NATIONAL PLAN THAT ONLY FUELS THE FIRE

Continuing our major investigation into the criminal justice system,
Nick Davies exposes problems of prohibition which has seen the
government accidentally encourage drug-related crime and distort its
treatment strategy

What would you do if your house was on fire and the fire brigade
turned up and started drenching it with petrol? Late last year, the
Home Office finally acknowledged what any specialist detective or
drugs worker could have told them at any time in the last 10 years:
that Britain's uncontrolled black market in heroin and cocaine has
expanded to include a vigorous market in crack cocaine. Like all drugs
markets, this is spawning property crime as its consumers search for
funds. This one also has spawned a peculiarly malign degree of
violence and social chaos from the Yardie gangsters who dominate it.

In 1996, the national criminal intelligence service (NCIS) warned that
crack had spread to such an extent that it represented "a threat to
the security and stability of the nation". Six years later, with
politically sensitive crime figures heading the wrong way and its own
research finally confirming that six out of eight sample markets were
"awash" with crack, the Home Office in December 2002 produced its
national crack plan. This is where the fireman gets out his petrol.

The Home Office has organised a national and international effort to
disrupt the supply of crack. To anybody who works in Whitehall and
understands little about drugs markets, that sounds like an obvious
move: cut the supply, cut the consumption, cut the crime committed by
consumers. But is that really what will happen? We have put this
question to officers of just about every law enforcement agency in the
country and received the same response: a blank shrug.

If you reduce the supply of a commodity on a free market, its price
rises. Does consumption then fall? It depends on what economists call
"elasticity of demand". If the commodity is non-essential (gold
watches), consumption falls dramatically, ie its demand is elastic. If
the commodity is more important (school shoes), consumption falls less
dramatically because its demand is relatively inelastic. In the first
year of GCSE economics, students are taught that the demand for all
goods is somewhat elastic, with one notorious exception - addictive
drugs.

UKP3.45bn Thefts

If the national crack plan succeeds in reducing supply, it will
increase the price of crack. If the demand from crack addicts remains
the same, the amount of money which crack users need to find will
increase. The National Economic Research Association two years ago
estimated that, on the available data, the street market in crack
cocaine was worth UKP1.8bn. The NCIS estimates that users fund at
least 48% of that (UKP864m) by stealing goods which are sold on the
black market for between 20% and 25% of their real value: ie crack
users are stealing at least UKP3.45bn of property a year. On that
basis, if the Home Office succeeds in raising the price of crack by
just 5%, they will inflict an extra UKP172.5m of property crime on the
communities they are pretending to protect.

(In an extreme case, if supply were cut to the point where it could no
longer meet some of the demand, the result would be the same but by a
more complex route: if users can't buy crack in Liverpool, they go to
Manchester, pushing up the price there; or they switch temporarily to
other stimulants, pushing up their price as well. In any case, they
have to commit more crime.)

There is a pool of published research that warns of the perverse
effects of attacking the supply of illicit drugs. Apart from
highlighting increases in price and crime, this research also warns
that taking out an established supply network can stimulate new
suppliers (the classic case is the bust of Turkish heroin dealers
through the French Connection to New York in the 1970s, which sent
street prices rocketing and brought in at least three new national
sources of black market heroin to the US).

There can even be perverse effects which are beneficial: in the last
18 months, police in Bristol have arrested nearly 800 street dealers;
they have made no discernible impact on drug supply or price but they
have cut burglary, mugging and car crime dramatically, almost
certainly because the dealers are also users who are involved in
property crime. But the research warns that even this beneficial
effect can turn bad: an open street market is like a shop window for
local criminals, allowing police to make relatively easy arrests; but
if they arrest too many, they will drive the market underground, the
dealers will leave the streets and use phones to set up deals, making
it more difficult to arrest these prolific offenders.

The national crack plan cites 15 different research papers - but never
refers to these published expert warnings on the perverse effects of
attacking supply. Since the departure of the "drugs tsar" Keith
Hellawell, there is no institutional link between the attack on supply
(which is run by a Whitehall committee known as CIDA) and the attack
on demand, run by the national treatment agency. The new national plan
does call for more crack users to be put into treatment, but it never
once warns police of the dangers of cutting supply without cutting
demand by the same amount. And all of its references to treatment are
compromised by a strategy which is not only mismanaged but still
fundamentally misconceived.

The whole plan reflects the underlying weakness which has condemned UK
drugs policy to failure since the late 1960s: it is based on the
ideology of prohibition. It assumes that the object of drugs strategy
must be to separate the drugs from their users, failing to recognise
that the result is to generate an ever-expanding black market which
produces the deaths and illnesses and crime and disorder which the
strategy is pretending to reduce.

This weakness pollutes official thinking not only about law
enforcement but also about treatment, which continues to be distorted
by a drive for abstinence at the expense of more effective
alternatives. Last year, Terry Byrne, head of law enforcement at
Customs and Excise, told the home affairs select committee: "There is
no sign that the overall attack on the supply side is reducing
availability."

The latest Home Office research estimates the economic and social
costs of class A drugs as up to UKP17.4bn a year, 88% of which is
directly related to crime. Thus far, the best that can be said about
the national crack plan is that it has not triggered a new crime boom
simply because, like all previous prohibition, it has failed.

And yet the government continues to allow its strategy to be distorted
by what it calls "maintaining prohibition". Two years ago, the
Guardian, with Channel 4, ran a high-profile series exposing the
weaknesses of prohibition and arguing for the prescription of heroin.
As a result, the home affairs select committee launched an inquiry,
called the Guardian to give evidence and concluded that there should
be "a substantial increase" in the prescription of heroin to users.

The new home secretary, David Blunkett, was prepared to be bold and
made it policy that heroin should be available to all those with a
clinical need. A small group of officials wanted to launch immediate
pilots, but they were obstructed by civil servants in the Department
of Health and the Home Office who buried the initiative in a working
party which took 20 months to report. The working party became a
flashpoint in the debate about prohibition.

On one side was a group which argued that Britain must move down the
Swiss route. They won several crucial victories: the government now
accepts that heroin should be available on prescription in every area
of the country; that this prescription should be long-term; that the
number of users with prescriptions should be increased. These are
potentially the most important change in official thinking on drugs in
the last 30 years. However, the working party also included civil
servants who, in an excess of caution, resisted full implementation of
the principles.

Methadone Danger

These officials defended the existing policy of prescribing oral
methadone to users. The reformist group argued that methadone should
be part of the strategy but that it is more dangerous than heroin,
more difficult to give up and, most important, that a significant
proportion of heroin addicts do not like it and will not be diverted
by it. The officials, however, claimed that there was an evidence base
which showed that methadone was a more effective treatment than
heroin. In private, Whitehall sources admit that this is not true. The
reality is that, because Britain has allowed the limited prescription
of methadone for 30 years, there is a mass of evidence that it can
work for some users but, when it comes to comparing it with heroin,
there is simply a shortage of evidence from the UK.

The officials refuse to be moved by the results from Switzerland,
Holland and Germany on the grounds that their samples are too small,
even though the Swiss, for example, studied 1,969 users, whereas the
Home Office launched its arrest referral scheme from completed
research into only 50 users.

The result is that, in new guidance not yet published, the government
is embarking on a national programme to prescribe heroin which is
hedged around with the kind of bureaucratic restrictions which are
already choking the whole treatment strategy: all users must first try
and fail with oral methadone; prescriptions will be available only
from specialist clinics and a handful of licensed doctors; for at
least three months, new users will have to use their heroin in front
of a nurse several times a day, regardless of the impact this will
have on their ability to work or travel. It is not clear whether the
government will provide any new money for the programme, nor whether
the Home Office drugs inspectorate will license enough new doctors to
generate a real increase or whether the whole programme will be
diverted into a small group of pilot studies before it is rolled out.

At the moment, in England and Wales, there are only 440 heroin addicts
with prescriptions for a clean supply of their drug. The Home Office
told the home affairs select committee that 1.8 million people in this
country have used heroin or cocaine, of whom more than 250,000 were
"problematic users" who were likely to be committing crime on a daily
basis.

The methadone research on which the Whitehall officials based their
policy suggests that some 30% to 40% of users will not respond to
methadone, ie, if the policy focuses only on problematic users, there
is a potential demand for between 70,000 and 100,000 heroin
prescriptions. Whitehall sources say the current plan is to prescribe
to only 4,500 of them.

The irony is that the reformist countries are adopting a strategy
created in Britain, which for 40 years allowed all GPs to prescribe
opiates to thousands of users, most of whom were therapeutic addicts
who had become addicted to morphine after operations. A return to this
British model offers the possibility of safe, stable, constructive
lives for users who are currently condemned by the black market to
sickness, misery and harassment by the police; it opens the door to a
dramatic cut in the crime which these users inflict on their
communities; it promises the chance of success for the government's
strategy, particularly for its arrest referral scheme and its drug
treatment and testing orders. But first, the fireman has to tell the
truth about what he is doing to the fire.