To Pick Up Their NHS Heroin, Drug Addicts Are Given Free Taxis

More than £80,000 of taxpayer’s money has been spent on hiring taxis to take drug addicts to an NHS clinic to be injected with ‘free heroin’.

Addicts with ‘chaotic’ lifestyles are picked up and transported to the £4 million clinic, where they’re given the Class A drug.

Earlier this year, a newspaper outlet revealed that the heroin-assisted treatment facility had cost taxpayers more than £165,000 per patient, and had logged 26 overdoses.

The latest figures, which came amid a row over Scotland’s drug death rate, the highest in Europe, sparked outrage at a time when the NHS was in crisis as waiting lists spiralled.

Anti-drugs campaigner Annemarie Ward, of human rights advocacy service FAVOR UK, said that this was basically the state acting as an enabler for addicts and encouraging them not to take responsibility for their own lives.

She said that there was a difference between rights and responsibility and that of course, people have a right to treatment for addiction but people also had to take responsibility for themselves.

She added that this took them into the territory of sick co-dependence, with millions spent on giving patients heroin when a place in rehab was proportionately much more cost-effective.

A newspaper outlet told that some patients had been selected from pubs and other locations rather than their own homes to be taken to the heroin clinic in Glasgow.

Ms Ward, a vocal critic of the SNP Government’s drug strategy, said the centre was aimed at tackling the chaotic lifestyles of drug addicts, but the fact that patients rely on taxis to get to the appointment suggests it is failing to restore stability to patients’ lives.

The purpose is to support those whose addictions are so far advanced that methadone has proved ineffective, so the NHS gives them heroin.

In March, it emerged that only 24 people had participated in the Enhanced Drug Treatment Service (EDTS).

There have been 26 overdoses since 2019, while 12 patients had been moved to other support services.

Now NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC), which runs the EDTS, has disclosed that £80,027 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on taxis for EDTS patients since 2019.

It said taxi journeys were planned and agreed on an individual basis for a brief period in order to help people to engage with services.

Pharmaceutical-grade heroin is given to addicts at the EDTS under medical supervision in a bid to stop them from using lethal street heroin.

Of course, no one forces these people to take these drugs, so why should the taxpayer have to pay for their lifestyle? On the other hand, no one forces people to drink alcohol, yet it costs the NHS 3.5 billion and a million beds yearly, so we shouldn’t have to pay for their lifestyle choices either.

What the NHS should be doing is treating cancer, dementia and all other serious long-term illnesses, but yet again they’re wasting NHS money on these taxes, and just when you thought you’d heard it all, you hear about the NHS squandering money, so next time your appointment is cancelled, or your procedure is postponed, remember this!

Then you have the elderly who are as old as their 90s being denied patient transportation to the hospital for appointments.

However, we mustn’t overlook the ex-servicemen that have been suffering from PTSD, and who have been ditched and left to suffer from addiction and extreme mental health problems.

If you spoke to each of these people with a history of dependence, most would have a painful story that would warrant help and support, so we need to have a heart.