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Debate |
Policy scope
administered by key workers on the ground. Faced with low testing uptake and
a medical model that was like ‘speaking in tongues’ to clients, these services
have overhauled themselves to deliver a much more flexible approach that met
people’s needs.
Sara McGrail gave an impassioned presentation on the government’s recent
Putting full recovery first
document, pointing out that although the document
has been criticised by many of the signatory agencies in private, none has
stepped back from it publicly, and it remains both an influence for
commissioning and a yardstick of the current government’s outlook.
Delegates also heard that whereas the term ‘recovery’ has been a source of
empowerment and strength in the mental health field, it has been hijacked in
the drugs field in a ‘victory of moral determinism, greed and self-righteousness
over evidence’. Instead of the language of recovery being used to empower
people who use drugs to determine their own goals and improve the range and
quality of services they receive – especially given widespread unhappiness at a
one-size-fits-all treatment system that had developed under the NTA – this
government’s idea of recovery has come to embody one imposed goal for all:
total abstinence from all drugs.
According to McGrail, this hijacking of recovery language is down to three
related factors – the broader push for austerity and funding cuts, the
development of ‘big business’ treatment charities focused less on individuals in
their care and more on tenders, contracts and profit, and several years of highly
efficient political lobbying from residential treatment providers and the
conservative Christian right. Together they have created a ‘hierarchy of
worthiness’ – with abstinence placed above all other successful treatment
outcomes – which has been translated into a system that ‘measures the success
of drug treatment by the absence of people in drug treatment’.
McGrail predicted that deaths, infections and stigma would increase as a
result of this shift, and called on delegates to recognise the weaknesses of the
previous treatment systems and maintain their focus on reducing harm. ‘We are
needed now more than ever,’ she said, emphasising the need to meet people
where they’re at, rather than where we are being told they should be.
Jamie Bridge is senior policy and operations manager at the International
Drug Policy Consortium.
POLICY SCOPE
The idea that drug policy is ‘failing’ appears to
have wide currency among MPs and
journalists.
On 8 September, a headline in The
Observer
proclaimed ‘Drug laws are not
working, believe 75 per cent of MPs’, while
noting that the poll commissioned by the UK
Drug Policy Commission found ‘little
consensus on changing existing laws’ among
MPs. The
Observer
piece concluded with a
quote from one David Cameron MP, who had
said back in 2002 as a member of the Home
Affairs Select Committee that Britain’s drug
policy ‘has been failing for decades’, explaining
that ‘drug abuse has increased massively, the number of drug-related
deaths has risen substantially and drug-related crime accounts for up to
half of all acquisitive crime’.
Now, if I was an MP or journalist or local politician with no specialist
interest in drug policy lending an ear to the ‘mood music’, I think one of the
dominant themes I would pick out was that ‘drug policy is failing’. It is a
slogan that unites those left-wing liberals (and right-wing libertarians) who
lobby for reform of drug laws with those social conservatives who attack the
legacy of our drug treatment system – although, of course, they have
opposing views of what is failing and why.
Is it true? Not really. As Roger Howard, chief executive of the UK Drug
Policy Commission, commented in The
Observer
, ‘drug policy in the UK has
had some good achievements, like keeping HIV rates low among drug users
and getting more people into treatment’, adding ‘but it’s now clear to many
people that we need some fresh thinking’. Fresh thinking is a good thing, but
that doesn’t mean a fresh start.
Consider David Cameron’s charge sheet from 2002. Is drug abuse
‘increasing massively’? On the contrary, the evidence says that drug abuse is
now falling. According to the 2010-11
British crime survey
, last-year use of
any illicit drug fell from 11.1 per cent in 1996 to 8.8 per cent in 2010-11, and
among 16 to 24-year-olds from 29.7 per cent in 1996 to 20.4 per cent in
2010-11. In 2010-11 there was also a fall of nearly 10,000 in the number of
heroin and crack users coming into treatment over a two-year period.
Are drug-related deaths rising? The Office for National Statistics says there
was a fall of 3.5 per cent in England and Wales in 2011 compared to the
previous year, the third consecutive year that the numbers were down. What
about acquisitive crime? It’s falling, and there is overwhelming evidence that
drug treatment reduces offending and reoffending (see the NTA’s
Treat
addiction, cut crime
for chapter and verse).
Now not everyone will accept all of these figures at face value and there
are no grounds for complacency, but this is far from the picture of policy
failure that is getting across to many politicians. At a time when we need to
be making the case for investment in drug and alcohol services in tough
financial times, we need to be talking about our successes too. At the
moment they can sometimes seem to be ‘hidden in plain view’.
Marcus Roberts is director of policy and membership at DrugScope, the
national membership organisation for the drugs field, www.drugscope.org.uk.
The popular mantra of drug policy
failure is drowning out our
successes, says
Marcus Roberts
CHANGE THE RECORD