MOTÖRHEAD's LEMMY Tells Welsh Assembly: Legalize Heroin

Daniel Davies of icWales has issued the following report:

Heavy metal hellraiser Lemmy used a Tory Party platform to advocate legalising heroin today.

The MOTÖRHEAD frontman was invited to the Welsh Assembly to give his "message" on drugs by Tory AM William Graham.

Pin-striped Mr Graham, AM for South Wales East, said he had been moved by Lemmy's account on a Channel 4 documentary of how heroin abuse wrecked lives.

Lemmy, real name Ian Kilminster, said the only way to tackle "the single most destructive drug in the world" was to legalise it.

"I have never had heroin but since I moved to London from north Wales in '67 I have mixed with junkies on a casual and almost daily basis," he said.

"I also lived with a young woman who tried heroin just to see what it was like. It killed her three years later.

"I hate the idea even as I say it, but I do believe the only way to treat heroin is to legalise it."

He said legalising the drug would wipe out dealers and stop criminalising young people.

Its sale would generate tax revenue, "which I am sure would appeal to you all", he told the crowd of politicians and their staff in the Assembly's milling area.

Lemmy, who grew up on Anglesey, north Wales, said the problem of heroin was a "contagion'' and "junkies who don't die become Typhoid Marys spreading the infection."

"If it were legal and on a prescription, then at least two-thirds of the dealers would disappear, you would have records of who was and wasn't using it."

If you send a young heroin user to prison he will "certainly be a criminal when he comes out".

"Probably, they will also be brutally sodomised by long-term prisoners and polarised against society in general, and force of law in particular."

Reading from a pre-written speech, he went on: "You have tried heavier and heavier policing — it hasn't worked has it?

"Know why? It's because you cannot keep people from doing what makes them feel good.

"If a junkie has a regular supply of heroin, most are quite able to do a job.

"They will never rehabilitate until somebody – you – gives them a chance to."

However the singer refused to comment on other drugs. Despite boasting in interviews of his tolerance for Jack Daniels, he would only answer questions about heroin.

"Heroin is the only one I have seen anybody die of," he said

"You have tried everything else and it hasn't worked."

Asked if he agreed with the rocker, Mr Graham said: "Lemmy has an alternative solution to the one presently being tried. The message is against drugs."

Afterwards a Conservative spokesman stressed the party did not share Lemmy's policy.

"It was Lemmy who made the comment," he said.