Have we got the balance right yet?

Your magazine on drugs (Drugs Uncovered, last week) was excellent, but you missed an important part of the drugs debate - prison. From 1996-2000, the British taxpayer paid £36 million for additional sentences given to prisoners who tested positive for drugs. According to the Howard League for Penal Reform, most positive results were for cannabis. One can only imagine the pain of prisoners given a prison sentence as punishment for cannabis possession when, on the other side of the wall, smoking a joint is all but legal.
Steve Taylor
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire


The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA) welcomes the development of a mature discussion about drugs. But let us not get distracted. Regardless of whether certain drugs are reclassified or not, people will still use drugs - and some will develop significant problems that impact on the users themselves, their friends and families, and the wider community. The most effective and efficient way of dealing with this is through treatment. The Government has recognised this.

Funding for drug treatment in England has increased by 35 per cent this year alone and, for the first time, a national agency has been established to improve treatment. The NTA aims to at least double the number of people in treatment - from 100,000 in 1998 to 200,000 in 2008.

This summer, we will launch a framework for care that emphasises the need to co-ordinate treatment with housing, employment and other services.

The NTA is also launching major campaigns to: develop and recruit more drug treatment workers; reduce waiting times; and increase services for under-represented groups. But there is no point in having more treatment if it is not effective. The NTA will monitor services, co-ordinate research and share information on what works with treatment providers.
Paul Hayes
Chief Executive, National Treatment Agency

You say in your leader last week '...medical evidence and experience alike are united in the view that heroin and crack cocaine have powerful addictive qualities and are physically and mentally destructive'. While both are highly addictive, the physical and mental destructiveness of pharmaceutically pure heroin is doubtful, though the additives the suppliers include have certainly claimed a number of casualties. It appears people can live productive if somewhat constipated lives on pure smack.
Adrian Smith
St Leonards-on-Sea, E. Sussex

There's a class of drugs that results in far more deaths than heroin: Home Office figures show they led to 3,433 deaths as opposed to 265 for heroin, morphine and opiates combined. Withdrawal is far longer, and often considered harder. Yet you don't even mention them. These drugs are tranquillisers.
Teresa Williams
Bristol