The Guardian view on drugs policy: time for the politicians to study the evidence
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Version 0 of 1. No party ever won or lost an election because of its drug policy. Yet it is a subject that strikes fear in the hearts of most politicians and leaves them deaf to demands for a review or reform. They are locked in the old wisdom that if drug use is harmful the best way of tackling it is punishment, too timid to examine the facts or challenge conventional thinking – even though a significant number of ministers in both past and present cabinets, including the prime minister, admit that they have experimented with drugs themselves. Only the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has consistently argued that policy should be based on an examination of what works. He has not got the royal commission he wanted, but the Home Office report published on Thursday, a comparative study of different regimes of drug control, should make all politicians think again. The study is a small but important reward for the Lib Dems’ persistence in calling for evidence-based policy. Ministers and officials have surveyed the experience of 13 countries from Japan to Portugal, with widely varying approaches to drug use. Its critical finding is that there is no evidence of a direct link between the harshness of penalties and the number of drug users. Portugal and the Czech Republic have both decriminalised possession, but their levels of drug use are sharply different. Different cultures and social pressures, it suggests, may be a bigger influence than government policy. The ball is back in the politicians’ court. If it is not supported by the evidence, the only reason for persisting with a penal approach is that it is too difficult politically to reform it. But as defeat is quietly admitted in the war on drugs in one country after another, UK policy is becoming damagingly out of touch. Drug abuse in Britain is a big and expensive problem. According to the latest crime survey there was a small rise in England and Wales last year: 8.8% of all over-16s, an increase of about a quarter of a million people, admitted taking illicit substances. Cannabis was the most widely used drug by a wide margin. But the average age of drug users is rising and the number of teenagers who admit taking drugs fell again, in line with a five-year trend. That is not to underestimate the cost to themselves and society of the one in 10 who is classed as a problem user. The Centre for Social Justice claimed recently that the wider costs add up to £21bn. More soberly, the British Medical Association puts the figure at £16bn. Interventions – medical and penal – cost more than £1.2bn. Drug-related crime costs £14bn. More than 2,500 people, mainly men, die of some form of drug poisoning each year. And behind the statistics are ruined lives and broken families. The issue is not whether or not drug abuse is harmful. It is how best to minimise the harm it causes. Some of those harms are not immediately apparent. Continuing to prosecute for possession of cannabis, for example, was shown in a report last year for the drug charity Release to have a seriously distorting effect on inner-city policing. In London in 2010, there were more than 1m stop and searches for drugs, half of them on young people, a disproportionate number of them black (even though drug use is about twice as high among white people). Fewer than half of the white people stopped were charged, compared with nearly four-fifths of the black people. Each year, more than 40,000 people are convicted of possession, a conviction that will damage their future employability, make further offences significantly more likely, relationships less certain and reduce earnings capacity by on average a fifth. Young people’s lives are being irreparably damaged by a policy that is intended to help and protect society. The evidence does not all go one way, particularly on class A drugs. Tough regimes in Japan and Sweden are matched by low drug use. But, the report observes, these are notably cohesive societies with similar cultural attitudes to drug-taking. What decriminalising possession can do is to open the way to treating drug abuse as a matter for health rather than criminal policy. So in Portugal, decriminalisation has meant fewer cases of HIV and Aids as well as lower policing costs and fewer people in prison. There is enough evidence in this report alone to advocate reform. It is time listen to the experts. |