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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: I'm not a failure, says drug tsar Thomas Harding The Telegraph Friday 03 Aug 2001 KEITH HELLAWELL, the outgoing government anti-drugs co-ordinator, defended his record yesterday, claiming his strategy had made Britain "the envy of the world". Publishing his final annual report, Mr Hellawell admitted that there were "worrying signs" that cocaine use was becoming more common. He also conceded there had been a "small but consistent" rise in the number of people aged 11-15 using drugs. Mr Hellawell, whose £106,000-a-year salary made him one of the Government's highest-paid special advisers, had been criticised in Whitehall as ineffective. But the teetotal, non-smoking former chief constable of West Yorkshire said he had turned down a new three-year contract because he felt his work as a "change agent" was done. Speaking at the Home Office yesterday, Mr Hellawell said: "If you want to say I am a failure that's fine. But the long-term educational programmes will teach young people about the risks. We are making good progress. We have changed fundamentally our policies." It has been reported that Mr Hellawell was ousted from his job when David Blunkett became Home Secretary. Before his appointment in 1997 there was no unified national strategy on tackling drugs. He said: "The situation I found in schools was that there was no concerted action. "Some schools had drugs programmes, some abrogated responsibility to the police, and some just avoided it. Very few teachers were trained. I asked one 'What's your experience of drugs?' and he replied 'Well, I had a joint once at University'." Next year the Government will increase its spending on anti-drugs education, treatment and prevention to £1 billion. Mr Hellawell said: "These programmes are being embarked upon in schools. It's the next generation that are going to get the benefit from this." The targets of the Government's 10-year drug plan included reducing re-offending by drug users, reducing the availability of drugs and cutting drug use among young people by half. Seizures of hard drugs rose by four per cent according to figures for 1999, the latest data available, and the number of people dealt with in Britain for supplying class A drugs jumped by more than 17 per cent. Mr Hellawell said: "Dealers have seen that that is clearly a market they can exploit." His tenure had seen a change of policy from "a hardline approach to criminals" to "educating those who commit petty crimes to feed their habit". Those who tested positive for drugs in prison had halved from 24 per cent, with some prisons "virtually drug-free". But Danny Kushlick, director of the drug law reform campaign Transform, said the drug strategy was failing and Labour's policy was in crisis. "The newly demoted drug tsar publishes his final annual report amid an unprecedented clamour for alternatives to totally failed policies" he said. "The price of street drugs continues to fall, purity rises and drug-related crime spirals out of control." Although Mr Hellawell backed the recent experiment in Brixton, south London, of police giving a verbal warning to people smoking cannabis, he said: "It is not going to be legalised. There is no change of Government policy." Summing up his term in office, Mr Hellawell said: "Some friends said it was a no-win job. If it went right then ministers would claim the credit, but if it went wrong my head would roll. But that doesn't matter. In communities people say it's better. "In prisons, hardened prisoners have actually hugged me and said, 'Thank you, we now have treatment and support - if only we had those 20 years ago we would not have caused mayhem'. "It's better. We don't have crack houses and we don't have young girls prostituting themselves. Things are improving. "My job was to get the thing up and running and that's now been done." The Home Office confirmed that it was discussing with Mr Hellawell a part-time role advising on international drug issues.
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