LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS

Are UK drugs seizures really going up? The Home Office said exactly
this in a press release last week but closer inspection reveals the
most extraordinary statistical manipulation, rumbled by my colleague
at the Centre for Policy Studies, Kathy Gyngell, who blogs on it here.
Here's the scam. The Home Office boasts about "a record 186,028 drug
seizures by police and HMRC. an increase of 15 per cent'". Clear
enough. What purports to be a statistical bulletin makes the case
further, showing the steady rise of seizures going back years plus a
handy graph showing this triumphant, latent surge. But what about the
amounts seized? Here is where one smells a rat. There is no graph, no
historical data - in fact, not even a figure for the previous years.
It simply states that 3.2 tonnes of heroin was seized.

One has to look up the Excel file to see what the Home Office is
really up to, and get the real story. Quantities of Class A drugs
being seized are plummeting in Britain, and the heroin and crack haul
was the lowest since 1998. The number of seizures is going up because
more users are having their tiny stash confiscated, while more dealers
get away with it. The average size of the seizure has more than
halved. As Jenny concludes on her blog:

"So why the deception and what is, or what is not, going on? Cocaine
has flooded the streets of Britain, its consumption continues to rise
here to the highest in Europe, it has become ever cheaper and more
people are seen to use it with impunity. Anecdotal evidence tells us
that there is so much heroin around it is being re exported out of the
country. One conclusion may be that the figures have been spun to
disguise massive incompetence, a crisis at the heart of SOCA our major
enforcement agency and a breakdown of enforcement at all levels."

This is an old Brownie - the "primary metric" scam. You choose an
indicator for success, then manipulate the indicator. Then you make it
difficult for anyone to get hold of what you deem the less important
indicators. For he who sets the yardsticks wins the debate. You have
to hope the Opposition don't notice, and if they do that the can't
make their point clearly enough.

For what it's worth, here is my "primary metric" on the drugs war -
the street price. It shows the market speaking, how easy it is to get
hold of drugs in the so-called war on drugs. The Home Office wised to
up this metric and discontinued the data series in Dec07 instead
giving a meaningless range (ie ?40 to ?140 for Cannabis, with no
average figure). But you see the overall picture. Labour has fought
the drugs - and the drugs won.