By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

A Tayside health boss last night called for “a summit meeting” with prison governors regarding the care of drug addicts.

NHS Tayside chairman Peter Bates said prisons were “not geared up” to care for the huge numbers of people locked up with serious drug addictions who were then released “untreated.”

He wants better links between the health service and prisons in a bid to improve the treatment of addicts and better manage the impact former inmates’ behaviour has on local communities when they are released from prison and commit further crimes to fund their drug habit.

His goal is to turn drug addicts in to “socially responsible citizens.”

Mr Bates stressed the problem of drug addicts was everybody’s business and not a problem to be passed around between social workers, prison governors, the NHS and police when addicts came in to contact with these services.

He wants an approach that will make drug addicts face the consequences of their behaviour, break their dependency on drugs and bring to an end the “revolving door” that sees addicts return to prison again and again as a result of drug related crime.

A joined up approach to care would also hopefully reduce the extremely high numbers of drug related deaths among liberated prisoners.

“The prison population has this very substantial group of revolving door drug abusers, who are habitual drug abusers,” said Mr Bates.

“They use hard drugs. For almost all of them it is why they are in prison. They pay for that drug regime through crimes that affect substantial parts of the community—robbery and so on—and every one of those crimes has an impact on the family and community concerned.”

That presented a “challenge” not only to prison governors but to a wide range of other services such as the police, the NHS, the courts and social workers, who all had dealings with drug addicts.

“I want to know what other things we can do to make what we do, and the money we spend on keeping drug addicts in prison, more effective as far as outcomes are concerned,” he added.

“Our priority has to be to change the behaviour, to remove the dependency on drugs and to make drug abusers socially responsible citizens that understand their behaviour has very significant consequences on other people.

“I think for prison governors this is an immense challenge and our job, corporately, is to work with them as a team.”

It was “not reasonable” to expect the prison governors to take sole responsibility for drug addicts.

“It is all of our problem. For all of the agencies, it is all of our problem. It is not a parcel we can pass round to each other—when they are in the NHS it is our problem, when they are in the community it is the police and social work. They are the same individuals that revolve round different doors.”

Mr Bates said the reason he wanted a summit meeting with prison governors was to seek their views on developing “much more effective” strategies that would focus on the “key themes” of breaking the dependency on drugs, providing alternatives and providing educational programmes.

“What I personally think will be enormously important to the community (outside of prison) is educational programmes that make the prison addict population face up to their responsibilities as citizens of the communities in which they live,” he added.

In June Tayside Police’s chief constable John Vine sparked controversy when he suggested the state should provide class A drugs to addicts in a bid to break the illegal trade and move addicts away from committing crimes to fund their habit.

Drug abusers seeking cash to fund their habit were blamed for a near 40% increase in the number of street robberies last year.