Britain’s fight against drugs ‘a total failure’

Devastating report reveals soaring use among the young

Denis Campbell and Anushka Asthana
The Observer

Government attempts to persuade thousands of young people to stay away from drugs have failed and done nothing to curb the soaring popularity of illegal substances, a devastating report will warn this week.

The number of young people using cocaine and cannabis has increased rapidly over the past 20 years despite high-profile campaigns, such as the £9m ‘Frank’ initiative aimed at 11 to 15-year-olds, according to an in-depth examination of official efforts to tackle Britain’s chronic drug problem. It is also expected to claim that Britain’s ‘unusually severe drug problem compared with that of our European neighbours’ is linked to social and economic deprivation, that punitive laws have had little effect and that police efforts to disrupt the drugs trade have also failed.

The report will be launched on Wednesday by the new UK Drugs Policy Commission, whose members include distinguished figures from the worlds of health, policing, drugs research and academia. They include David Blakey, a former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, Annette Dale-Perera of the NHS-funded National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and Professor Colin Blakemore, who leads the Medical Research Council.

The study, ‘An Analysis of UK Drugs Policy’, has been written by two internationally respected experts, Professor Peter Reuter of Maryland University in the US and Alex Stevens, senior researcher at the European Institute of Social Services at Kent University.

Their findings are a scathing indictment of decades of education, prevention and awareness-raising campaigns intended to warn youngsters about the perils of narcotics. The three main strategies into which successive governments have ploughed tens of millions of pounds - mass media campaigns such as ‘heroin screws you up’ in the 1980s, initiatives in schools aimed at pupils as young as seven and targeting of vulnerable groups - have made little or no difference, it says.

‘Prevention is cited as the main policy area aiming to reduce drug initiation and continued use. The policy is predicated on the assumption that prevention efforts reduce drug use, but there is as yet no clear evidence showing that prevention has had this effect in the UK,’ the authors conclude.

The National Institute of Clinical Excellence recently drew similar conclusions about the usefulness of drugs prevention campaigns.

‘It now seems that what might be termed “recreational” drug use has become firmly established as an experience that many young people will go through’ because consumption of illicit substances is now so common in their age group, the document says. The failure to deter growing levels of drug use has contributed to Britain developing the most chronic drug problem in Western Europe, according to the report.

The report cites an array of official statistics charting the steady growth in Britain’s drugs culture. For example, according to the 2005 British Crime Survey, 40.4 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds have used drugs at some point in their lifetime, as have 49 per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds, 51.6 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds and 45.8 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds.

While cannabis use by young people has fallen recently, it remains around 50 per cent and consumption of cocaine has increased. The Home Office last night rejected the new body’s findings. A spokesman said research showed that giving young people information about drugs, rather than adopting a ‘just say no’ approach, was a more effective way of warning them about the dangers.

‘The British Crime Survey shows that drug use has fallen by 16 per cent since 1998 and drug use among adults has fallen by 21 per cent. We are determined to build on this progress by continuing to take more drugs off our streets, put more dealers behind bars and make sure young people are informed about the harms drugs cause’, he said.

But Peter Walker, a former secondary school head teacher who pioneered random drug testing at his school and is now a Whitehall adviser on drugs, last night agreed that government policy on drugs had not had enough of an impact.

‘What has been done has not been as effective as the public or the government would like it to be,’ he said. But while he accepted that ‘methods of prevention are not good enough,’ he dismissed the notion that prevention could not work.

Danny Kushlick, director of the pro-legalisation Transform Drugs Policy Foundation, said the new study backed his view that attempts to discourage drug use were pointless. ‘We know from evidence that misuse of drugs is related significantly to social ill-being and social deprivation. You cannot deal with that stuff with education and prevention or through teaching younger and younger children. You deal with it by redistributing wealth and improving wellbeing.’

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