ONE of the North-East's top policemen has called for heroin addicts to be prescribed the drug to eradicate the threat of dealers.

The newly-appointed Chief Constable of Cleveland Police, Sean Price, yesterday announced plans to discuss the policy with health authorities.

The plans were welcomed by a doctor and anti-drug campaigners, who said it could be the way forward in the force's ongoing war against drug dealers.

At his first meeting of Cleveland Police Authority yesterday, Mr Price said it was necessary to crack down on the suppliers by maintaining the success of the Dealer-a-Day campaign.

But he said that if the demand was still there, market forces meant it was only a matter of time before new dealers emerged, so that treatment and education was also essential.

He called the strategy a pincer movement.

He said: "We need a really radical look at how we treat people with drug dependency so we can decrease that, and then crime will fall considerably because we will eradicate the need for dealers.

"It is a way of taking command of the problem, because people who are addicted to drugs commit crime because they are desperate and need them."

Mr Price said treatment programmes using the heroin substitute methadone were not always appropriate because addicts would use street heroin on top of their prescription, and the use of two substances could exacerbate the problem.

Stockton anti-drugs campaigner Tina Williams, of Parents and Addicts Against Drugs In Communities, supported the call and said prescribed heroin would be a more effective and safer way of treating some addicts.

She said: "Currently, we have an inhumane way of dealing with people who have become addicted.

"The streets have been flooded with this stuff, and it is our kids who have been affected, so we cannot as a society just leave them.

"This is an illness and, under controlled circumstances, this is the best form of medicine."

Middlesbrough GP Dr John Canning, a member of the British Medical Association GP committee, said the strategy could work with some addicts, but not all.

He said: "The treatment has to meet the patients' specific needs, because there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem."