The Arithmetic of Crime Part 2 - Drugs

There is probably more well-intentioned nonsense spoken about drugs policy than any other topic save the selection of the England football squad. It's part of the British Condition (similar to the Human Condition but more complicated) to polarise any debate into two 'opposing' positions, regardless of how subtle or nuanced the matter actually is.

I'm not going to deal, in this post, with the legalisation question. That deserves its own post / book / lifetime to untangle.

What I'd like to address here is the arithmetic of drugs.

According to the Home Office, in 2006 the value of the illegal drugs trade was £5.3 billion, give or take a billion. Numbers on this scale make the so-called 'war on drugs' seem like a fool's errand : surely we're destined to lose, because such riches will always attract new players?

I think it would be wrong to despair. What we really need is a clear understanding of what 'success' might look like. Let me spell out a few success criteria, and then discuss the route we might take to achieve them :

1. It will be a good day when young people feel relaxed about declining drugs - when peer pressure no longer operates in favour of the pusher. We have gone through a sea change in public perception of drugs. Young people in particular regard drug-taking as normal, an everyday part of life. This might not be such an issue if the range of drugs wasn't as wide as it is - every few months we see a new drug, or a variant on an old one, hit the streets. The consequences are utterly unknown, yet young people cheerfully sign up to the latest fad.

2. We need to reach a point where dealers and potential dealers feel that the risks outweigh the reward, and move into other areas of work

3. We need a healthy slice of that £5.3 billion to make its way back into the legitimate economy

4. Existing addicts become ex-addicts at a faster rate than new addicts are formed, contracting the market

1. How do we re-attach stigma to drug use? Only by very visible conviction - young people need to see - particularly in clubs - that there is a very real risk of being arrested and prosecuted for buying illicit drugs. A bit tough on the sacrificial lambs who get arrested, but the purpose isn't really to change their behaviour so much as the behaviour of the next generation coming through. If you had seen a drugs bust at your local club, and somebody from your town ended up in the dock - somebody just like you - this might just give you the ability to say 'no thanks' when you're next offered drugs. It won't deter the already-keen drug users, but we do need to help young people to resist peer pressure.

2. The only way we can deter local dealers is by stripping the assets, quite ruthlessly, of every drug dealer at whatever level we can find. We already have the legal power to do this - it needs to be enforced perhaps 100 times as frequently as at present. The Asset Recovery Agency was set up to achieve this, but sadly cost £65 million to run and only ever retrieved £35 million from criminals. SOCA is now tasked with continuing the fight, but I don't think anybody's holding their breath. The problem, as usual, is in will. Massive organisations are hopelessly bureacratic and self-serving. Let's devolve the powers to local police teams and let them fight the drugs dealers on their own patches. Some will do a great job and some will fail, but across the UK we should be able to at least begin to change the arithmetic.

3. See 2.

4. I would like to see a legislative change with regard to drug users. For certain drugs - notably, not marijuana which I think is a special case - we should automatically force anybody failing a blood test to attend a 3 month treatment programme at a secure facility. A blood test should be legally enforceable in a range of situations where police have reasonable grounds - we need to make it easy for police to order a test. This would be immensely expensive, but would achieve three outcomes :

• 3 months when they're not stealing to fund their habit
• a chance that some will be helped by the treatment
• 3 months when their dealers are going without some income

We have to be careful that we don't inadvertently incentivise dealers to 'grow' new addicts to make up the shortfall in their income. If we have established a ruthless process of asset stripping we have a fighting chance of making local drug-dealing - the face to face deals at the end of the chain - unprofitable. If we can achieve this, then we have a real chance of contracting the entire drugs economy.

It is not inevitable that the number of problem drug users will increase. It is perfectly possible to bring this number down, year on year, along with the tsunami of crime which each addict is responsible for.