Heroin injecting rooms move closer

Police deny they would set up a "shooting gallery"

A safe injection room for heroin users is being considered by authorities, including Kent police.

Under the scheme, drug users would be allowed to take prescribed heroin in a controlled environment in a bid to reduce crime.

The pilot scheme is being considered by the Kent Drug Action Team, a group made up of health workers, the police and the probation service.

A police spokesman denied that the proposals amounted to the setting up of a heroin "shooting gallery".

Safe injecting rooms have the capability to save hundreds of lives

A DrugScope spokesman

"A shooting gallery is what you get on the south side of Chicago in a derelict house where addicts go to take crack cocaine and heroin.

"To describe what is being looked at as being like a shooting gallery is completely and fundamentally wrong.

"We know from experience that a high percentage of people that we arrest in connection with vehicle crime and burglary have drug addiction issues.

Clinically produced heroin

"What we are looking at is removing the link that exists between addiction and the committing of crime.

"It is still very early days. We still need to look at who would be eligible, and under what circumstances it would be carried out."

An injecting room in Sydney, Australia

The trial clinic would offer diamorphine - clinically produced heroin - to some addicts.

It would only be available to addicts who had failed to respond to other treatments.

It was not known where in Kent the facility may be established.

A Home Affairs Select Committee report has previously recommended that such clinics - which already exist in Germany, Holland and Australia - should be set up in the UK.

A spokesman for DrugScope, which advocates the use of "safe injecting rooms" to treat addicts, welcomed the move.

"It is certainly an excellent first step in the right direction but we need to go further and responsibility to go further must lie with the Government.

"Safe injecting rooms have the capability to save hundreds of lives."

A Home Office spokesman said: "The Government has no plans to introduce injecting rooms at the moment but we would watch with interest any individual developments in such countries where work like this is taking place."