Controversy continues in Britain on a story we’ve covered before: “Three drug addicted prisoners have won more than £11,000 in compensation after a court ruled that forcing them to go cold turkey was a breach of their human rights.” (Murray Wardrop, Daily Telegraph, Dec. 3). Earlier here and here.
4 Comments
At first blush this is the sort of story to make members of the community outraged. unfortunately, it does not tell the whole story. In the UK, methadone is prescribed to addicts to assist in their recovery. If a felon is in receipt of a prescription for methadone from a medical practitioner, then the denial of that drug would be improper.
No doubt there are those who will say, well he is an addict and a criminal so what? That misses the point that someone is engaged in a lawful, medically supervised rehabilitation programme.
The fact that someone is then incarcerated does not entitle the community at large to ride roughshod over their basic rights.
Most health professionals would say that cold turkey withdrawal from heroin is dangerous, extremely painful and completely uneccessary.
And no, I am not a bleeding heart liberal, but a former defence lawyer and current prosecutor.
There are some instances of compensation being paid to prisoners that are inappropriate, but this does not seem to be one without more information being supplied.
The fact is that whenever compensation is paid to a prisoner, for whatever purpose, a large section of society is going to say that they should not receive the payment.
Sean, I don’t disagree with a lot of what you say, but I am taken a bit aback by your typifying the rights of a junkie to drugs as a ‘basic right.’
Bob
The right of those held in State custody to ordinary medical care and drugs prescribed thereby *is* a basic right. That he medical problems may be self-inflicted is really not relevant. We don’t let someone who shoots himself bleed to death in jail, nor do we refuse to medicate his pain on the grounds that he deserves it.
Bob,
I did not typify the “rights of a junkie to drugs as a basic right” as you suggest.
In the United Kingdom, where the story comes from, the use of methadone under strict medical supervision, to assist those voluntarily seeking help in dealing with their addiction to heroin, is a standard treatment regime.
Most UK prisons have what are euphemistically called “drug free wings” where prisoners self select to stay in an area of a prison where they will be subjected to more frequent urinalysis to detect illicit drug use.
The fact is that drugs are as readily available inside prison as out and one of the major concerns for rehabilitation of prisoners is that they can often incur significant drug debts whilst in prison that results in them returning to crime once released to satisfy those debts.
AS I said in my earlier comment, more information is really needed to make sense of the story, but the forced withdrawal by cold turkey of a heroin addict in prison when there is a readily available, widely used, medicinal programme serves neither the felon himself nor the community at large since it is more likely that the individual, rather than going through a brutal withdrawal process, will find access to alternative illegal drugs.
Those that do not think such drugs are easily available in a prison environment are, sadly, very mistaken.