Last week the home secretary, James Cleverly, announced that nitazenes are now being treated as class A drugs, his statement bookended with the usual stern rhetoric about the need to keep “these vile drugs off our streets”. The maximum penalty for selling or supplying class As is life imprisonment.
Cleverly’s decision follows the discovery that several victims of deadly drug poisonings had nitazenes in their system. Nitazenes are synthetic opioids, meaning they are similar to the heroin and morphine refined from opium poppies but made entirely in a lab. First developed as painkillers in the 1950s but never approved for medical use, they have been found mixed into heroin to give the low-grade variety of the drug that extra kick, as well as in bootleg Xanax and Valium pills sold on the dark web. Up to 500 times stronger than morphine, even a tiny amount can prove fatal.
In these relatively few instances, there are echoes of the US’s overdose epidemic, which now claimsmore than 100,000 lives a year – more than half of which are from fentanyl, another synthetic opioid. This outbreak has sparked a revival of tough-on-drugs policies. But if the UK risks sliding towards an opioid crisis, these are the pitfalls we must avoid.
A month ago, the state of Oregon repealed its Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act (known as Measure 110), which had passed by referendum in 2020, decriminalising personal quantities of narcotics as part of a “health-based” based approach to drug addiction. Under that law, users weren’t arrested for holding a gram of cocaine, but instead were fined $100 unless they entered into drug treatment services. Dealing, meanwhile, was still classified as a crime. But amid a spiralling death toll from the fentanyl crisis, and homeless people’s tents filling the sidewalks, lawmakers panicked and reversed their decision. Drug users caught with small quantities of drugs may now face prison again.
This reversion to the drug-war norm makes little sense – it has been proved time and time again that greater criminalisation does nothing to lower addiction rates. Politicians lost their nerve in Oregon because of a rise in drug fatalities after Measure 110 was passed – but as one study showed, this is more to do with the growing prevalence of fentanyl than users taking greater risks because of looser penalties. It is a fact that wherever fentanyl hits the market in the US, the death rate shoots up. Police action disrupting the supply chain only makes matters worse, as new dealers appear with unknown strength and quality. A recent study in Indiana found that fatal overdoses spiked each time there was a major drug bust.
A growing street homelessness problem – and the very public drug-taking that many of those on the streets are embroiled in – also forced the hand of lawmakers. But people don’t pitch up a tent under a bypass because of addiction issues. West Virginia has been among the worst-hit by drug deaths, but boasts the lowest homelessness rate. Why? Housing there is relatively cheap, while average rents in Oregon doubled between 2020 and 2021. Could it be that unaffordable rents are pushing people from their homes? No, it must be the drugs!
Snapping on the handcuffs doesn’t help. I’ve tried tramadol, drunk lean (a cocktail of codeine plus soda) and smoked opium, and I get why folks grow addicted to opioids. If your life feels empty and hopeless, why not? They don’t fill the void, but they let you not care. They’re like an anaesthetic for inner pain. One recent study found that 96% of patients leaving mandatory detox relapsed within months, proving that caging people does not cure them of their trauma. You simply can’t force someone into sobriety.
What could Britain do differently? In the 1980s, a Liverpool clinic headed by Welsh doctor John Marks provided free heroin and cocaine courtesy of the NHS. There was no toxic fentanyl or nitazenes, no one dropped dead from an overdose, and the stability of a steady fix gave their patients a chance to live normal lives, holding down jobs and rebuilding bonds with their families without being on edge for policemen or pushers. Their business drying up, heroin dealers began disappearing from the area.
So why should law-abiding taxpayers foot the bill for these junkies getting their jollies? Well for a start, it’s more cost-efficient. The cohort of patients at a similar clinic in Middlesborough committed 541 crimes prior to entering the programme, costing £2.1m in taxpayer money. And if they were locked away in prison, it cost another £47,000 a year to keep them housed and fed, again at taxpayers’ expense. Giving them free heroin, on the other hand, costs only £12,000 per year, while giving them a chance to get their life back together. Over a period of six months, the Middlesborough cohort committed a grand total of three crimes, all had found a roof over their heads (many were previously unhoused), and they had stopped buying smack from their dealers (which may have contained toxic additives) almost entirely. That is, until funding was cut in 2022.
Feeding their dependency wasn’t an ideal solution, but since long-term diamorphine use – ie clinically pure heroin – causes minimal damage to the body, certainly less than alcohol, it avoids the absolute worst consequences. You can’t help someone if they’re dead.
With the Taliban’s poppy ban cutting off the heroin supply from Afghanistan, it’s likely that synthetic opioids will become more common on Britain’s illicit narcotics scene, regardless of whether they’re class A, B or Z. To get ahead of the game, safe supply is the only logical solution.
• Niko Vorobyov is a Russian-British freelance journalist, convicted drug peddler and author of Dopeworld
