Four out of five drug addicts on welfare

A devastating report on how the state unwittingly bankrolls drug addiction, timed to come out with tomorrow’s Green Paper, can now be downloaded from the DWP website. I’m not sure if this is intentional or not, but there we go. It looks at addiction to opiates (heroin) or crack cocaine, the so called Problem Drug Users or PDUs. Until now, official figures show that just 400 people on Jobseekers Allowance were PDUs – just 0.05 percent. The new figures show the real figure is a scandalous 8 percent, or 66,000 souls. And that’s just JSA. Widen it to all out-of-work benefits and the number is a staggering 267,000 out of what the Home Office believes to be 332,000 PDUs. Strip away the acronyms and this means the welfare state bankrolls four out of five drug addictions in the UK. Simply staggering.
 
As the (leaked) Green Paper itself says (p38) “taxpayers cannot be expected to support a drug-dependent lifestyle.” But the point runs far deeper. There is something fundamentally immoral about a system that has paved the way for a wretched life of drug addiction for a more than quarter of a million British people – a lump of humanity greater than the population of Newcastle, Belfast or Nottingham. Even the most ardent socialist could not argue that this is compassionate; all the more reason why the welfare state needs urgent, radical change. Yesterday’s Guardian had a fascinating pie chart of government spending, where welfare was named “social protection”. In the above instance, there can be no worse misnomer.