Hopes for a new drug strategy
The ten-year drug strategy introduced by the first Blair government in 1997 expires next year and the Home Office has long been promising a public consultation as part of the process of reviewing that strategy and producing a new one. That public consultation - Drugs: Our Community, Your Say - has now arrived, alongside Gordon Brown's commitment last week to an expert review of cannabis classification. The real question is whether, and how closely, these two exercises are related.
Is the call to review the legal status of cannabis really a sign of serious intent to reclassify it - in which case it might be taken as an indication that the Prime Minister will move towards a more moralistic and a more punitive drugs strategy in the future? Or is it simply an attempt to vie with the Conservatives for the popular vote and strike a stern moral pose without any real intention of changing the law?
The cannabis review may in fact be a red herring, an attempt to build on the current 'Brown bounce' in public sympathy rather than a pointer of real change to come. Despite recent media scare coverage and the curiously unbalanced Addiction report from Ian Duncan-Smith's Social Justice Policy Group, many feel that cannabis control is hardly the point of a national drugs strategy. It would be very dangerous for policy to get bogged down around the issue of cannabis, or indeed around the issue of the drug classification system.
Far more interesting is what Gordon Brown has chosen to say in the past few weeks about the need for a radical overhaul of the drug strategy as a whole. That he should have chosen to raise the prickly subject of drugs at all, even before he became Prime Minister and then in the very first weeks of his new appointment, was a surprise. But even more surprising is the tenor of his recent remarks, all of which suggest a move away from the automatic linking of drugs with crime that has been such a feature of government policy in recent years.
There are signs that under Brown more serious consideration may be given to framing drugs policy within the context of health, with more emphasis both on the welfare of the individual experiencing problems with drugs and on the public health benefits of tackling drug-related problems like the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C.
Certainly, the new Prime Minister has not made the link between drugs and crime his opening gambit. He has talked about extending drugs education in primary schools. He has called for 'support to people undergoing treatment'. He has spoken of 'supporting communities troubled by drug dealers', a phrase that sounds more like a return to the ambitions of the original 1998 strategy, which put communities nearer its heart, than the pronouncements of recent years which all use crime reduction as the rationale for funding drugs treatment.
What Gordon Brown has not talked about is 'targeting drug-using offenders via the Criminal Justice System to engage them in treatment and reduce drug-related crime' or 'having a sustained impact on the supply of Class A drugs to the UK and availability within its communities' - two of the four aims of the existing Public Service Agreements as set out in the 2004 Public Spending Review. So far, the bullish vocabulary of 'gripping' problem drug users and 'eradicating' drug use has been absent from his rhetoric - and indeed rhetoric itself has been muted, which is not often the case when drugs are the subject under discussion.
The indicators are that drugs policy in the future may be tending in the direction urged by the RSA Drugs Commission, which produced its report Drugs - facing facts in March this year. The RSA report urged a greater emphasis on drugs education in primary schools; a health approach to drugs rather than a criminal justice approach; a strategy that casts drugs policy as a facet of broader social policy, to be tackled in the context of social exclusion, not just criminal justice; an approach to the regulation of drugs rooted in the best scientific evidence on their relative harms.
In her statement on the Business of the House on July 19, the Leader of the House said : 'We must look at the evidence and examine how best to use the considerable additional resources that we have made available for dealing with drug abuse problems.'
There is indeed an overwhelming case for looking at the evidence - first spending more on gathering that evidence through an expanded programme of drugs research, and then giving due weight to the evidence-based recommendations of the expert Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
There is an equally strong case for maintaining the 'considerable additional resources', not cutting them, as has recently been the fate of the Young People's Substance Misuse Grant, the Drug Interventions Programme grant and the amounts allocated for drug treatment in prisons. These resources are urgently needed, to underwrite a broader approach to drug problems than one dominated by the link between drugs and crime, a multi-agency approach in which health agencies play a far more important and less grudging role, motivated by a new Public Service Agreement around drugs that actually mentions the word 'health'.
