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drinkanddrugsnews
| February 2015
For the stories behind the news
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
L
ast week justice secretary Chris
Grayling announced a tough new
set of punishments for prisoners
using or smuggling new
psychoactive substances (NPS),
prompted by fears that their use is partly
responsible for ‘increasing violence in our
prison estate’ (see news story, page 4).
Whether the punishments will affect levels
of use remains to be seen, but the fears do
appear to be well founded. According to a HM
Inspectorate of Prisons report on HMP
Dartmoor, safety at the prison has been
compromised by ‘the too-ready availability of
prohibited drugs’ including synthetic
cannabinoids ‘not detectable with current
testing methods’, while a report on HMP
Altcourse found that assaults and bullying
incidents were ‘rising sharply’, with 38 serious
assaults in the four months prior to the
inspection. ‘Gang issues and the availability of
drugs’ – particularly synthetic cannabinoids
like ‘Black Mamba’ – were a ‘significant factor
in much of the violence,’ it states, while the
substances had also ‘been the cause of regular
hospital admissions’.
Altcourse is one of the three prisons – all
run by private sector organisations – to record
the most drug finds in 2012-13, according to
figures from the Ministry of Justice. The same
figures show that the overall number of drug
seizures in prisons in England and Wales has
increased by 800 to 4,500 since 2010-11, while
one of the key findings of the latest DrugScope
Street drug survey
is the increasing use levels of
synthetic cannabinoids – alongside misuse of
prescription drugs – in prison environments.
The scale of the NPS problem – particularly
in terms of cannabinoids – has started to
become apparent over the last six to 12
months, national officer at the Prison
Governors Association, Mark Icke, tells
DDN
.
‘They were being used before that but
probably we weren’t as on top of it as we
should have been,’ he says. ‘But prisoners are
starting to talk to us a bit more about it now
so our intelligence systems are starting to
gather more information, and as that
intelligence churns out you start to get a
better picture.’
So how much of a problem do these drugs
represent? ‘It’s one of the biggest problems in
our current history,’ he says. ‘A lot of the
incidents of violence and sickness are related to
the use of legal highs, for want of a better
expression. It causes us problems with violence
and with trying to run an orderly regime. Trying
to get prisoners to work and education can
sometimes be quite difficult because they’re ill
or tired, so it causes us huge problems. But the
violence is the bit that bothers me the most.’
And is that violence because of the
associated drug debts or the unpredictable
effects of the substances themselves – or
both? ‘Both, absolutely,’ he states. ‘Incidences
of violence have increased even over the last
three months, and when you start to drill
down and look at the circumstances there will
either be some kind of hooch background, or,
mainly, the legal highs.’
When people take traditional drugs, at
least they – and staff – can be reasonably sure
what the effects are likely to be, whereas
stories of users of substances like ‘Black
Mamba’ having fits and other adverse
reactions abound. ‘Funnily enough, I was
talking to a prisoner this morning who said, “if
you smoke a joint you’re going to sit in your
cell and have a chillout and play your game,
have five minutes to yourself,”’ says Icke. ‘But
he said that when people were using this
stuff, you’re on edge – as he put it, “people
who think they’ve got snakes for arms and
want to fight the world”. It puts everyone on
edge and increases that level of violence.’
Another issue that’s creating problems for
staff is that the drugs are being used by
people who wouldn’t necessarily have been
part of a prison’s usual drug-using population.
‘The reason why some people don’t use
drugs in prison is because we test for them,’
he says. ‘They don’t want to affect their
sentence planning because they’ve got
families to go home to or jobs to look forward
to, or they’re trying to work through to a new
category – a B to a C cat – or impress a parole
board. So they won’t use drugs. But we can’t
test for these on MDT [mandatory drug
testing], so by using them you won’t have any
consequences. There’s less risk.’
While there are plans to expand MDT to
include NPS testing – once those tests become
available – the fact remains that NPS are also
easier to smuggle than traditional drugs. But
while drug services inside and outside the
prison estate are struggling to keep up with
the bewildering array of new substances,
support is available for prisoners who develop
problems. ‘When we identify it, we do refer
them,’ says Icke. ‘Each prison will have a
different department, and in the ones I’m
associated with it’s RAPt. We’ll refer the
prisoners, or they can self-refer, but I think the
best help in this situation is education –
whether that’s peer-to-peer or staff trying to
get the message out there.
‘I also believe there could be deaths linked
to this,’ he states. ‘It’s harder to detect and
people are less willing to talk about it, but I
believe there have been deaths, and that
bothers me greatly. This isn’t about media
headlines – it’s about trying to prevent violence
and death. We’re really worried about it.’
Inspection reports at
www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk
DrugScope street drug survey at
www.drugscope.org.uk
PSYCHOACTIVE CHALLENGE
New psychoactive substances don’t show up in mandatory prison drug tests and their use
level in jails appears to be soaring, with worrying consequences.
DDN
reports
Legal highs,
such as the
synthetic
cannabinoid
‘Black Mamba’
are becoming
more readily
available.
‘It causes us
problems with
violence and with
trying to run an
orderly regime...
But the violence is
the bit that bothers
me the most.’