Get the biggest stories sent straight to your inbox Sign up for regular updates and breaking news from WalesOnline Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

A doctor hounded from Britain by the establishment has revealed how he slashed heroin addiction and crime by doling out the drug to addicts.

Psychiatrist John Marks now works in Vienna. But in 1982 the South Wales Valleys-raised medic was working in Widnes, in the Wirral.

In a new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, he reveals how he became the accidental pioneer of an initiative to give free heroin to addicts – and that it worked.

Related: Drugs seizures in Wales rocket

“There were maybe a few dozen lads, the occasional girl, who came and got their tot of junk – railwaymen, bargemen, all walks of life really,” Dr Marks said, describing the patients he was given when he moved to Widnes.

He told them to stop using. They said they needed it.

“I found this a bit of a headache,” Dr Marks said.

“I had bigger fish to fry.”

He moved to axe the programme but then there was a directive from Margaret Thatcher’s government. Every part of Britain had to show it had an anti-drugs strategy. Clinics had to conduct cost-benefit studies to show what worked.

No typical junkies

Dr Marks commissioned academic Russell Newcombe to look into it. He assumed Dr Newcombe would find his patients were like cliché junkies – unemployed and unemployable, criminal, with high levels of HIV and death.

But he didn’t. On receiving the report, Marks looked at his patients. There was Sydney.

“He was an old Liverpool docker, happily married, lovely couple of kids,” Dr Marks said.

“He’d been chugging along on his heroin for a couple of decades.”

He had a decent, healthy life.

So did all the users prescribed heroin.

“How could this be?” Dr Marks asked himself.

“Doesn’t heroin inherently damage the body? Doesn’t it naturally cause abscesses, diseases and death?”

Difference between street addicts and prescribed patients

Allan Parry worked for the local health authority. Patients without prescriptions were injecting smack with “brick dust in it, coffee, crushed bleach crystals, anything.”

He told journalists at the time: “Now you inject cement into your veins, and you don’t have to be a medical expert to work out that’s going to cause harm.”

Dr Marks could see the difference between street addicts arriving at the clinic and patients on legal prescriptions.

The former had abscesses like hard-boiled eggs rotting under their skin. They had open wounds on their hands and legs.

“It looked like a pizza of infection,” Mr Parry said.

“It’s mushy, and the cheese you get on it is pus. And it just gets bigger and bigger.”

But the prescription addicts could have passed for clinic staff.

Marks began to believe many “of the harms of drugs are to do with the laws around them, not the drugs themselves.”

In the clinic, they started calling the infections, abscesses and amputations “drug war wounds.”

93 per cent drop in theft and burglary

“If prescription is so effective, why don’t we do it more?” Dr Marks wondered.

He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen to more than 400.

The police noticed the effect.

Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area. He found a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary.

“You could see them transform in front of your own eyes,” Lofts told a newspaper.

“They came in outrageous condition, stealing daily to pay for illegal drugs, and became, most of them, very amiable, reasonable law-abiding people.”

He said elsewhere: “Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.”

Prescription addicts got their fix for free

A young mother called Julia Scott came into Dr Marks’ surgery.

She had been working as a prostitute to support her habit.

He wrote her a prescription. She quit sex work that day.

Something else happened. The number of heroin addicts in the area fell.

Dr Newcombe had an explanation. Street addicts were buying drugs and taking what they needed.

They cut the rest to sell. They were persuading others to become addicts.

Prescription addicts did not have to do this because they got their fix for free.

“Insurance companies would love to have salesmen like drug addicts,” Dr Marks said.

Afterwards, 41 died in two years

Dr Marks’ experiment began to attract media attention and pressure from the US government. The British government panicked. It shut it down.

When Dr Marks was prescribing, from 1982 to 1995, he never had a drug-related death.

After closure, of 450 patients he prescribed to, 20 were dead in six months. Forty-one were dead in two years.

More lost limbs and caught potentially lethal diseases.

Sydney the docker and Julia the prostitute died.

Dr Marks was blacklisted. He ended up in Gisborne, New Zealand.

Where others express frustration at his fate, he is resigned to it.

“Whatever gave you the idea folk in authority operate according to reason?” he tells them.

“Your trouble is you’re being rational.”

Today, Britain has more than 250,000 people using illegal opiates.

Dr Marks’ experiment has been written out of history.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari, is published by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99.