A crack-brained strategy
The new government drugs strategy seems to me to be just more of the same old same old. It makes the three crucial mistakes which underpin the failure of drug strategy over the past few years (I don’t know how they arrive at these figures of falling drug use but I simply don’t believe them:
1) The strategy eschews drug use eradication for harm reduction. It tacitly accepts drug use as a given and concentrates instead on reducing its harmful effects through treatment, instead of enforcing the law to reduce the use of drugs themselves.
2) It concentrates law enforcement instead on drug dealers while regarding users as their victims who have to be treated rather than punished. This false dichotomy between users and dealers ignores the fact that many users are dealers.
3) Both of these errors compound the most important problem of all, that the messages our society is giving about the use of drugs are equivocal and inconsistent. It doesn’t matter how many threats are being ‘considered’(and will almost certainly never materialise) to withhold welfare benefits if drug users don’t present themselves for treatment; nor how many five years-olds are to be taught that drugs are nasty (but of course it will be their choice as autonomous and empowered five year-olds whether to do them); nor how many grandparents will be encouraged to care for the offspring of their drug-addicted children (don’t all rush).
The message has to be unequivocal that no drug use will be tolerated, full stop. That means choking off demand as well as supply; it means criminalising drug use as well as possession and dealing, along with vigorous enforcement and treatment; and it means an end to the distinction between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs. The message should be loud and clear that all drug use is such a danger to society that it simply will not be tolerated. Those societies that deliver such a message — Sweden, China, Singapore — have little or no drug problem. Those that do not and have gone down the ‘harm reduction’ (aka drift towards decriminalisation) road instead — the UK, the Netherlands — have a major problem.
Everything else is just so much garbage.