The governing Progressive Labour Party is to debate Bermuda's cannabis laws next month, according to retiring chairman David Burt. But will that debate go far enough and who gains when the state interferes with what people put in their bodies? The Royal Gazette looks at how other countries are handling the drug problem and whether the worldwide war on drugs is working.

It sounds like some Orwellian nightmare the state injecting its own citizens with heroin.

Meanwhile, taxpayers toil away to fund the $25,000 per annum cost to enable each hard-core addict to loll about enjoying state-funded fixes.

The whole scenario might sound like an exercise in the grotesque but in fact there is an experiment based along those lines now being conducted in Britain and health experts like what they see.

Drug-fuelled crime has been slashed among those in the experiment, meaning safer streets and homes.

And far from being an attempt to keep addicts in a drug-addled stupor the trial is, very slowly, helping some reduce their dependency and get lasting help, rather than prey on the taxpaying majority through addiction-fuelled crime sprees.

The experiment began four years ago and has shown some real results in reducing crime and the use of street heroin, according to the King's Health Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre (AHSC).

In a summary of the results published this month of the Randomised Injectable Opioid Treatment Trial (RIOTT) the AHSC said the UK's most chronic heroin addicts can be treated successfully using the radical new treatment.

Participants were heroin addicts seemingly immune to years of treatment, rehabilitation and even prison said the AHSC. For these people, daily use of 'street heroin' had been the norm, even while in conventional treatment.

The RIOTT trial, coordinated by the National Addiction Centre and sanctioned and funded by government, began four years ago.

It saw addicts split between three groups some given supervised injectable heroin, some were given supervised injectable methadone [a heroin substitute] and some were given oral methadone.

The trial hit its target early reduced use or abstinence from 'street' heroin and continued during the six-month trial. Those on injected heroin did best clients spending an average of just over £300 [approximately $480] a week on drugs cut it down to an average of just under £50 [approximately $80] a week at six months.

Many shunned crime altogether while others substantially cut their crime sprees. Weekly spending on street heroin for the 40 people in the test fell from nearly £14,000 [approximately $22,000] a week to under £2,000 [approximately $3000] at six months.

And crime was cut massively. Prior to entering RIOTT treatment over half of the clients in each treatment group were committing a mean number of between 20-40 crimes in a month.

Yet at six months, the proportion committing crimes in each group more than halved and the mean number of crimes committed in the past 30 days reduced to between four and 13 less than a third of previous levels.

Put another way, those same 40 people had been responsible for 1,731 crimes in the 30 days prior to entering RIOTT treatment.

Yet after six months, this had fallen to 547 crimes a reduction of 1,184 crimes per month.

Prior to entering RIOTT treatment, around three quarters of each group were also using crack. But at the close of the trial the proportion using crack had reduced across all treatment groups as had the amount of crack used.

There were improvements in physical and mental health and social functioning across all treatment groups over the six months. But it all comes at a price.

The cost of producing positive results in this 'difficult to treat' group is around £15,000 per patient per year roughly the equivalent of $24,500.

A large sum, but much less than the $80,000 Bermuda spends per year on housing each inmate at Westgate.

And there are other clear, tangible benefits. Not having to put in so much energy into chasing drugs means an addict can pursue other interests, begin to form a routine and even look for work.

One addict told the BBC she was now seeing a psychologist about looking at why she used drugs.

One of the heroin addicts, a 34-year-old man called John, had been addicted for eight years when the trials began. He fed his habit by dealing.

He told the BBC: "My life was just a shambles... waking up, chasing money, chasing drugs," he said.

But John said the scheme had transformed his life "100 percent" and he now had a part-time job.

"It used to be about chasing the buzz, but when you go on the programme you just want to feel comfortable," he said.

The UK's National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA), which administers drug treatment in England, said the results were "encouraging".

In its drug strategy, published last year, the UK government said it would roll out the prescription of injectable heroin, subject to the findings of the pilot scheme.

Britain is by no means the only country examining how it copes with the drugs menace.

In Mexico the drug war is at its height. Battling gangs are able to stalk and murder Police and politicians at will, while politicians are easily put on the payroll.

After one head criminal was arrested his gang launched 15 coordinated attacks on Police stations and officers in eight cities across three states. In one attack, gunmen hijacked a bus carrying 12 Police officers and killed them all.

Drug-related murders rose from 2,275 in 2007 to 5,207 in 2008, according to an unofficial tally by a Mexico newspaper.

The 2009 toll stood at 3,757 as of August 17. Of those, 104 victims had been decapitated, and 306 showed signs of torture. Now the US is to launch $1.4 billion in further aid in a bid to stop the drugs and mayhem continuing to flow over its borders.

However Mexico is adjusting its drug laws and last month changed the law to decriminalise possession of small amounts of drugs including heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

The new law, removes criminal penalties for possession of drugs considered to be for personal use e.g. up to five grams of marijuana [roughly three to five joints] and half a gram of cocaine, [equivalent of three to eight 'lines']. The law will offer treatment instead of incarceration for people caught with personal use.

That stance was welcomed by Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, who said Mexico's new law to decriminalise personal possession of illicit drugs is consistent with the broader trend throughout Western Europe, Canada and other parts of Latin America to stop treating drug use and possession as a criminal problem.

But he said it contrasted sharply with the United States, where arrests for marijuana possession hit a record high last year roughly 800,000 annually and now represent nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide.

One journalist writing in Esquire magazine calculated the American death toll from the war on drugs was touching 15,000 a year with about 6,500 drug related murders and the rest from overdoses caused by dirty drugs.

It's clear people around the world pay a high price for the conventional ways of combating drugs some of which end up in Bermuda.

But the drug industry rolls on. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, while pressing the case for keeping drugs illegal, ironically defeats many of its own arguments.

It says: "In some parts of the world, drug enforcement has been used as a pretext to wage war on marginalised communities, resulting in serious human rights violations."

And once drug selling is handled by street gangs it becomes notoriously difficult to crack, with members viewing death and prison as occupational hazards.

Despite satellite technology which can photograph opium poppies growing in fields around the world, the bar charts in the UNODC's 2009 report show the volume of drug production is consistent, stockpiles fill in when seizures increase.

Despite having US and British forces on its territory, Afghanistan is still able to pump out vast quantities of heroin just 11 percent was seized last year.

Few drugs are consumed in the poor countries which produce them, they are sent to the richest countries which consume them. Countries like Bermuda.

Despite billions of dollars spent by law enforcement worldwide the conveyor belt of drugs keeps rolling on. The question is: does anyone really know how to stop it?

l TOMORROW: Surgeon Joseph Froncioni makes the case for legalising drugs while drugs counsellor Sandy Butterfield makes the case against.