NATIONAL DRUG AGENCY PLANNED BY STRAW

Jack Straw will today unveil plans to improve Britain's network for
the rehabilitation and regulation of 50,000 drug offenders a year
through the creation of a national treatment agency, complete with
Blairite league tables.

Ministers are avoiding direct comparison with agencies like Ofsted,
which enforces better performance on schools, where locally delivered
services vary dramatically. But they hope to impose market disciplines
and national standards on a previously loose set of
arrangements.

The home secretary's initiative comes on a potentially embarrassing
day when Judge Gerald Butler's report is published into the
circumstances in which customs and excise botched Britain's biggest
drugs trial, of two men caught on a Caribbean yacht with 334 million UKP
worth of cocaine. The high court threw it out.

Straw aides said they were unaware of that coincidence as they rolled
out legislation planned for November's Queen's speech.

It will allow the new agency, which will be jointly funded by the Home
Office, Department of Health and local authorities, to impose higher
standards on voluntary and charitable drug treatment centres and act
as a clearing house for the most demanding cases.

Tony Blair used his controversial speech to the WI yesterday to stress
that "if we don't deal with drugs, we don't deal with crime," a theme
Mr Straw will hammer home again today.

"Every crime is a breach of trust, a rupture of the fabric of rights
and responsibility which binds our society together," he will say.

The home secretary will signal renewed government determination to
tackle drug related crime by revealing that delays in getting
offenders and other class A drug users - of heroin and cocaine - into
treatment is having a disastrous effect on theft and burglary. To
underline his point Mr Straw will quote a study which revealed that 80
addicts committed 10,000 offences to feed their drug habits in a
single month before they entered treatment.

"Waiting lists may be days or weeks in some areas, but months or even
years in others. For many people every day they are kept waiting is
another day they are out thieving to raise money for their next fix,"
Mr Straw will say.

Ministers have already set in train a 10-year strategy which includes
a new police power to drug test people suspected of certain drug
related crimes and seven year sentences for drug dealers convicted for
a third time.

Local drug action teams will still be involved in treatment, but they
will have to submit to national standards. The new agency will become
a clearing house for the 2,000 residential rehabilitation places for
offenders and long term addicts whose cases are the toughest.

Picking up on the much photographed face of the actress Daniella
Westbrook, whose nose has been destroyed by cocaine abuse, the home
secretary will say that drug dealing is "an industry that respects
neither wealth nor privilege. On the one hand we read of a young TV
star with everything to live for, with her looks eaten away by years
of cocaine abuse.

"On the other hand there are addicts dead in the the past two weeks on
some of Glasgow's poorest estates from a rogue batch of heroin. Two
significantly different stories, but with one very clear message:
drugs destroy lives."