Why the NHS Bradford Escape Heroin Addiction Experiment Failed !

I have to thank my late friend Andrew for alerting me to the fact that the High Dose OLANZAPINE I was prescribed in 2000 MAKES YOU GO BLIND if you continue taking it and like all chemical drugs its a cumulative poison.

I had know ” Andrew Person ” since he was at primary school, he was really bright and his severely physically disabled dad, who I met by pure chance got him into model railways to spark an interest in engineering for him. I used to visit once a week and as treat buy them fish & chips, ( his family was pretty skint at the time ) and talk engineering with his dad. His dad got compensation for a motorbike accident after which they were better off but still get the family virtual prisoners of benefit dependency poverty. However when Andrew was old enough he did buy him a Super 8mm to go with his dad filming preserved steam trains mostly on the Settle & Carlisle and as far afield as Mid Wales, Scotland & even East Anglia for which I provided the transport.

Anyway to cut a long and often tragic story short Andrew had got himself a steady girlfriend with whom he had a son, they lived in a council house at Skipton until his by then heroin addiction cased them to split up. He kept the cat and moved to Keighley, for which my information is not that detailed except to say that he was dealing drugs to fund his addiction. It was said that he was so skint once that when he got got some really top quality Speed he was too skint to afford to buy ” Cut ” so he used VIM bath cleaner. He told how once when he scored some really good heroin he ended up in Airedale Hospital, and swore at the nurses who gave him the antidote because he was having a really good trip. In addition it meant that he would have to go out and steal something to score again.

He got onto aforementioned Bradford NHS experiment after he got a Settle flat and he was keen to make a success of it as his former girlfriend had denied him access to his son on the grounds that he was an addict. They started him off on 80 DHC a day on daily prescription supplied at his monthly Bradford appointment He had to catch the train from Settle to get there, a short walk to the south of Foster Square Station. Anyway I offered to take him in my car to save him the train fares, by then he was down to 40 DHC a day but knocking on the chemist every morning. He was rattling pretty bad when he went for his Bradford appointment, going straight into the Lloyds Pharmacy next door to the clinic and chewing the pills ASAP.

A perhaps ( deliberate ?? ) fatal mistake by his consultant was to stop swab testing his mouth for other drugs, I first noticed something was wrong when I arranged to take him to Morecambe to visit old friend and have a proper cooked meal. I arrived at the stated time but his mate Billy appeared and they went into the bedroom for a 15 minutes, he was fine at first but later became increasingly agitated. He wouldn’t eat his meal and we had to come home early despite the fact that a spitting image of Lord Bath Blackpool historian turned up who I was really interested to converse with.

The next and final time I took him to Bradford he insisted that he called in at the drug dealers in the old boarded up corner shop opposite the petrol station at Morrisons Keighley. I bought him some roast chicken thighs for his dinner at Morrisons Skipton on the way back as usual, but we fell out on the A65 when I refused to attempt to pass a slow loaded tanker. Even though he knew better, he said I was useless at driving, he was only an expert on PS2 Rally, and even then he beat his record after I designed his car for him.

The next thing I knew I was attending his funeral, a tragic life cut short in what should have been in its prime, Andrew was really good at doing things with his hands, when he was 17 and I had my then Metro insured for learners I gave him an aptitude trial in it which he passed with flying colours. Obviously too much watching Top Gear and other television output by the BBC and others since the late 1990s which is obviously free advertising to promote want and ignorance, get people into debt !

Perhaps Andrew would have been alive today if only Bradford had continued the swab tests, another problem I identified was that when I usually visited him mid week in the evenings he was totally paranoid. I did offer him some spare Amisulpiride to try but he wouldn’t touch it as it was an anti-psychotic, I was paranoid when I was taking lots of DHC prior to my nervous breakdown in 2000.

Anyway if any health professionals can get the funding to have another go and this time make a success of it, you know where to find me to use as a consultant, or will it be yet another case of institutional arrogance like which faced 18th Century John Harrison and his Marine Clocks !