of Peterhead and 
Fraserburgh. Not because it was no longer needed - both have seen a big 
increase in heroin injecting and a spate of drug-related deaths among the 
young - but because Aberdeenshire council slashed its grant.

These are crazily perverse outcomes, which ministers are trying to correct 
with common sense.

The policy unit has carried out an audit of the A3250 million spent on the 
drugs problem each year, to see if the money is being put to best use. The 
executive's drugs strategy, published last month, promised more research 
and better coordination between agencies on the ground.

MSPs will have an opportunity for dialogue with the justice minister, Angus 
MacKay, when he appears before the committee next month.

The drugs inquiry will be a test of how far the executive and the 
parliament can cooperate.

It is not just a question of holding ministers to account - although the 
SNP's Fiona Hyslop has asked sharp questions about the value of the Pounds 
10 million new Drugs Enforcement Agency. It is a question of whether 
ministers will heed the news MSPs are bringing back from the front line.

The people who gave evidence in Aberdeen spoke privately but frankly, with 
none of the vague euphemisms that we are accustomed to hearing from 
politicians. They were not inhibited by the polarisation between "zero 
tolerance" and "harm reduction" that clouds debate about drugs in Scotland.

One teacher volunteered that her pupils saw drugs as cheap and easy, with 
no real risk attached.

Tell them "Just Say No" and they would laugh in your face, she said. A 
former addict told MSPs how happy heroin made her feel - for the first 
couple of hits, leaving her chasing a feeling she could never recapture, 
like the opium addicts of the 19th century. But few politicians would 
entertain publicly the notion that heroin and happiness have anything to do 
with each other.

If politics is to have relevance to real life, martial metaphors about a 
"war on drugs" will be of little use. Mr Coulter, who has accumulated more 
knowledge of heroin than he could ever wish, believes that it should be 
decriminalised, "putting the dealers out of business overnight".

He would rather be dispensing pure, state-approved heroin from his pharmacy 
than methadone, which can be just as dangerous. But they will not make him 
an OBE for saying that.
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