ISSUES
: Drugs
Chapter 2: UK drug laws
23
Drug policy is working – why do we
prefer to think otherwise?
An article from
The Conversation
.
By Paul Hayes
O
n all sides, our politicians
and commentators seem
convinced Britain’s drug
policy has been a failure.
Party conference season saw
Liberal Democrat leader Nick
Clegg rehash his old refrain that
we’ve “lost the war on drugs”.
Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for
Social Justice still portrays drug
addiction as one of the main
drivers of worklessness, poverty
and social exclusion in our poorest
communities. And on 30 October,
the narrative of failure will be
rehearsed yet again when Green
MP Caroline Lucas initiates a
three-hour debate in Parliament
calling for an impact assessment
of our current drug laws.
But
these
diagnoses
are
misleading: for all the problems
that remain, the major successes
of our drug policy deserve to be
acknowledged. Here are some
of the headline facts, which can
take even informed observers by
surprise.
Turning it around
Drug use is much less common
than most people assume. In
England and Wales, about one
adult in three will have used a
drug in their lifetime; for the vast
majority, this will be short-term or
intermittent cannabis use.
Use of the most dangerous drug,
heroin, is much rarer. Public Health
England estimate there are now
fewer than 300,000 heroin users in
England, compared to estimates of
more than 450,000 at the height of
the heroin epidemic in 1999.
The biggest fall in heroin use
has been among young people;
our addiction problem is in a
cohort of middle-aged users, who
began using heroin in the 1980s
and 1990s and who also suffer
from poor mental health, alcohol
misuse, homelessness and
social exclusion. By and
large, they are not the
vulnerable teenagers of
popular imagination.
Meanwhile, a range
of research suggests
that a major part
of the sharp rise in
crime experienced
in the 1980s and
1990s was caused
by the dramatic
increase in heroin
use during that period;
it is also estimated
that ready access to
treatment (including in
prison) currently prevents
4.9 million crimes per year.
Levels of HIV, closely associated
with needle injection around the
world, are also very low among
British injectors, largely thanks
to the harm-reduction policies
pioneered by Norman Fowler when
he was Margaret Thatcher’s Health
secretary in the 1980s. In the USA,
up to 20% of injectors have HIV;
in Byisk, in Russia, it’s more than
70%. But in England, the rate is
just over 2%.
Of course, not all the news is
good. Drug-related deaths rose
startlingly in 2013, after falling
each year since 2010. The
immediate and long-term health
risks of ‘legal highs’ are still poorly
understood; the poor integration of
drug and mental health services is
a continuing scandal.
But if we resist the meaningless
rhetoric of ‘winning’ or ‘losing’
the ‘war on drugs’, we’ll see that
the broader reality of England’s
drug problem today is that fewer
people are using drugs, fewer are
becoming addicted and the social
and economic impacts of drug use
are shrinking.
We’ve clearly come a long way
since the first national drug
strategy, Tackling Drugs Together.
While drug addiction still has
a disproportionate impact on
vulnerable citizens living in Britain’s
poorest communities, there is no
longer a plausible argument that
drug addiction is destabilising our
society.
Yet despite rapidly declining use,
falling crime, an ageing cohort of
users as young people shun heroin
and still-low levels of HIV – all of
which would once have been seen
as causes of celebration and proof
of success – British drug policy
is almost universally derided as a
failure. Why?
Decline and fall
For ideologues of a traditionalist
conservative bent, drug use
is part of a broader liberal
folly, a social programme that
has trashed the morals – self-
reliance, responsibility, deferred
gratification, sacrifice, duty – that
Drug
use is lower
than it was ten
years ago:
8.6% in 2014/15
vs. 11.2% in 2004/05
among
16- to 50-year-olds
*
* Source: Findings from the 2014/15 Crime Survey for England and Wales
