DRUGS are killing abusers at the rate of two a week in Lancashire, but the claim today by coroner Andre Rebello that almost as many are dying from the legally-prescribed heroin substitute, Methadone, as from heroin itself is truly worrying.

He suggests that family doctors are prescribing too much at once - to the extent that surplus quantities are being sold to others by addicts in order to buy street heroin.

Methadone should not, says Mr Rebello, be prescribed in pint bottles, but only in much smaller daily doses that deal with each addict's needs.

Quite so. Then, there would be less risk of excess Methadone being so lethally available.

And lethal it is if, as we learn, last year it was responsible for 22 per cent of the drug-related deaths in Mr Rebello's territory against 26 per cent caused by heroin - and that the year before it caused even more than heroin.

The coroner vows to get to the bottom of this saying that, in future, GPs will be called to account in his court if they prescribed amounts that allowed Methadone to be sold on. He is right to do so. For what the Methadone deaths syndrome smacks of is a system without sufficient control.

It seems to be one that may, in some cases, permit addicts to carry on indulging their heroin habit instead of being cured of it while at the same time fuelling the drug abuse of others.

And is it happening so that some GPs may restrict the amount of contact they have with potentially difficult and aggressive addict patients - by prescribing several days' supply of Methadone at once instead of daily doses - or because some doctors are simply too trusting of them?

Let Mr Rebello's promised probe find the answer to that - and quickly, as the Methadone death toll is plainly too high.

But is not the other solution the one he suggests - of the drug rehabilitation drive being removed from GPs' surgeries and concentrated in specialist clinics with staff specifically qualified in treating drug dependence?

Of course it would be costly, but drug abuse is already a huge social menace with thefts by heroin abusers now costing every Lancashire household £147.

Is it not high time that resources were ploughed into more-effective cure programmes?

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