Howard Roberts got quite a bashing for his suggestion that people who commit crimes in order to obtain heroin, should be prescribed the drug …
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6173230.stm
Should it be viewed as “a cry for help” ?
I tend to think of people who end up addicted to anything, as pretty weak, but I can see how and why people can end up that way.
I can see that the net socio-economic cost of what Roberts suggests may be smaller, yet something still feels wrong about giving people who want to escape from reality so badly, the means to do it – it has parallels to assisted suicide [I'll blog on my views on that soon].
Personally, I would far rather try to treat the underlying problem – whatever is unbearable, wrong, corrupting in the person’s life needs to be changed, either by giving them the support and assistance to do that themselves or intervening directly.
