Addicts are turning to shoplifting to fund their habits - sometimes at the cost £300-400 everyday
Nottinghamshire Live is highlighting the impact of shoplifting on smaller and independent businesses in the run-up to Christmas, the busiest time of the year for retail. This week, reporter Joshua Hartley talks to an expert about how drug addiction is driving up shop thefts - and the desperately sad stories that have created some of Nottingham's most prolific criminals.
"Shop theft is mostly perpetrated by people with substance problems. It'll be things like legs of lamb that are sold down the pub but then really big ticket items like the latest computers - which are then sold for just a few bags of heroin." The most recent UK Health Security Agency figures estimated there were 3,412 opiate and crack cocaine users in Nottingham during 2019/2020. "Their addiction will drive their frequency of offending, people refer to it as a raging crack habit - and it is raging. It is a very chaotic drug and the way it works means that you will want to keep repeating the dose.
"You will find a caseload of victims themselves, but that's difficult to get across to the general public." He explained that the people using the programme's services, a high proportion of whom had committed shop theft, were dogged by traumatic experiences, poverty, poor educational achievement, and mental and physical health problems.
Mr Wilson, who worked in the probation service for 15 years before moving to Framework nearly 10 years ago, said some addicts had become accustomed to the lifestyle they needed to live to feed their destructive habit - making it hard to treat them. "There are people whose names I recognise from more than 20 years ago when I started, and these people are becoming the aging population with abuse issues whose addiction will eventually cause their death," he said.
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