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What do we want? We want.....er.....

26 May 2003


Hands up anybody who knows what drugs policy in Britain is designed to achieve. In an area of a thousand policy objectives and targets, what's the big picture?

The drugs issue is a classic social policy nightmare which tangles together a bundle of often incompatible threads. What might solve one aspect of the problem merely exacerbates another. Target the availability of drugs and you push the price up. This (as The Guardian pointed out in a feature last week) increases the value of  the thefts and robberies required to finance the habit. Addicts don't stop doing drugs because the price goes up any more than somebody who lives in Maidstone and works in Reigate buys less petrol when the price goes up. They still have to drive.

One sure way to reduce drugs-related property crime is to make drugs legally available and cheap. But this, it is thought, draws in new consumers, increasing the total sum of drug-fuelled misery and wrecked lives.

The confusion is the product of incremental policy making: starting out with a policy that seems obvious enough and then reacting piecemeal to the consequences of implementing that policy by introducing new, sub-policies, to deal with the consequences. It's not surprising that some of these sub-policies conflict with the main policy since they are a reaction to its shortcomings. The whole of drugs policy exists in the tension between preventing drug use by active criminalisation and managing it through programmes for rehab and clean needles.

This tension mirrors attitudes to, for example, teenage sex and pregnancy. Efforts to discourage the former are mirrored by the provision of information and facilities (such as contraception) to prevent the latter. The message "don't have sex, but if you must here is the safe way to do it" may send confusing signals, but it does reflect a social reality.

Under-age sex may technically be illegal but is rarely prosecuted except when one party is over-age. Policy, therefore, is driven by social considerations rather than the criminal law. That is why a policy of sending mixed but realistic signals is sustainable. Social policy does not have to be consistent when the problem is not consistent. That is its strength.

Social policy acknowledges the need to deal with the consequences of what people want to do in the light of the reality of the situation, namely that they want to do it. That is why social policy provides clean needles for drug injectors and contraception for 14 year olds. In the case of drug users it goes much further than this, funding at huge expense a vast range of facilities and programmes, as wells as those of agencies, partnerships and voluntary organisations.

The criminal law is different. It is blind to social considerations or context. It has to be consistent with itself, observing its own letter. If you are the one person ticketed on a speeding motorway, it is no defence in law to say that everybody is doing it. It may not be consistent with reality to criminalise what everyone is doing, but the fact that everyone is doing it does not de-criminalise it of itself.  Whether or not it's a good idea to prohibit something that everyone wants to do is a question upon which the criminal law has no view.

In relation to drugs use, the criminal and social approaches do not conflict in their objective. They both want to lessen drug use. But the methods do conflict, and the criminal law (being blind) drives a blind coach and horses through the efforts of social control. The problem is precisely that lack of discrimination in the criminal law concerning drugs.

For laws to be effective they have to have a moral and social purpose. People drive at 85 mph on motorways in their modern, super-safe cars because they don't see it as unreasonable. On the other hand they increasingly respect tougher drink-drive laws and penalties because they can see how anti-social it is. These laws reflect a legal-moral-social contract that people will accept.

In relation to drugs, a law that criminalises social, medical or even habitual users of whatever drug fulfils no moral contract. Using drugs ought not to be a criminal problem although the consequences of using them may be. Sometimes law enforcers seek to make that distinction by lightening up on the users while still bearing down on people dealing illegally. This is seriously confused stuff. You can use it but you can't get it is a statement that helps nobody but the international drugs cartels, whose profits stand in the place of the excise duty that is levied on other stimulants such as cigarettes and alcohol. Tax is still paid, but is stolen from shops and homes to be paid to the racketeers.

What is necessary is to combine the social and the criminal-legal effort in attacking aspects of the problem that society can agree upon. Casting drugs dealers in that rôle is to miss the point that the market is demand driven. Criminalising the supply of drugs means that the controls that could help in attacking these aspects are not in place. The promise of fat profits tempts dealers to push their wares towards vulnerable groups, such as children, addicts and the mentally ill whom, within an open supply chain, it would be easier to protect.

The success of drugs policy, like that of any policy aimed at social improvement, depends on what can be bought with the money in the pot. Preceding that question (although often ignored) is a decision about what the policy wishes to buy. That, in turn, involves stripping the perceived problem down to its component bits and asking society which bits it really wants to change and which bits it can live with. That exercise needs doing, but in the meantime there is no harm in speculating that the biggest specific concerns people have about drugs are (a) the risk to their children from exposure to drugs and (b) the risk to themselves and their property of drugs-related crime. De-criminalisation and a controlled, open supply chain would address both of these, while freeing up a wad of cash for programmes of effective social intervention.


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