Cocaine use surge prompts medical review

Published: 5:42AM GMT 02 March 2010

Statistics showed 6.6 per cent of sixteen to 24-year-olds used heroin last year Photo: PA

The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) pronounced make make use of of of the ""very harmful"" drug had augmenting five-fold between sixteen to 59-year-olds during the past twelve years and the virginity of travel samples had decreased.

Writing to the Home Secretary, the council"s authority Professor Les Iversen pronounced he hoped his examination would ""counteract the increasingly usual misapprehension that heroin is a comparatively protected drug"".

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His minute cites new British Crime Survey census interpretation display that 6.6 per cent of sixteen to 24-year-olds used heroin last year, compared to 1.3 per cent in 1996.

Usage between those elderly sixteen to 59 additionally jumped from 0.6 per cent to 3 per cent during the same period.

Prof Iversen - whose prototype Professor David Nutt was sacked last year for criticising supervision drug process - pronounced that he did not design the inform to outcome in a call for a shift in the sequence of cocaine"s existent Class A status.

He additionally pronounced that along with the drug"s augmenting usage, the virginity of samples had been dwindling interjection to some-more ""cutting agents"" being added.

The highbrow wrote: ""Cocaine is a really damaging drug to people and some-more broadly multitude and justification of the one after another augmenting superiority of heroin make make use of of is deeply concerning.""

On Monday NHS total showed that flourishing numbers of young kids were being treated with colour for heroin addiction.

Since 2005, the series of under-18s being helped to get off the drug has augmenting by some-more than 65 per cent, the interpretation revealed. Treatment numbers for eighteen to 24-year-olds additionally doubled in the same period.

Former ACMD head Prof Nutt was dismissed for criticising the Government"s preference to reclassify cannabis to Class B from C.

Prof Iversen"s examination is approaching to take about a year.