Morning:
8°c
So, the troubled pop balladeer Pete Doherty has been slung in jail for 14 weeks after breaching the terms of his bail for a suspended sentence he received last year. You, the taxpayer, will be coughing up yet more money, quite uselessly, to punish a man for having an illness.
Once in jail - as after previous sentencings - Doherty will come into contact with the services set up to help him with finding treatment. No bad thing: there are a range of options available to addicts and alcoholics who are imprisoned. There's just one problem: mostly, they don't work.
There are only a fraction of the necessary places available on prison wings equipped for rehabilitation therapy that have a mandatory "clean" policy and the testing to back it up. For the most part, jailed addicts and alcoholics are offered a little counselling, a detox of some kind, and perhaps access to a Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Then they go back to wings that are awash with drugs.
Addicts and alcoholics who receive a suspended sentence with a mandatory treatment component fare little better. Heroin addicts will be offered methadone maintenance, on the bizarre assumption that means they are "clean" and will be able to regularise their life. Some may be given Naltrexone, a drug that renders opiates ineffective the way Antabuse stops alcohol working.
Heroin addicts can sell their methadone on the open market - it's an addictive drug, delivers a form of high, and is actually more damaging than heroin. They will stop using their Naltrexone as soon as they can - after all, it's only the 21st-century equivalent of the man Coleridge hired to stop him going into apothecaries to buy opium, and then summarily dismissed.
Proper rehabilitation costs a great deal, and its outcomes - in percentage terms - are not that great. For prison governors, probation officers and the burgeoning drug services industry, the current range of treatments looks good on paper. Meanwhile, there isn't the political will to tackle the enormous damage that abuse of drugs and alcohol costs us, because the moralistic lure of a "war on drugs" always seems like a vote-winner.
I understand perfectly the repugnance the public feel towards drug addicts and alcoholics: they are responsible for more acquisitive and violent crime, by many magnitudes, than the rest of the population. These people do bad things - but at root they aren't necessarily bad people, just sick.
When Doherty said, apropos of a public relapse on heroin, "It was a stupid, stupid thing to do and I feel nothing but shame", he actually meant it. It's time our policy-makers and our judiciary felt the same shame about their addiction to using custodial sentencing to deal with this mental illness.
