THE front page on February 25, headed "Drugs ring is smashed" showed the pictures of three heroin dealers who had been sentenced to a total of 20 years imprisonment.

As it costs about £40,000 per year to keep a prisoner in jail, this trio is going to set the taxpayer back some £800,000, assuming that they serve their full time.

While these gentlemen will be out of circulation for several years, it is a near certainty that other dealers will rapidly fill the void created by their departure. One may hope that imprisonment will deter these men from returning to their former occupation on release. But their imprisonment is likely to have little effect on their customers who will soon be "shopping" elsewhere.

The net effect is that the taxpayer is facing an £800,000 bill together with many other similar bills up and down the country amounting to tens of millions of pounds each year whilst more one million NHS patients wait for hospital admission.

I know of no disease requiring hospital admission that improves with waiting, but because the NHS is so short of funds it has inadequate capacity and pays staff so poorly it has a chronic recruitment problem hence the chronic backlog of patients.

I would suggest that it is high time that government reconsidered how it is going to deal with drug pushers, for current methods are expensive, fundamentally ineffective and deny funding in far more needy areas.

DR C O LISTER

Whitworth Road