If you can't win the war on drugs…

Then try and win the war on drug addicts – that seems to be the stance taken by “Project Prevention”, a US based “charity” that’s come to the UK to offer £200 cash to any drug addict in exchange for being sterilised. They were featured in the news a few months ago, after a group of them harassed a mother (who was not a drug addict) coming out of Possilpark health centre and offered £200 in exchange for being sterilised.  Now they’re making that offer to any drug users in Glasgow, Bristol, Leicester or London who wants to take it up.

One man featured in the BBC’s report took up Project Prevention’s offer because he felt he would be totally unable to raise a child – as a drug addict that’s not surprising. If drug addicts do want to have a vasectomy/abortion etc to stop them having a child they don’t want then it should be accessible for them on the NHS, and is an understandable and in most cases a sensible decision for people going through a physical need for drugs that dominates their life.

What Project Prevention does is quite different from sensible birth control though – it’s about attacking drug addicts without doing anything practical to either help addicts get off the drugs or take the drugs out of communities. It’s also led by folk who obviously have a stereotyped view of people living in poor areas as being drug users – like when they offered  a non-drug user money in exchange for sterilisation, just cos she came out of a health centre in Possilpark.

The money itself is obviously designed as a lure for people in the most desperate and miserable state in their lives. How many people, thinking clearly would get rid of their ability to have kids forever for £200? The only reason people will take that cash is because they are desperate for money for drugs. Project Prevention must know that, and obviously don’t care their efforts are helping FUND drug abuse and drug dealers in the USA and now want to do the same in the UK.

Most drug use in the UK and USA that is severely damaging to infants – in practice crack cocaine and heroin – has not always existed. Heroin use in Scotland skyrocketed in the 80′s as a side effect of mass unemployment and de industrialisation. In the USA crack flooded into predominantly Black areas, who suffered the same collapse in industry – alongside a deliberate ignorance of the Contra drug dealers who shipped crack into the USA.

SSY says drug abuse should be dealt with as a social emergency and an illness – in the first case, proper jobs should be funded for people living in areas with high levels of drug abuse to make moving into drugs and dealing less appealing.

Secondly, those who are drug users – specifically heroin users, given that is by far and away the most damaging illegal drug in Scottish society – should be given pharmaceutical heroin on prescription. This would allow them to take a drug which is not impure, in a safe environment away from parks etc with children, and would mean that heroin dealers would lose their power very rapidly. What heroin addict would risk jail for stealing money to buy an inferior product after all? This also naturally means the burglaries, muggings and thefts by heroin addicts trying to feed a habit would also drop.

This heroin on prescription programme was viciously attacked by political parties in Holyrood, but it is not a fringe view – there are many police officers who support it. The programme itself was already tried in the English town of Widnes, where there were no recorded heroin related deaths and a 93% drop in drug related crime.

And it would also mean less addicts who would decide to sell their ability to have kids for a pittance to some opportunistic predators posing as a charity. With proper support, after some years they may be in a position to have and support children instead of having that choice forever taken from them in the most desperate times of their life.