This is not, as we continually mourn, something usual in our body politic. So, when it happens let us celebrate it:

Drug addicts are set to get heroin on the NHS, in Britain's first 'shooting gallery'.

For the first time the health service will prescribe pharmaceutical-grade heroin for free and provide a place to take it.

Plans were approved yesterday for the facility in Glasgow city centre, raising fear more will follow across the country.

Already, there have been three trials in London, Darlington and Brighton, providing free heroin, although this will be the first state-sanctioned injecting facility.

Fear that more will follow? Why not one in every town? For it is not the getting high which is the problem. It is the disease that comes from dirty injection methods, the deaths from impure or over strength injections, the theft and crime to pay for it all, which are the problems.

Way back when the NHS used to provide free drugs to addicts. Then they stopped and addiction soared as dealing was the way to make the margin to be able to consume.

We're pragmatists around here as well as moralists. We insist that it is morally right that consenting adults get to ingest whatever they wish. But even aside from that the damage of drugs comes from their illegality. Prescription grade heroin might make you feel like doing not very much (although Shipman murdered hundreds while supposedly so incapacitated) but other than that there's no problem to it, not even to the health of the taker.

Lucy Dawe, from charity Cannabis Skunk Sense, said: 'This is tantamount to drug dealing by the state. I can't see it's going to reduce the number of addicts, it just gives them somewhere to go.'

Yes Lucy, you're right, it is only drug dealing by the state, it is only giving people somewhere to go to gain clean gear and accurate doses.

That's why it's such a damn good idea.