BLAIR 'MUST SCRAP FAILED DRUG TACTICS'

Think-Tank Says Recreational Use Does No Long-Term Harm

Gaby Hinsliff, chief political correspondent Sunday March 24, 2002 The Observer

Tony Blair's war on drugs has been a 'resounding failure' and should be
scrapped, according to a new report which concluded that recreational drug
use does most people no long term harm.

Anti-drugs education in schools should be abandoned and Police Commander
Brian Paddick's experiment with decriminalising cannabis in Lambeth
extended, says a controversial paper by the Foreign Policy Centre
thinktank. It also backs the creation of licensed 'shooting galleries',
where users can legally inject under supervision, and providing kits to
test the purity of drugs like ecstasy in nightclubs and all-night petrol
stations.

The report - published this week and written by policy expert Rowena Young,
partner of Geoff Mulgan, head of Downing Street's delivery unit - will
spark major debate.

It comes as the Home Office is rewriting the targets set three years ago
under its anti-drugs strategy, a review expected to lead to more focus on
harm reduction and treatment programmes.

The Foreign Policy Centre report argues that the 'vast majority' of young
people who have experimented with drugs - such as weekend clubbers who
occasionally take ecstasy, or City traders using cocaine to keep alert -
'are able to use drugs, even the so-called hard drugs, without long-term
damage'. The Government should focus instead on problem users who cannot
cope, through treatment programmes tackling underlying causes of addiction
such as poverty or family trauma.

'Both here and in the US the war on drugs has been a resounding failure.
Rarely in the history of wars have so many achieved so little at such a
high cost,' it concludes.

Government policy is hampered by 'an unhealthy cocktail of acute public
anxiety, simple nostrums, tabloid bile, vested interests and political
opportunism', it adds, calling on Ministers to launch a more honest debate.

The Government strategy is also expected to be heavily criticised in a
report from the Commons Home Affairs select committee next month.

Despite the tough approach piloted in Labour's first term, heroin deaths in
Britain doubled and cocaine deaths quadrupled between 1995 and 2000, the
Foreign Policy Centre report notes, while the number of 'problem' users
doubles every four years.

Yet the report argues too much attention is wasted on recreational users
who still function normally at work and socially, and whose habits are
'generally manageable and fit within a lifestyle of clubbing and friendship
networks, which usually prevent over-indulgence'.

Such people often give up by themselves if the habit gets out of hand,
according to Young, a development director at the drug treatment agency
Kaleidoscope. 'People who use coke in the City for example, even quite a
lot of coke, often manage to stop themselves because when they start to see
the cost they will bring it into check - perhaps because their partners are
getting fed up with it or they are starting to realise it is affecting
their relationship with their kids,' she said.

Young said the hounding of Paddick showed 'how we have seen a number of
individuals go by the wayside when they do try to act on the evidence' over
recreational drug use.

Education programmes should concentrate on harm re-education, such as using
clean needles to inject, the report adds, warning that 'Just Say No'-style
classes in schools 'take up a large slice of the drugs budget but with
little or no evidence that it is effective, and strong anecdotal evidence
that patients treat it with contempt'.

Rehabilitation treatment, championed by many pro-legalisation campaigners,
risks becoming an 'expensive revolving door' with high relapse rates unless
social problems driving addiction are tackled alongside chemical
dependency. Risk factors likely to make a user slide into danger include
past family bereavement, loneliness, lack of hope for the future, poverty
and feeling divorced from the mainstream.

The report says decriminalisation is not an easy answer and will call for
tougher drugs laws in some areas, including stiffer penalties for adults
supplying children, using drugs in front of children or involving them in
dealing.