Lottery fund awards £500,000 to drug trial that will give addicts free heroin

The National Lottery's Community Fund has awarded a £500,000 grant to fund a scheme that will provide drug addicts with heroin, The Independent can reveal.

In the first study of its kind, 100 heroin users who previously failed to respond to detox treatments will be provided with the drug, under supervised conditions, to see if they can be weaned off it.

If the results are positive, the trial could encourage the Government to adopt a system of clinics where drug users would be able to obtain and inject free heroin. Researchers hope that the trial will prove effective in treating long-term addicts, who cost society an estimated £35,000 a year each through crime, welfare and health care.

The Community Fund was criticised last year for donating lottery money to, among others, a group which works to block the deportation of failed asylum-seekers, a farm project in Peru that breeds guinea pigs, and a scheme to support male prostitutes in Yorkshire. Under an overhaul of the National Lottery, announced earlier this month, the Community Fund is to be merged with the New Opportunities Fund to create a board that will control how ticket revenue is spent.

The grant for the heroin trial will be announced by the Community Fund later this week. The £500,000 will fund a year-long trial by Professor John Strang, director of the National Addiction Centre at the Maudsley Hospital in south-east London. Professor Strang chaired a working group of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, which recommended that the Government increase the number of people who are prescribed heroin on the NHS.

At the moment, about 400 addicts receive heroin on the NHS but they are given the drug to take home to inject.

Of the 100,000 heroin addicts in treatment, about 90 per cent receive methadone, a heroin substitute which is taken orally. A small minority are given an injectable form of methadone or another oral substitute, buprenorphine. About 10 per cent of addicts do not respond to oral methadone or buprenorphine treatment, and these are the people who will be recruited for the study.

The trial will compare the benefits of "super-charged" oral methadone with injectable methadone and injectable heroin. The addicts on prescribed heroin will have to attend the clinics in London three to four times a day to receive their hits.

Treating addicts with injectable heroin is expensive; oral methadone costs about £3,000 a year per patient, while injectable heroin costs £15,000.

Professor Strang said: "We will be recruiting people who are at the extreme end of the scale of addiction, who have failed on the first line of treatments. We would hope to see that by giving them prescribed heroin under supervised conditions, we see a reduction in their illicit drug use and criminality, and gains in their health.

"We want to medicalise the way in which they take the drug, so there won't be joss sticks and Led Zeppelin records. They will go into a cubicle and inject the heroin themselves, under supervision, and we will then keep an eye on them for a few hours until it is safe for them to go out."

He added: "I think it is impressive that the Community Fund is supporting research like this. These people [heroin addicts] are a disadvantaged group, and the Community Fund tends to focus on disadvantaged people. The grant may strike some people as controversial but whatever the rights and wrongs of their behaviour, these people need help.

"Their behaviour also has a massive impact on society in terms of petty theft, criminality and health issues such as HIV infections, so from a cold-blooded point of view, society will benefit."

The grant also has the backing of the Home Office. A spokeswoman said: "Heroin addiction can lead to the total disintegration of people's lives and we need radical thinking about how we engage users in treatment. These trials will begin that process and look at ways in which the most entrenched and difficult drug users can move away from illicit drug use and crime."

Lesley King-Lewis, the chief executive of Action on Addiction, said: "These addicts can make major recovery from their addiction and it is important to find the most effective way of treating them."

Greg Knight, the Tory spokesman on Culture, said: "The National Lottery is there to help the original good causes of heritage, arts and sporting charities. If this grant goes ahead, it will serve as another example of the Government's failure to keep the lottery focused on these original good causes."