Prisoners given drug vending machines

Vending machines have been installed at three West Midlands jails to dispense drugs to addict inmates.

Featherstone, Stafford and Birmingham's Winson Green are among the prisons with machines automatically dispensing heroin substitute methadone.

The machines will allow prisoners to access the drug directly by scanning their fingerprint or iris.

They are part of a £4million scheme that will see the machines installed in half the 140 prisons in England and Wales.

Shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve, who uncovered details of the scheme, believes it amounts to an "admission of failure" in attempts to get addicts clean.

The total cost of the machines exceeds by £1million the amount spent on an abstinence programme aimed at getting addicts off drugs, he claims.

Methadone prescription is official policy for tackling heroin withdrawal.

Its supporters claim it gives the best hope of breaking the cycle of hardcore heroin use.

But critics reckon methadone just replaces one dependency with another, some others believe it can be even harder to quit than heroin.

A Department of Health spokeswoman claimed the money spent on the dispensers is only a fraction of the £40million spent on drug treatment programmes.

She added the dispensers are "safe and secure" and only accessed by those on a prescribed treatment, adding that the level of drug misuse in prisons – as measured by official figures – had declined by 63 per cent since 1996/97.