THE METHADONE debate has gone on for 10 years. It is back on the agenda now because we are at last coming to understand that using this heroin substitute to ease addicts off their expensive and dangerous habit is not working well.

In Scotland well over 50% of heroin users, and 80% to 90% of women prisoners who use the drug, have undiagnosed, untreated mental health problems. Those problems are certainly not solved by prescribing methadone or substitute heroin.

So why is a senior policemen trying to persuade us to import another miracle-cure drug for heroin users? Have the police learned nothing from the years we've been importing one failed US rehabilitation scheme after another?

If we are now going to offer addicts heroin to solve their heroin problem, without putting in place all the essential services of care, to help them rebuild their seriously damaged lives, then this is just another way of parking the problem for later.

I am suspicious of drug solutions pedalled by the police. It was the police, after all, who persuaded David Blunkett and Charles Clark to reclassify cannabis - and look where that got us.

The police seem to glory in mounting drugs raids, media in tow, to show us how clever they are. Unfortunately the media don't follow that up by visiting those communities further away which find the drug dealers have moved into their area.

The clamour to test school pupils for drug-use is another police-supported initiative which will only make things worse. More schools will simply have confirmed what drugs workers know already: that every school has a drug problem, not just some of them. Testing school children will lead to more exclusions, so where will these kids be educated? In some sink school in a deprived area.

I do not want people to think that there is no point at all in using methadone or heroin as a way of getting drug users on the road to recovery. There is no doubt at all that, for some, that has been a very positive thing.

I am arguing that we need to listen to the views of far more people and we need to have a far wider range of medications and therapies made available to those trapped in addiction.

The public will have to face up to the fact that rehabilitation does not come cheap. We have to get real and allow our politicians to dare to consider that it might cost £36,000 a year to imprison a drug misuser or upwards of £50,000 a year for top quality rehabilitation.

Which, they should ask, has more chance of curing the problem?