The War Against Drugs is Being Waged No Better Than that Against Terror

Civitas, 24 November 2006

Since, and because, the government down-graded Cannabis to a class C drug, its use among young people has substantially increased. So claimed Roger Davy, a West Yorkshire magistrate and national spokesman on youth courts, according to a a reort in today’s Times entitled ‘Cannabis is linked to rising child crime and harder drugs’.
Britain is now among the worst European nations for drug misuse. It tops the European league table for cocaine use, not only among 15 to 34-year olds (over 10% have tried it), but also among the 15-24 year olds (6% have tried it). In the last year for which figures are available (2003), Britain also topped the European league table for heroin seizures, came second after Spain for cocaine and cannabis seizures, and was top for seizures of Ecstasy.
The scale of human tragedy indicated by these figures is truly appalling. Yet what do we read in an adjacent report but that, to meet government targets to reduce the waiting times for treatment of hardened drug addicts, they are being increasingly palmed off with comparatively inexpensive but largely ineffective methadone programmes and day centres, rather than placed in more expensive but far more effective residential drug rehabilitation centres. Only 3% of addicts kick their habit after a methadone programme; nearly a third do after rehab in a residential centre.

Earlier this week, Howard Roberts, deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, advocated prescribing heroin to drug addicts so they would not then need to rob to fund their addictions. This is a counsel of despair, as Patrick West points out in a very good article in today’s Times. He also points out that ‘the typical heroin addict is as likely to be a sensitive, fragile, middle-class graduate as an aggressive, working-class misfit from the roughest of council estates’. For addicts in the former category, removal of the threat of punishment and the stigma of a serious criminal conviction would be the worst possible remedy. He writes: ‘Heroin users, or would-be users, need the countervailing force of punishment…. All these sensitive souls – hardly natural outlaws – would have forced themselves to quit their habit had they faced the serious prospect of prison, a fine, or bringing shame in their family.’
There is lot of truth in what West claims here. It is not good enough as a society that, simply to save ourselves the cost and hassle of fighting drug addiction, we throw in the towel and simply feed the habits of addicts. There is redemption from drugs, but to gain it addicts have to undergo the purgatory of rehab. This is something many of them are willing to do only under threat of the far greater penalty of spening time in the hell of prison or at least acquiring a serious criminal record.
It is nothing less than a national scandal that, at a time when the country is apparently awash with drugs, that almost half the beds in leading residential drug rehabilitation units should be lying empty, as government waiting-time targets are met by the expedient of placing addicts on ineffective methadone programmes.