A new front in the “war on drugs”
This week, the government announced its new ten-year drugs strategy, with Boris Johnson “shamelessly dressed up as a cop”, says Kojo Koram in The Guardian. This “purportedly ground-breaking” new strategy admits that the current policy isn’t working, then promises more of the same. Indeed, this is at least the sixth new drugs strategy to be announced in the past 25 years. During that time, notes Simon Jenkins in the same paper, British deaths from drug misuse have nearly doubled to record rates, three times those of the EU. Yet now we have another “war on drugs” in which a modest increase for “treatment and rehabilitation” for those who “repent” is accompanied by a “bloodcurdling crackdown” with expanded police testing and confiscation of driving licences and passports to deter recreational users.
Drug dealers’ ideal clients are wealthy students, young professionals and older highfliers, says Shaun Bailey in
The Daily Telegraph. While this “scourge” will not be solved through “strict policing alone”, “breaking the supply chain” (the government has committed £145m to close down an extra 2,000 countylines drug gangs) is among the most important steps”. An uncompromising approach isn’t “outdated but necessary”.
Politicians often present a “false dichotomy” when discussing policy reform, says Koram: a crackdown versus free-for-all legislation. In reality, there are a number of different policy approaches that could be transformative. In 2001 Portugal decriminalised all drugs with funds redirected from policing to public health. The result was a fall in drugrelated deaths and the “overall social costs of drug use”. Spain and Switzerland provide rooms for intravenous drug users. Such ideas should be under discussion “by any government serious about tackling drug harm”. This is a “missed opportunity… to join the global sea change in drug policy”.