Addicts: No Children Allowed

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Duration: 30 minutes

Would it be better if 60,000 children in Scotland had never been born? That is the controversial conclusion of Barbara Harris who believes that Scotland's drug and alcohol addicts should not be allowed to procreate. This programme investigates Barbara's contentious American charity Project Prevention as it attempts to set up in the UK. The charity is devoted to paying every addict who agrees to either long term birth control or sterilisation 200 pounds to stop them having any more children. The social and economic cost of Scotland's current addiction problem runs to a staggering 2.6 billion pounds a year, and Barbara thinks she can solve it at its source. But critics have called her methods unethical, comparing her to Hitler and accusing her of practicing eugenics. With over 3000 addicts already signed up in the US, can Project Prevention help Scotland's serious and long-standing addiction problems, or is this modern day eugenics?


Arifa Farooq
Arifa Farooq


