The price of drugs......
News reports in today's press state that the price of heroin per gram is now £40 as opposed to £60 a few years back. The general drift of the articles is that Britains streets will now be "flooded with cheap heroin".
Its interesting to note that when I got clean in 1986 the average price was around £60 to £80 per gram. I guess that if you take inflation into acount then in real terms the price is even cheaper now comparatively speaking.
While I have no doubt that there is a direct relationship between availability and usuage I don't think that the picture is quite as simple as the economic model suggests.
I cast my mind back to when I started using heroin in the early 1960's:
I can't say that my life was very manageable around this time or that I was functioning well - I wasn't - and all this was shortly to come to an end.
The end came when the Government acted on the recommendations of the 2nd Brain report which came out in 1965. You see there had been a panic - the number ok known heroin addicts in the UK had gone up to the dizzy heights of around 2,000! (A very large proportion of those actually came from Canada and the USA because of this setup!) This was enough to trigger a panic. (I bet that the "powers that be" would be more than happy with 20,000 today.)
So the law changed and all the prescribing stoped. It was decided that "psychiatrists in special drug dependency clinics" was the way to go.
Why am I telling you all this history? Because up until that point I had never seen street drugs on sale in the UK.
I can tell you however that within a couple of weeks I was buying heroin from the Chinese community in Gerrard Street.
The price? £1 a bag initially. After a police crackdown the price went up to the dizzy heights of £70 for a quater ounce. What I believe happened was that the government legislation actually created an economic climate which made it profitable to import drugs. There was plenty wrong with the so called "British System" but at least the market was dominated by dodgy doctors rather than Gangsters and in fact the gangsters couldn't compete with the "dodgy doctors" plus Boots the Chemist.
The moral? There are now between 150,000 and 300,000 heroin addicts in the UK and the "experts" who presided over this disaster are still in charge! In what other field could the scale of the problem increase 150 times over and we would still listen to these people?
Its interesting to note that when I got clean in 1986 the average price was around £60 to £80 per gram. I guess that if you take inflation into acount then in real terms the price is even cheaper now comparatively speaking.
While I have no doubt that there is a direct relationship between availability and usuage I don't think that the picture is quite as simple as the economic model suggests.
I cast my mind back to when I started using heroin in the early 1960's:
- After a couple of initial hits which were obtained by buying from "friends" who had legal supplies I pretty quickly decided to get "registered" as they called it in those days and to get supplies from a doctor. I would not only be able to have heroin legally but I would have more - always a good idea if you are an addict!
- You might think that it was hard to find a doctor - it wasn't, there were about half a dozen in London who would more or less prescribe to anyone who walked through the door with the requisite cash (about £5) for a private prescription and who said that they had a heroin habit. It was so easy that I not only walked out the door with a prescription for heroin - I had one for cocaine as well! (The doctor asked if I used cocaine as well as heroin - I am an addict so what was I going to say? In reality I had never even used cocaine up until this point.
I can't say that my life was very manageable around this time or that I was functioning well - I wasn't - and all this was shortly to come to an end.
The end came when the Government acted on the recommendations of the 2nd Brain report which came out in 1965. You see there had been a panic - the number ok known heroin addicts in the UK had gone up to the dizzy heights of around 2,000! (A very large proportion of those actually came from Canada and the USA because of this setup!) This was enough to trigger a panic. (I bet that the "powers that be" would be more than happy with 20,000 today.)
So the law changed and all the prescribing stoped. It was decided that "psychiatrists in special drug dependency clinics" was the way to go.
Why am I telling you all this history? Because up until that point I had never seen street drugs on sale in the UK.
I can tell you however that within a couple of weeks I was buying heroin from the Chinese community in Gerrard Street.
The price? £1 a bag initially. After a police crackdown the price went up to the dizzy heights of £70 for a quater ounce. What I believe happened was that the government legislation actually created an economic climate which made it profitable to import drugs. There was plenty wrong with the so called "British System" but at least the market was dominated by dodgy doctors rather than Gangsters and in fact the gangsters couldn't compete with the "dodgy doctors" plus Boots the Chemist.
The moral? There are now between 150,000 and 300,000 heroin addicts in the UK and the "experts" who presided over this disaster are still in charge! In what other field could the scale of the problem increase 150 times over and we would still listen to these people?
posted by anaddict @ 7:22 PM
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