DRUGS CHARITIES have condemned a £200 (€228) payment to a British drug addict for having a vasectomy as “exploitative”, and morally and ethically dubious.
The incentive payment, the first in the UK, was made to a 38-year-old opiates addict from Leicester, known as John, by a controversial US organisation targeting drug and alcohol abusers.
Project Prevention, set up by Barbara Harris from North Carolina, has been compared by US critics to the Nazi eugenics programme. After paying more than 3,500 mainly female American addicts not to have children, it is now offering the service in the UK after a $20,000 (€14,300) donation from an anonymous US businessman living in Britain.
John, an addict for 15 years, told the BBC's Inside Outprogramme last night he would spend the money on overdue rent and shopping. "It [the money] was kind of what spurred me into doing it in a way," he said. "It was something I'd been thinking about for a long time and something that I'd already made my mind up that I wanted to do."
Ms Harris, who adopted four children born to a crack addict, began her crusade 12 years ago after witnessing children damaged by their mothers’ addictions. She believes “bribing” addicts to be sterilised or to use long-term contraceptives prevents child abuse.
Addaction, a British drugs and alcohol charity, said Project Prevention was exploitative, with addicts being approached “at their lowest ebb”. It feared the cash would end up in the hands of dealers. “It doesn’t deal with addicts who are already parents, it doesn’t help people recover and it doesn’t offer any positive solution,” said Addaction’s chief executive, Simon Antrobus.
The charity DrugScope said the approach was “exploitative, ethically dubious and morally questionable”. Its chief executive, Martin Barnes, said the premise that people with drug problems should be sterilised “further entrenches the significant stigmatisation and demonisation experienced by this group, making it less likely that people will come forward for help and support”.
The British Medical Association ethics committee said the committee “does not have a view” on Project Prevention, but believed the focus of any consultation for sterilisation or long-term contraception “must be on the overall interests of the patient”. The committee believed doctors should inform patients “of the benefits of reversible contraception so that the patients have more reproductive choices in the future”.
Ms Harris told the BBC that as she watched her adopted children struggle with the addiction passed on to them by their mother, she got “very angry about the damage that these drugs do to children”.
Ms Harris’s US critics have labelled her a right-wing religious zealot, though she insists her project is not “God’s work”, and she is not a regular churchgoer.
She likened her intervention to a scheme to offer smokers in parts of Scotland £50 a month to quit. – (Guardian service)