How Labour's drugs battle changed

By Jon Silverman
Home Affairs analyst

One of Tony Blair's first insights as shadow Home Secretary in 1993 was to identify drug taking and dealing as a key component in crime.

It is ironic then that, having had five years to hone its thinking on the issue, Labour should make such disappointing headway when implementing its first drugs strategy in 1998.

Tony Blair identified the drugs issue while still in opposition

One of the problems was that it attacked the problem on too wide a front - aiming to reduce drug use among the young; protect communities; expand treatment and fight trafficking - while seeking to cut Class A drug abuse by 25% over five years.

By 2002, there had been a major re-think.

The focus of the updated strategy was a "tough love" approach, exploiting users' frequent contacts with the criminal justice system, at every point from arrest to prison, to get far more into treatment.

A more realistic level of funding than hitherto has been channelled through the Criminal Justice Interventions Programme.

By the end of 2004, 54% more users were in treatment than five years earlier.

Critics' warning

It is impressive progress but with flaws. Critics complain that if you have not been arrested, you are not a high priority for treatment.

The government is effectively implementing a crime reduction policy masquerading as treatment Danny Kushlick, Transform

Danny Kushlick, director of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, said: "This means that most of our money is spent on enforcing the law and the policy appears to be tough on crime.

"The government is effectively implementing a crime reduction policy masquerading as treatment."

It is also the case that for every pound spent on adult drug services, only one pound goes into adolescent drug needs.

Key trends in UK drug use At-a-glance

Lord Victor Adebowale, chief executive of the charity, Turning Point, warned that the government's plans to drug-test young people charged with certain crimes would fail "unless testing is accompanied by appropriate treatment."

Treatment services are also under-serving non-opiate users, such as crack addicts, despite a 2002 government initiative called Tackling Crack.

And the chief executive of the National Treatment Agency, Paul Hayes, admits that he would like more black and ethnic minority addicts to access treatment.

Punishment

The Drugs Act 2005 gives the police additional powers to test for Class A drugs on arrest and establishes a new drug intervention order which can run alongside ASBO's.

The legislation has been widely attacked as overly-punitive and may fail to address the problem that too few offenders are identified as problem-users and that, even if they do get treatment, they engage with services for too short a period to have a lasting impact.

The thing about role models is they should be treated in exactly the same way as anybody else Drugs minister Paul Goggins 'Get past celebrity drug debate'

The Audit Commission says that planning needs to be more coherent both at national and local level.

On the number of addicts, there is good and bad news. Findings from the 2003/4 British Crime Survey, indicate that the proportion of young people who have used a Class A drug has fallen since 2000.

But the BCS is a self-reporting method of obtaining data and a different picture emerges from a confidential Cabinet Office Strategy Unit analysis which was leaked this summer.

It suggests that heroin and cocaine consumption in the UK has at least doubled in the last decade and that more than 3 million people every year use illegal drugs.

Controversy

And that despite the government's concentration on attacking Class A drugs markets, the supply of crack and heroin has increased.

Moreover, the economic impact of police and Customs interventions is that prices are low enough to be affordable while high enough to cause heavy users to commit significant levels of crime to fund their habit.

For supporters of legalisation, the link between drugs and crime and the highest use of recreational drugs in Europe is clear evidence that Britain's strategy is a mess.

But, as the controversy over the reclassification of cannabis has shown, the political consequences of any radical re-thinking are probably too great for the government to contemplate.