poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
- Messages
- 11,543
Legal Heroin Prescriptions: The ‘British System’ You Never Knew Existed
In an hour and a half of interviewing Sarah*, I would never have suspected she had taken heroin that morning. Her West London basement flat contains none of the chaos and disorder you might associate with a daily user. The living room is clean. The only item lying on the floor is a food bowl for her cat that comes in and out as we speak. The shelves are full of books with titles such as Prescription Drugs: Alternative Uses, Alternative Cures alongside River Cafe cook books and novels.
Each morning, Sarah, 47, intramuscularly injects a dose of heroin just after she gets up. She injects again in the afternoon - around 5pm if she has been out working or volunteering - and then injects again at bed time. All told, she takes 300mg of the drug a day. All of Sarah’s drug taking paraphernalia is clean and neat.
Tomorrow, she will need more heroin. She will hit the streets, not in search of a dealer, but a chemist. She goes to a specialised clinic for addiction, speaks to her key worker about how things are going and receives her prescription. This gives her two weeks’ worth of freeze dried ampoules of diamorphine - the medical term for heroin - clean syringes, sterile water and alcohol swabs, for free, from her local pharmacy.
Heroin prescription has been a part of Britain’s approach to drugs since the 1920s, but the public is largely ignorant of its existence. The policy was so rare internationally it came to be dubbed “The British System”. The Home Office licenses doctors to prescribe diamorphine to those who do not respond to alternatives like methadone or morphine. Possession of diamorphine, a Class A Drug, would ordinarily mean a prison sentence of up to seven years.
Sarah has been on her prescription for 14 years. She became addicted to heroin after leaving home in her native Australia aged 15. This take-home prescription follows repeated failures of what she calls “the methadone merry-go-round”, when she took the substitute given to addicts that failed to suppress her urge. She is determined to come off her prescription but fears, if she relapses, she would not get it back.
Sitting in her living room, I ask where she would be without it. She pauses for 15 seconds, chewing over her thoughts. “God, I don’t know,” she says. “When I asked for this prescription I felt like this was it, this was the last thing that was available.
“I didn’t know what would happen to me if I couldn’t get it. I know that sounds crazy really, because you think ‘just stop, just get it together and fucking stop’. But I think sometimes, when you get to a place when you’re so entrenched or enmired in your situation, drugs are all around you all day...
“I always remember this guy saying ‘when you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder, everything is above you’. You just feel it’s almost insurmountable. Having that prescription really gave me he first tool I really needed to climb out of that mess.”
Sarah speaks slowly and carefully. She is advocating legal, free diamorphine for those who need it in a world where “people just see junkies. They just see heroin. They just see the damage heroin causes”. She wants to get this right.
Sarah may not know where she would be without a diamorphine prescription but the troubles she faced without it paint a bleak picture.
After leaving home as a teenager, Sarah was interested in experimenting and took heroin and speed. It wasn’t until she had a boyfriend who was regularly using heroin and the drug was “around all the time” that she started using regularly too and became addicted. She woke up one day “sick” and “incredibly anxious”. “It’s like this anxiety is in under your bones, you just can’t think straight,” is how she describes the withdrawal symptoms. Sarah, who was by now working as a prostitute, used methadone but found, while it alleviated the symptoms, she still needed her fix.
In 1993, in her early twenties, Sarah came to Britain, something her mother hoped would help her come off drugs. She continued to try and get off heroin using methadone but, still surrounded by contacts and friends she would score with, she kept using. “Heroin doesn’t work as well on methadone. If you’re not ready to stop, you take pills on top to make the heroin when you do score better.” The need for a fix was like “running on a treadmill”, she says. “It’s all that you have time to think about and do every day. It takes all that time to work out how you’re going to get the money. Then try to score. Then, sorting out your gear, having your little chill and then it all starts again.”
Sarah makes a motion with her hands like she is ringing water from an imaginary towel, still deliberating over the words she chooses. “The heroin stops the sickness but also that desire to get heroin. Maybe it’s having a fix... I’m sure that’s got something to do with it... That process... that instant gratification. There’s something incredibly satisfying about when you feel a bit wired or sick or anything and then have a hit, bam, instant, fixed.”
Cont -
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/heroin-prescription-diamorphine_uk_57fd2f6ee4b0430f66f67894
In an hour and a half of interviewing Sarah*, I would never have suspected she had taken heroin that morning. Her West London basement flat contains none of the chaos and disorder you might associate with a daily user. The living room is clean. The only item lying on the floor is a food bowl for her cat that comes in and out as we speak. The shelves are full of books with titles such as Prescription Drugs: Alternative Uses, Alternative Cures alongside River Cafe cook books and novels.
Each morning, Sarah, 47, intramuscularly injects a dose of heroin just after she gets up. She injects again in the afternoon - around 5pm if she has been out working or volunteering - and then injects again at bed time. All told, she takes 300mg of the drug a day. All of Sarah’s drug taking paraphernalia is clean and neat.
Tomorrow, she will need more heroin. She will hit the streets, not in search of a dealer, but a chemist. She goes to a specialised clinic for addiction, speaks to her key worker about how things are going and receives her prescription. This gives her two weeks’ worth of freeze dried ampoules of diamorphine - the medical term for heroin - clean syringes, sterile water and alcohol swabs, for free, from her local pharmacy.
Heroin prescription has been a part of Britain’s approach to drugs since the 1920s, but the public is largely ignorant of its existence. The policy was so rare internationally it came to be dubbed “The British System”. The Home Office licenses doctors to prescribe diamorphine to those who do not respond to alternatives like methadone or morphine. Possession of diamorphine, a Class A Drug, would ordinarily mean a prison sentence of up to seven years.
Sarah has been on her prescription for 14 years. She became addicted to heroin after leaving home in her native Australia aged 15. This take-home prescription follows repeated failures of what she calls “the methadone merry-go-round”, when she took the substitute given to addicts that failed to suppress her urge. She is determined to come off her prescription but fears, if she relapses, she would not get it back.
Sitting in her living room, I ask where she would be without it. She pauses for 15 seconds, chewing over her thoughts. “God, I don’t know,” she says. “When I asked for this prescription I felt like this was it, this was the last thing that was available.
“I didn’t know what would happen to me if I couldn’t get it. I know that sounds crazy really, because you think ‘just stop, just get it together and fucking stop’. But I think sometimes, when you get to a place when you’re so entrenched or enmired in your situation, drugs are all around you all day...
“I always remember this guy saying ‘when you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder, everything is above you’. You just feel it’s almost insurmountable. Having that prescription really gave me he first tool I really needed to climb out of that mess.”
Sarah speaks slowly and carefully. She is advocating legal, free diamorphine for those who need it in a world where “people just see junkies. They just see heroin. They just see the damage heroin causes”. She wants to get this right.
Sarah may not know where she would be without a diamorphine prescription but the troubles she faced without it paint a bleak picture.
After leaving home as a teenager, Sarah was interested in experimenting and took heroin and speed. It wasn’t until she had a boyfriend who was regularly using heroin and the drug was “around all the time” that she started using regularly too and became addicted. She woke up one day “sick” and “incredibly anxious”. “It’s like this anxiety is in under your bones, you just can’t think straight,” is how she describes the withdrawal symptoms. Sarah, who was by now working as a prostitute, used methadone but found, while it alleviated the symptoms, she still needed her fix.
In 1993, in her early twenties, Sarah came to Britain, something her mother hoped would help her come off drugs. She continued to try and get off heroin using methadone but, still surrounded by contacts and friends she would score with, she kept using. “Heroin doesn’t work as well on methadone. If you’re not ready to stop, you take pills on top to make the heroin when you do score better.” The need for a fix was like “running on a treadmill”, she says. “It’s all that you have time to think about and do every day. It takes all that time to work out how you’re going to get the money. Then try to score. Then, sorting out your gear, having your little chill and then it all starts again.”
Sarah makes a motion with her hands like she is ringing water from an imaginary towel, still deliberating over the words she chooses. “The heroin stops the sickness but also that desire to get heroin. Maybe it’s having a fix... I’m sure that’s got something to do with it... That process... that instant gratification. There’s something incredibly satisfying about when you feel a bit wired or sick or anything and then have a hit, bam, instant, fixed.”
Cont -
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/heroin-prescription-diamorphine_uk_57fd2f6ee4b0430f66f67894
