UFO Info Week-End

Det Supt Kevin Orr the head of the force’s drugs squad said: Heroin condemns people to a

Det Supt Kevin Orr, the head of the force’s drugs squad, said: “Heroin condemns people to a life of misery and deprivation. When the day dawns that the police start handing out cash to bank robbers, I will give heroin to drug-users.”A spokesman for Virginia Bottomley, Secretary of State for Health, said that although a small number of British doctors were licensed to prescribe heroin to addicts “in very special circumstances”, the Government opposed any extension of the scheme across a major city like Glasgow. Mr McKelvey said he would urge an incoming Labour government to approve a heroin programme in Glasgow.But his proposal was angrily rejected by John McFall, Labour’s Scottish home affairs spokesman, who said that Labour “opposed utterly any suggestion that Class A drugs should be made widely available to addicts”.Strathclyde Police described his idea as “immoral and unethical”. At the same time, drugs-related crime, which costs the city up to £1bn each year, would drop. Overall, Glasgow and its people would be better off.”Mr McKelvey welcomed the recent decision by Greater Glasgow Health Board to encourage GPs to prescribe the heroin substitute, methadone, to junkies.

But he said many drug users rejected methadone because the synthetic opiate was itself highly addictive.Under his Glasgow plan, pharmaceutical supplies of heroin would be made available to such addicts through clinics and health centres as part of a long-term treatment programme. Addicts would receive the drug only as part of a detoxification plan. No Glasgow doctors currently prescribe heroin to drug-users and Mr McKelvey’s scheme would mean that junkies would be allowed legally to store and use the drug for the first time. If pure, clean heroin was selectively decriminalised and supplied free to those addicts who wanted to kick their habit, it would drastically reduce the level of mixing and the death rate would decline. The NHS has already met the needs of the drug-using population half-way in the interests of the public good by, for example, giving out free, clean needles to encourage safe injecting practices and reduce the level of HIV and hepatitis infection.”In Glasgow, where heroin kills two young people on average each week, it is now time for the NHS to go the whole way. But a number of drugs counsellors, health professionals and addicts welcomed the idea.In an interview with the Independent on Sunday, Mr McKelvey, who visited cities in Europe and the United States while compiling the select committee’s report, published last summer, said the “grave extent” of drug abuse in Glasgow meant the city was “ripe for a radical new initiative”.He pointed out that most of the addicts who had died in recent years had overdosed after mixing heroin with other drugs – in particular, sleeping tablets, painkillers and alcohol.

Junkies make the high-strength opiate cocktails because the quality of heroin on Glasgow streets has declined sharply in recent years.If clean, pure supplies of the drug were handed out by NHS doctors, Mr McKelvey said, addicts would stop mixing and the death rate would drop.He explained: “In Britain the Government has acknowledged that people take drugs, and that addicts have special problems which require unusual solutions. William McKelvey, whose Scottish Affairs Select Committee investigation into drug abuse in Strathclyde last year revealed that there were more injecting drug-users in Glasgow than in any other city in Europe, argues that it is “time to think the unthinkable” on drugs.
Mr McKelvey, MP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, says pharmaceutical heroin should, for the first time, be made legally available to addicts throughout a British city via the National Health Service.Handing out pure, clean supplies of the drug in Glasgow would, he adds, help to stop junkies making lethal opiate cocktails, which have killed around 300 youngsters in the past three years alone.His proposals have been criticised by Labour’s home affairs spokesman, government ministers, the police and Greater Glasgow Health Board. HEROIN should be supplied free to addicts in Glasgow to help solve the city’s burgeoning drugs problem, a Scottish Labour MP has proposed. Intensive rearing methods, say vets, are already prolific on the Continent and animal-rights protesters argue that in Britain the trend is heading the same way.This, they fear, will destroy the well-deserved green image of the one British farm animal that has hitherto not been reared in the same way as some pigs and chickens, in a system more like a factory than a field.. The whole front of our barn is open to let the air in.”If the weather is good, Mr Ewing hopes to put the lambs out in March, once the new grass begins to grow.But other farmers, vets say, keep them inside until slaughter to maintain their weight.Britain now has some 20 million breeding sheep, about half of the European flock.