State has “allowed itself to become drug dealer-in-chief”.

Drug users hooked on methadone are pleading with the Government to help them get off drugs completely instead of just parking them on the heroin substitute.
One former addict, Rosie, told The Times methadone is “almost more of a poison than heroin, there doesn’t ever seem to be an end to it”.And Jay, who started smoking heroin before he was 18, said he was given methadone in prison, instead of getting help to become drug-free. Clean
Jay said: “Most junkies I know want to be clean but if you can’t do it when you’re inside, when can you?” And he commented: “I came out needing drugs as much as when I went in.”

The Government is increasing its spending on methadone programmes, despite their low success rate, while only 850 prison inmates were put on an abstinence routine last year.

Residential-based abstinence programmes lasting at least a month have a one in four success rate, but after three years on methadone only three per cent of addicts are drug free, recent studies show. Financial Commentators have pointed out that the methadone industry itself is lucrative. Neil McKeganey, who works at the Centre for Drug Misuse at the University of Glasgow, said: “There’s considerable financial incentive that drug users remain drug dependent.”The Times reports that GPs in many parts of the country get paid around £220 per methadone patient per year and that pharmacists can get £200 administration fees plus about £1.50 per administered dose. Kathy Gyngell, a drugs policy analyst for the Centre for Policy Studies, said prescribing methadone to young offenders has become routine.
She added: “It might appear the easier option but it leads to longer term problems.
“Individuals who historically used their short sentences to gain clean time now feel the necessity to carry on using methadone, as it takes no effort other than presenting themselves at the healthcare door to get it.” The Times’ report concluded with the words of Jay, who is still a drug addict and expects to end up in prison again soon. He was asked why he didn’t just accept methadone every day instead of searching the street for heroin.Jay replied: “But where would it get me?
“All right, the craving for smack’s not there but you soon get the craving for the meth. “Nobody I know on a heroin ’script is getting any better. They’re just surviving.”Commentator Melanie Reid said methadone programmes make drug users into victims rather than encouraging them to transform their behaviour. An editorial in Wednesday’s Times asked why the State has “allowed itself to become drug dealer-in-chief”.The article continued: “Worst of all, methadone is an admission of failure. “It offers no cure beyond lulling people into an ambitionless state of numbness. “It should not be allowed to have the same effect on the debate that it has on its users.

“If methadone is the only solution on offer, we are not asking the right question”, the editorial said.

Chad Schaffner at risk for more life sentences than a cat with nine lives could survive

crime spree that puts Chad Schaffner at risk for more life sentences than a cat with nine lives could survive, the 37-year-old Indiana man yawned.He was equally nonplussed when Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Reeves announced the parolee's probable fate."It would be a total of 12 life sentences consecutive to each other," Reeves said.In just five months, Schaffner robbed 13 banks in six states, including Tennessee. These, however, were no run-of-the-mill heists. Court records show Schaffner, fresh out of prison for two Illinois robberies, seized control of the banks, wielding a gun, issuing orders and threatening to kill tellers.

In heist after heist, he ordered frightened tellers to lie down on the floor as he made his getaway."He told the tellers to lie on the floor and count to 60 and, if they did not comply, that he would return and send them all to hell," Reeves wrote of a July 29 robbery in Hendersonville, N.C.Schaffner told tellers at a Fletcher, N.C., bank that "he had a police scanner and would return and kill them if they called police."In another robbery, Schaffner struck three teller windows at once, walking from window to window with his gun and ordering each teller to fill his bag with cash - sans any dye packs or silent alarms, Reeves wrote.Schaffner, who was nabbed in Missouri in September after a state trooper there recognized him from a media report, is on the receiving end of two powerful weapons in the federal justice system - armed career criminal status and "the hammer."
"The hammer" is a moniker prosecutors have given the harsh consecutive sentencing federal law requires for criminals who use guns to carry out their misdeeds.
In Schaffner's case, the math works this way: As an armed career criminal, he faces life for each robbery and each related count of using a gun in a crime of violence. The hammer means each of those gun crimes will be stacked on top of each other and the life sentence for the bank robberies.Schaffner last month pleaded guilty to robbing banks in Jefferson County and Hamblen County. On Wednesday, he agreed via Assistant Federal Defender Tim Moore to have his out-of-state cases settled here in Greeneville.