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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: 'Could we have a real drugs strategy, not a fantasy one?'
Michael O'Byrne The Guardian
Tuesday 08 Oct 2002 There are two major problems with the drugs debate in its current form: one, that it tends to deal with only the ends of the spectrum - status quo or legalisation/decriminalisation; the other, that it tries to maintain the myth that there is a drugs problem rather than a whole complexity of problems, one symptom of which is the use and abuse of drugs. The black and white approach of status quo v enforcement allows both ends to avoid the complexity of dealing with all of the grey areas in between. The government's approach (or more accurately its lack of one) has colluded in this, in moving from publicly silencing a minister, Clare Short, who dared to suggest in the mildest terms that there was a need for a public debate, to David Blunkett's peremptory and scantily justified decision - announced in July - to reclassify cannabis from next year as a drug whose possession in small amounts would no longer be grounds for arrest. The drugs problem ranges through the abuse of legally obtainable drugs such as alcohol, nicotine and prescription medicines through to the violent crime arising out of the spread of crack cocaine. Each of these has different parameters and dynamics, each requiring its own custom-made solution. They are, however, all loosely related and a solution in one will inevitably affect the others. Advocates of amphetamines, for instance, have been quick to use the decision on cannabis to propose that a similar approach is taken with their drug of choice. The key omission - surprising in a government that thinks that it rules elsewhere - is to lose sight of the fact that the drug realm is just another market. In any market there are just three factors, supply, demand and price. So long as demand exists variations in supply will only affect price and vice versa. If more effective enforcement reduces supply, this will lead to a rise in price which will bring new supplies and suppliers to the market until it stabilises again. This model works at every level from the street/neighbourhood dealer up to national and international trafficker levels. Logical analysis shows that demand and not supply is the key strategic factor - yet it is supply, through enforcement, that gets the biggest slice of the government cake and most of the public and political debate. The approach fails not only in its logic but also in its practical outcome. In the last decade the seizures of drugs of all types have grown relentlessly, yet the cost of these drugs, in actual and inflation-discounted terms, has continued to drop just as relentlessly. Compared to the focused effort against supply, that aimed at reducing demand is unstructured, uncoordinated and only spasmodically effective. The approach to treatment and rehabilitation is patchy, uncertain and determined by postcode, as are all discretionary NHS services. The relatively peripheral role that the NHS plays is also reflected in the poor range of outcomes achieved by the Drugs Action Teams which they nominally lead. Similarly in education there is no nationally agreed and evaluated programme for use by schools, indeed some are still using approaches that have been evaluated and found to be ineffective. Even worse, the pressure on schools to continually improve their GCSE and A level results has led to a significant use of exclusions in the communities where there is the greatest risk of the pupils at the greatest risk. Which raises the key issue of targets and measurement. Drugs treatment and education do not figure in NHS or school targets; waiting lists and results do. It is difficult to overstate the effect that targets have on what service providers believe that they need to do: what gets measured gets done, invariably at the expense of what is not. "Joined-up" government can be achieved only where departments have targets that are also joined up - that is, are at least complementary and at best mutually agreed. But the government has a strategy, hasn't it? It even, at one time, had a tsar to oversee it. The so-called strategy is a mishmash of pious hopes, unethical, unprincipled and unachievable objectives, set without thought to anything other than the soundbite and spin that these objectives would achieve when published. At the end of the drug tsar's four-year reign in October last year, when it was clear to everyone that there was no hope of achieving the targets set, his role was massively diminished and the strategy put under review - a review that has yet to see the light of day. The official strategy completely lacked an effective implementation framework and did not have the resources needed to develop one. A comparison of the so-called war on drugs with the so-called war on terrorism is a stark one, even though they are joined at the hip in terms of players, transport systems and money laundering. The straw that has broken the camel's back in terms of even a notional strategy is the decision to reclassify cannabis, as of next year, as a drug whose possession for personal use will no longer be illegal. The plan was floated publicly in October last year, and the decision formally announced in July this year. These moves were going on at a time when the Lambeth experiment - policing cannabis users lightly as long as they were not deemed to be dealing - was receiving massive publicity; although the trial of this new system was not complete, it was being lauded as a success in that it released around 2,000 "officer hours" - additional police time that could be used to focus on hard drugs. This was a classic case of statistical manipulation to achieve an effect. Two thousand hours sounds like a lot. Actually it amounts to about one "officer year" in a division of about 1,000 officers - a staggering 0.1%. The nature and timing of the announcement that cannabis was being reclassified has had the double whammy of confusing police officers about what is expected of them regarding cannabis and all the other "soft" drugs, and has convinced a sizeable number of young south Londoners, at least, that cannabis has actually been legalised. This confusion is perfectly understandable given the situation where those who should know better - government and those advocating a liberalisation of the law - appear to use "decriminalise" and "legalise" without thought to the difference between the two. In decriminalising a drug we get the disadvantages of it remaining a crime (eg, criminal gangs, vulnerability of users to blackmail and other pressures) with none of the advantages of legalisation (eg, regulation of users' age, quality control, taxation). What we need is a real and workable drugs strategy born out of: -A national, open and informed debate on all of the issues around drugs misuse; -Research on harm and its avoidance; -Funding for effective anti-drug abuse education; -A properly resourced infrastructure to deal with the outcomes. What we do not need are unachievable targets that claim to reduce drug use by 50% in five years. No matter what the solution is, the only certain thing is that it will be a long haul with a lot of effort and frequent disappointments - not the best soundbite material. My own stand on cannabis is that it is a dangerous drug and that the market forces I have already referred to will ensure that those suppliers whose product has the most potent ingredients will dominate the market leading them to continually produce ever more potent skunk. This is already the case: the current product is significantly more potent than that available in the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that society is willing to tolerate two legal dangerous drugs, nicotine and alcohol, makes the differentiation of any other on grounds of principle difficult, if not impossible. The alternative, which I advocate, is to draw a line in the sand on the basis that more than two is intolerable, accepting that this is not without its difficulties and inconsistencies. At least with our current approach we know what the worst we can get looks like, and we do not yet know that a well thought-through strategy will not work, as we have never tried one. Those who advocate legalisation and decriminalisation do not know what the worst looks like - so Mr Blunkett needs to tell me by what right he allows them to experiment with our children and grandchildren. - Michael O'Byrne joined the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1966, moving to policing in Britain on joining the Metropolitan Police in 1970. He moved on through Surrey Police, Thames Valley Police before becoming Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Police until his retirement in 2001
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