Drugs In Britain

OUR SOCIETY IS HOOKED ... HERE'S HOW WE CAN FIX IT

As the Tories debate legalisation of soft drugs and Labour grapples with
the perceived link between drugs and crime, a visit to a rehab unit in
Oxford reveals one vital truth - every addict is different.

In the summer of 1971, when United States involvement in the Vietnam war
was near its peak, Richard Nixon's government commissioned a research
project. The Pentagon knew that, confronted by the trauma of losing a war
and limitless cheap narcotics, tens of thousands of American troops had
become addicted to heroin.

Nixon and his advisers feared this flood of returning junkies would cause
havoc back home, overwhelming drug treatment services and triggering a
crime wave.

So they commissioned a study of almost 14,000 troops approaching the end of
their tours of duty, and asked a team led by Professor Lee N. Robins of the
Washington medical school to monitor them.

The results were extraordinary. First, the Pentagon had massively
underestimated the scale of hard drug use. Almost half had taken opium or
heroin in Vietnam, while at least 20 per cent were physiologically addicted
to heroin, dependent on multiple shots of the drug each day and prone to
withdrawal symptoms if their supply was interrupted.

The second major finding has lasting relevance for the debate about
addictive drugs today. Twelve months after their return to America, only 5
per cent of those who left Vietnam as addicts were still using heroin.
Almost all the GI junkies simply came home and stopped taking it: less than
2 per cent of the soldier addicts had had any kind of drug treatment. Even
those who admitted they had been exposed to the drug subsequently and taken
an occasional 'hit' had not been re-addicted.

As Robins commented, these findings sharply challenged conventional wisdom
about heroin and its 'uniquely addictive' qualities - so much so that the
New York Times assumed the study must have been some kind of whitewash and
spent months trying to discredit it.

The story was never published. If we want to try to understand heroin
addiction, and to find means of reducing the chaos and harm it wreaks,
Robins's study is the place to start. We need to look not only at the drug
but at the people who take it and cannot stop; at those who might, in other
circumstances, have been among the 5 per cent of former addicts who were
still dependent a year after leaving Vietnam.

The implications for current UK government policy are uncomfortable.
Reduced to its essentials, this views the rapidly increasing problem of
addiction to heroin and crack cocaine almost entirely through the prism of
the criminal justice system. A high proportion of people arrested for
property and other types of crime are drug users, the argument goes: so the
crimes are caused by drugs. In the words of the former 'drug tsar' Keith
Hellawell, we need 'to break once and for all the cycle of drugs and crime
which wrecks lives and threatens communities'.

To an increasing extent, drug treatment programmes are being made available
to addicts as part of a sentence by a judge or magistrate, for example
through the new Drug Treatment and Testing Orders. The belief, in the words
of a senior Oxford detective, is that 'if you take the drugs out of the
offender, he or she will stop offending'.

Putting money into drug treatment cannot be a bad thing. But what if the
relationship between drugs and crime is far more complex than Hellawell's
formula suggests? What if there is no simple, causal link? That would leave
existing policy dangerously skewed. Measured by the criteria that created
it - the political need to cut the crime rate - it would fail.

Of course, there is such a thing as drug-related crime. I have spent the
past six weeks talking to current and former Class A drug users, mainly in
and around Oxford, and all of them had been in trouble.

One afternoon at the Ley Community, a long-term residential rehab unit
outside the city, I joined a group of new residents who began swapping
stories about their brushes with the law: 'Have you ever had the police
chase you from a helicopter, fixing you from the sky with that red laser
spot,' asked Linda from London. 'That's scary, man. Really scary.'

They agreed that when they were starting to 'cluck' or 'rattle' - to
experience withdrawal from heroin - their determination to acquire their
next 'raise' (the price of a deal) knew no limits. But the crimes they were
prepared to commit were relatively restricted: cheque and credit card
fraud, stealing from vehicles and, above all, shoplifting. Five years ago,
they said, most problem drug users were often burglars. No longer. 'There's
so many hard things about burglary,' Linda said. 'To begin with, you're
much more likely to get caught. And nowadays you can get a lot of bird.'

As a result of changes brought into effect in Labour's first term, even a
first offence of burglary will usually now attract a prison sentence.
Shoplifting is different. Users may easily find themselves before the
courts time and again, repeatedly given bail, a fine or probation. If they
finally do get a custodial term, it will be much shorter: a few months,
instead of years. And the one thing heroin addicts aren't is stupid -
research by Dr Marian Small, a psychologist, has found that Ley Community
residents tend be of above average intelligence.

However, this is shoplifting on an industrial scale. At the bottom end are
'trolley runs'. Here, the user's client gives him or her a shopping list:
he goes into Tesco or Sainsbury's and fills up a trolley in the normal way
- then wheels it calmly out the entrance, avoiding the checkout. Or he may
go for specific items and sell them door-to-door.

Other users work in pairs or teams, and the methods get more sophisticated,
the sums raised higher. They have learnt how to remove security tags and
how to prevent alarms going off. Sometimes, said Oxford's criminal
intelligence chief, one or more users may act as decoys to capture the
attention of security staff. Or one may go in and move valuable items away
from security cameras' sight-lines; a partner will follow and remove them
from the shop. 'Why bother stealing a suit?' asked Darren, 25. 'Far better,
if you can, to steal the whole rack.'

Five years ago Oxford had 20-30 burglaries a day. Now the average total is
four. National figures bear out the local experience. In the past 10 years
Class A drug use has exploded, yet property crime figures recorded by
police have steadily declined. Total burglaries in England and Wales fell
from an all-time peak of almost 1.4 million recorded crimes in 1992, to
950,000 in 1999.

Bailey. I weighed seven-and-a-half stones. As soon as I got there I started
to change. It helped me get my life back.'