Johann Hari

Kimberly Dowling was just another 21 year old blonde sleeping in the river-blown freeze under Waterloo Bridge. When the journalist Tanya Gold found her in a tattered sleeping bag a few months ago while researching a piece on London’s rough sleepers, she described Kimberley as having “a ski-jump nose, the deceptively bright eyes of a heroin user” and “a soft, plaintive voice that makes her seem like a fairy who has wandered into the wrong wood.” She offered up the old, sad story of every other junkie on our streets – an alcoholic mother who tossed her out, and a thoughtless flop into the warm blanket of heroin to fend off the cold and pain.

But Gold left Kimberly “thinking she will be OK. She is pretty and young and she occasionally smiles a child’s surprised smile, clutching [her boyfriend] Gavin’s hand and toying with his fingers - a grubby Juliet to his slightly broken Romeo.” I was talking to her when she discovered the very different end to Kimberley’s story. An e-mail from a homeless contact explained that “little Kimberley of Gavin and Kimberley is dead.” She had become another anonymous heroin overdose in another anonymous tunnel on the streets of London. Another pointless 21 year-old corpse.

Britain has more Kimberleys than any other country in Europe – as a direct result of our ‘tough’ drugs policies. Don’t take my word for it. The government itself admits as much. It was recently put to the Home Office that providing girls like Kimberley with safe rooms where they could inject heroin with clean needles, under the supervision of a nurse, would save lives. Similar projects have, after all, drastically reduced overdoses in Australia, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. The government admitted, “Several countries are piloting injecting rooms for illegal drugs, and early evaluation does seem to indicate that such facilities can prevent overdose fatalities and reduce harm to drug misusers.”

So why not do it? Why not save those lives? They initially issued a string of transparently untrue reasons not to proceed. They said it would contravene international law – even though six other major democracies have found it does no such thing. They said people would still inject in an unsafe way when the injecting galleries were closed – an argument for opening them 24/7, rather than for never opening them at all. Then they got to the real worry – they said they would be accused by the media of opening “drug dens”. In other words, the lives of girls like Kimberley – over 500 people overdosed on heroin in Britain last year – are not worth a few bad headlines in the right-wing press.

The question of opening injecting rooms has been jabbed back onto the agenda this week by an authoritative report from the anti-poverty charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. They assembled a group of impartial experts – including Kevin Green and Andy Hayman, both senior figures in the Metropolitan Police – to spend 20 months interviewing witnesses and studying the evidence. They that even though there have been literally millions of injections there since injecting rooms were first set up, only one person has ever died in them – due to an allergic reaction. That’s thousands of rescued Kimberleys.

The government’s claim that the policy is “untested” and “lacking evidence” simply cannot be sustained any more. The panel has gone methodically through any possible objections to introducing safe rooms, and found them all to crumble to powder. The most weighty worry they studied is that injecting rooms will cause terrible problems in the (inevitably working class) areas where they are located, causing junkies to congregate in one sullen area. But the panel found that in reality, the opposite happens. Far from causing local problems, all five lengthy academic studies into this subject have found that they massively reduce problems. In Zurich – a city where I have relatives – there is a park called Platzspitz which came to be known as Needle Park after addicts turned it into a makeshift needle-cluttered home. Local people were too frightened to go there. But when a safe injecting room was opened nearby, the addicts migrated and the park has been reclaimed by residents.

This is no idle anecdote. In one Australian study, 750 locals were surveyed before a local injecting room was set up, and again year after. Almost everyone expected things to get worse – and almost everyone said a year later that the problem of needles and addicts on the street had fallen and their lives were better. The worry that the centres would act as ‘honeypots’, drawing addicts to the area, turned out to be flawed. Junkies worry about where their dealers are; seeking out a safe place to inject is a secondary concern, and they won’t travel far for it.

Of course, there are people who say injecting rooms condone or even encourage heroin use. It might seem compassionate to help Kimberley now, but aren’t you just ensuring she stays on heroin longer, and loses even more of her life? They advocate instead a ‘tough love’ approach of offering nothing but zero-use rehab and crackdown after crackdown. This is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heroin use. Using heroin is not a moral failing, a sign of weakness. It is a very serious illness, and for most users there is no cure. Even with the very best gold-plated Betty Ford rehab centres, the success rate for staying clean after three years is just 20 percent. That leaves 80 percent of heroin users whose bodies cannot be purged of the desperate need for heroin, no matter how many stern lectures or cold jail cells we offer them. These people – most of whom are victims of extreme poverty or childhood sexual abuse – cannot be wished away or left to rot under Waterloo Bridge. They must be helped to stay alive and have some kind of life.

It is easy to offer stern moral platitudes about drugs being evil and how we must condemn, condemn, condemn. Those of us who believe in more rational drugs policies must answer them in the language of morality too. As Father John Clifton Marquis, who works with heroin addicts in Baltimore, puts it: “Moral leaders have no choice but to choose between authentic morality, which produces good, and cosmetic morality, which merely looks good…. Authentic moral leaders cannot afford the arrogant luxury of machismo, with its refusal to consider not “winning the war on drugs.” Winning, in the case of drug abuse, is finding the direction and methods that provide the maximum amount of health and safety to the whole society, and to addicts.”

For too long, the government has been choosing the cheap cosmetic morality of tough talk. It is girls like Kimberley who pay for it.

POSTSCRIPT: If you want to campaign to reclaim drugs from armed criminal gangs and hand them to doctors and pharmacists, you can support the brilliant drugs reform charity Transform at www.tdpf.org.uk

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