Dominic Grieve on Sweden and America

In this summer series specially for The Westminster Hour's website, we have asked politicians to reveal what inspires them about the political systems in other countries.

Each week we have a different contributor and the best ideas will be featured in a special report to be broadcast this week on The Westminster Hour.

So far we have had the opinions of cabinet minister Tessa Jowell, Labour MPs Graham Allen, Gisela Stuart, Martyn Jones and Jim Knight, Lib Dem politicians Norman Baker, Jenny Tonge and Andrew George, Scottish Nationalist Alex Salmond and Conservatives Ann Widdecombe and Tony Baldry.

Dominic Grieve

This week's contributor is Dominic Grieve, elected as a Conservative MP to the constituency of Beaconsfield in 1997. A member of the Shadow Home Affairs team since 2001, he has been on a number of trips abroad to look at the way crime is tackled in other countries.

In relation to problems of drug addiction I think there are probably three countries which have interesting models. The first is Sweden, the Netherlands also do a lot of work in drug rehabilitation and finally interestingly enough the United States of America, where the lack of primary health care means that they treat drug addiction as a serious public health issue. And certainly in Boston Massachusetts, when I went over to look at projects, I was impressed by the amount of resources they put in to running drug rehabilitation as a very serious public health matter.

I think it is accepted in all these countries that if somebody has an addiction - particularly to hard drugs - then merely to detox them and then to say well we'll provide you with a bit of counselling afterwards is most unlikely to lead to a cure, because the underlying causes of the addiction are psychological - probably in the background of the individual themselves, in their home environment and in their childhood. I think one of the pictures that emerged most commonly when I spoke to those who were undergoing drug rehabilitation in Boston was that drugs had filled a void in their lives, life was meaningless and it provided a comfort which soon turned in to a physical and an emotional craving.

So unless you can try and address that and also restore self-esteem, provide a sense of direction, point out that there's a real chance and ability to get back into employment, then I think the chances are that these people will slip back into addiction quite quickly.

And certainly in this country, although the Government claims it is expanding hugely the number of drug treatment places, our investigations have shown that in fact it doesn't really amount to very much at all. It amounts sometimes to seeing a counsellor on an occasional basis. We just don't think that that's going to solve the problem.

In contrast if you go to Sweden, for instance, they have 1,737 in-patient beds in Sweden which is one for every 5,124 of the population, compared to one for every 28,587 in Britain and I think that illustrates the enormous contrast. In Sweden - I didn't myself visit but other members of the team went over - here was a country which actually was very tough on hard drugs and if a juvenile came before the court system with a hard drug problem, saw it as an absolute priority that they should go into residential accommodation to be detoxed and rehabilitated and indeed were coercive in respect of this in the sense that they said, 'You have got to do it or you will be prosecuted and sent to prison. We will not tolerate people who are not going through programmes'.

Now although there has been some doubt cast on whether you can coerce people into programmes - and certainly I accept that there'll be some people for whom no help will ever work - I think there's ample evidence and I certainly saw it in the United States - that a degree of pressure works pretty well and if on top of that you are providing a top quality service once somebody is in to rehabilitation then I think they soon discover that there are tremendous attractions from being rehabilitated, getting off drugs and acquiring a new purpose to their lives.