Guernsey's legal heroin users under supervision to prevent black market trade

Health bosses in Guernsey are tightening up rules around prescribing heroin-like drugs, to prevent them being sold on the black market.

The island's Community Drug and Alcohol Team are running clinics to supervise users who have been prescribed Opiate substitutes as part of their treatment.

These alternatives have a greater street value in Guernsey than in other jurisdictions, which is said to be down to low supplies of illegal heroin driving up street prices for the substitute treatments.

Currently, 99 islanders are on opiate substitute therapy – five on methadone, 25 on Buvidal injection and 69 on Buprenorphine oral medications. 58 of those take their medication under supervision.

The number has reduced from 2019 when there were up to 170 people on heroin alternatives, and the downward trend is attributed to much closer monitoring and supervision.

Users need to take their medication every day and there are seven local pharmacies across the island where they can be supervised from Monday to Saturday.

However a shortage of pharmacists and increased demand for the supervised service means there are limited spaces available for service users to access daily supervision.

A Sunday clinic has opened at the Oberlands Centre from 09:00 to 12:00 so users can be supervised every day, but this is only a short-term solution.

The Community Drug and Alcohol Team is paying qualified nurses to supervise those who need to take their medication daily. Credit: ITV Channel

Nicky Thomas, manager of the Community Mental Health Teams, says the lack of available hours for supervision has reached a 'critical' point.

"It's a public health issue I think that if we don't have the correct capacity for supervision, it feeds the drug problems in Guernsey and certainly CDAT see those trends in terms of increasing referrals," she said.

"The likelihood of people diverting medication when they are supervised is much, much lower, so that’s one really good method of reducing leakage and diversion.

"Another way that we can reduce the risk of that is through a Buvidal injection which is a way of giving people opiate substitute therapy in an injectable form, usually once a month and again that reduces the likelihood of those drugs being diverted.

"So supervised consumption is a really, really important way for us to manage what’s available in the community for people to use without it being subscribed."

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