Brighton plans safe rooms for injecting drug users

Brighton is set to be the first British city to offer official "drug consumption rooms" where addicts can use heroin, crack and cocaine under supervision without fear of prosecution. The city's public health leaders will meet this summer to "give serious consideration" to the plan in order to save lives.

Brighton has one of the UK's highest drug-related death rates, with 104 fatalities between 2009 and 2011. An estimated 2,000 people in the city have a serious abuse problem. A report published this week from an independent drugs commission led by the crime author Peter James and Mike Trace, a former UK deputy drugs tsar, is expected to say that drug consumption rooms "significantly reduce overdose death rates" and do not encourage further use.

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