DRUGS TSAR VICTIM OF OUR STALINIST PRISONS

The Deadly Twist In Hague's Cultural Cringe

To the conservative mind, the user of drugs is fallen. The original sin -
the first taste, puff, sniff or stab with a needle - damns you to be a
drooling addict forever. Drug prohibition has become a coercive instrument
for the mass intimidation of the young and the poor (113,000 were convicted
for drugs offences and 7,200 were jailed in 1997) because its supporters
insist no dose is too small and those who cannot or will not 'just say no'
must be punished for their weakness.

There are millions who know the laws that have followed are a lie.
Statistics are unreliable, but the 1996 British Crime Survey found that 45
per cent of the 16- to 29-year-olds its researchers questioned were
prepared to admit to taking an illegal drug. The majority had tried
cannabis and it had not led to heroin. Eleven per cent had taken LSD or
Ecstasy and managed to survive. Five per cent had sniffed cocaine without
becoming slaves to Bolivian marching powder or, worse, being forced to join
the Groucho Club. One per cent said they had tried heroin and, again, most
carried on without ill effect. As cautious people don't generally cough to
a crime to a stranger with a clipboard, I think we can take these figures
as underestimates.

Liberals often say that the unwinnable war on drugs is cruel and vacuous
and risks destroying respect for the judicial system. What is less noticed
is that the upholders of order are allowing crime to flourish. If they were
to admit that the fortunes of gangsters were made by the few, not the many,
they would have to concede that the majority who try cannabis find it
remarkably depressing and carry on as before. By condemning all drug use,
they ignore the addicted minority whose criminal records are astounding.

The penal reform group Nacro has produced a digest of the available
evidence on drug-fuelled offending, and although you sort of knew it
before, seeing the studies in one place is an antidote to complacency. In
Brighton and Derby arrested addicts admitted to spending about UKP400 a
week on average - a few needed UKP2,000. Virtually all their income was
coming from crime. As fences offer about a third of a stolen good's real
value, the average Brighton addict would have to steal UKP1,200 worth of
videos each and every week. A survey of 1,100 people on drug treatment
courses found they had committed 70,000 crimes in three months. A second
found cocaine addicts in Lancashire spending 90 per cent of their money on
crack.

Addiction makes you a danger to yourself and everyone you meet and there is
an enormous public interest in rehabilitating the afflicted. Prison
sentences stop the crime sprees for a while, of course, but do not halt
drug taking. Despite dogs, CCTV cameras and the most humiliating searches,
oppressive security unprecedented in British penal history has failed to
prevent dealing in cells. In What's Wrong With Women's Prisons , published
last year, Angela Devlin described the consequences for what had been the
least barbarous corner of the jail system.

Addicts can be 'unbelievably ruthless', she wrote. They tore into women if
they were convinced they were hiding drugs in their vaginas. A chaplain
showed Devlin an isolation block at an open prison. 'The other day a girl
had to be put in there because she had gone absolutely berserk,' he said,
'and smashed every stick of furniture in her room. They were after getting
the drugs off her and, well, they'd used forks on the poor soul.'

Given that Britain's reactionary elite is devoted to maintaining itself in
power with populist gestures, cynics might have expected Ministers to
ignore the urgent need to cut crime by treating addicts - the policy may
work, but it does not play well in the press - and impose ever sterner and
more useless punishments. New Labour started badly by appointing a retired
copper, Keith Hellawell, as 'Drugs Tsar'. The ludicrous title (do these
people know what happened to the Emperor of all the Russias?) came from the
United States where penal Tsarism has led to 520,000 being jailed for drugs
offences, and where you do not have to be a Marxist to see Soviet-style
mass imprisonment as a deliberate attempt to cower the unruly lower orders.

Yet rational scepticism was misplaced. The Government rejected the horrors
of the American gulag. Hellawell ruled that punishment was failing and
dozens of initiatives to treat addicts inside and outside jail poured out
of the Home Office and the Department of Health. In the dirigiste way of
New Labour, targets were set. The proportion of young people using heroin
and cocaine was to be cut by 50 per cent by 2008, all hardened drug takers
were to be in treatment by the same date and 67 per cent of recreational
users of Ecstasy were to have a hallucinogenic-inspired reverie about
Stephen Byers, a pot of Swarfega and a stand-in Newsnight presenter by the
next eclipse.

Even if you find the precise targets a little silly and accept that I made
the last one up, the Government's proposals showed it was serious in one
area at least, and justified those New Labour idealists who asserted that
all the micro-policy meetings at the Institute for Public Policy Research,
where the very paint seemed to peel from the walls to escape the tedium of
the timid discourse, were worthwhile. In a small but vital way, a Blairite
administration would make life better. Our conservative political culture
appeared to have taken a wise and radical turn.This week Hellawell will
attend what looks like being a very chilly meeting with the managers of the
Prison Service. The plans to break the cycle of addiction, crime and
gangsterism are being sabotaged, not out of malice but necessity. Reform
and the right-wing logic of the Third Way are incompatible.

Fifty prisons are meant to start helping addicts this year. Residential
units are to be set aside where inmates will work to get a grip on their
lives free from the sales patter of dealers. As about three quarters of
convicted drug users get out of the criminal justice system and offend
again, the desire to tackle the toughest cases might have saved hundreds of
thousands from being victims of crime.

The Prison Service's research showed that charities with long experience of
the hard, unrewarding work of persuading an addict to give up had the
people who could get the best results. Hellawell extracted a promise that
36 of the 50 treatment programmes would be run by outside agencies. The
promise has now been broken.

Governors have been given UKP70 million to deal with drugs at the same time
as their overall budgets were cut to meet Tony Blair's and Gordon Brown's
insistence that Britain carries on with Tory tax-and-spend strategies. The
governors know that their brave political masters will ruin their careers
if there's a riot or an escape and are using the drugs money to hold on to
warders. There's nothing wrong in theory with training officers to counsel
addicts. But in practice the Prison Service has no training programme or
strategy to give them. All it is doing is allowing inexperienced uniformed
staff to be reclassified as treatment officers so that governors can retain
the manpower they need to keep control. If anything goes wrong - and in
Britain's bulging jails crisis is perpetual - the treatment programmes will
be stopped while the officers rush off to firefight.

Hellawell is said to be prepared to cancel the entire project rather than
let the ineffectual compromise go ahead. One of New Labour's few breaks
with conservatism is about to crumble into a dust so sterile you won't even
be able to cheer yourself up by shoving it in your nose.

This notebook has had many stonking scoops over the years and only the
conspiracies of the Downing Street Policy Unit and other perverts have
stopped it winning a cabinet full of awards. Perhaps our greatest coup was
the revelation in 1997 of the Hague Page, the saddest site on the web.
'Hello fellow surfers,' William began before listing his achievements as a
statesman including winning 'public speaking and debating competitions
throughout the world!' being 'closely involved in the first major
fund-raising campaign by a British university!' and being married in the
'House of Commond', which was nearly right.

Hague has since shown himself true to his shallow roots in the giddy world
of management consultancy by rejecting the part of novice net nerd and
rebranding himself - 10 times, according to Labour.

The most revealing shifts in perception management have been the campaigns
to make the him seem a warm and gentle politician. Michael Portillo has hit
on the same unlikely tactic and the quiet war between their far from gentle
supporters explains why so much leaked Tory dirt on Ashcroft and Hague's
media strategies is piling up in Westminster.

The caring Conservative is tough on the outside but tender on the inside,
like badly barbecued offal. Thus last week's anti-Hague leak from Tory
Central Office showed his wife and spin doctor scheming to have William
overcoming 'his lacklustre image' by posing for the cameras in Judo pyjamas
with Army martial arts experts, but not actually going on to kick their
heads in. As with Blairism, the strategy comes from the United States,
whose glories always provoke a shuddering cultural cringe in our
politicians and journalists. Hague received instruction from George Bush
junior, governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate, who is
lauded for inventing 'compassionate conservatism'.

In the current issue of the New York Nation magazine, Christopher Hitchens
points out that no one wants to mention that Bush has compassionately
signed the death warrants of 100 Texans. When Christian fundamentalists
protested that a white girl should be spared because she had repented and
found their god they raised the terrifying prospect that Bush would be
accused of racism (the next women scheduled to die was black). With
exquisite even-handedness, he killed them both.

We should be thankful that a humane Conservative leader who takes lessons
from such a man will never enter Downing Street, but worry that his mentor,
who hopes to control the world's largest nuclear stockpile, is on overly
familiar terms with death.