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The battle to tackle drug addiction is not lost

The debate about legalisation is a distraction.

By Paul Hayes Published 16 August 2012 11:36

Opium poppy buds in an Afghan field. Photograph: Getty Images

It is impossible not to be moved by the plight of communities in Mexico and other drug-producing countries across the world. Crime and violence related to the supply of drugs are without a doubt causing extreme grief to citizens and governments. But reaching to decriminalise or legalise those drugs in the hope that it will overcome those communities’ deep-rooted problems offers them a false prospectus, and overlooks the nuanced picture of drug use and addiction which in this country at least, is in decline.

For many producer nations, drugs are one of a number of complex factors contributing to adverse conditions within their countries. Legalisation would compound the devastating effects of drug use and the drugs trade, as former UN head of drugs and crime Antonio Maria Costa argues, especially if the structural issues that leave those states without the resources to tackle the causes and consequences of their drug problem are not addressed.

The legal framework in this country does not prevent those with drug problems from being treated humanely and effectively. Drug treatment is freely and quickly available via the NHS in England, and offers users the prospect of stability and recovery from the chaotic lives inherent in addiction. Over the last six years, 340,000 mainly heroin users have got help for their addiction, of whom around one third successfully completed their treatment, which compares favourably to the international evidence of recovery. Addicts are treated as patients in the health service, and if there are other crimes to account for, addiction treatment is offered for offenders in the community and in prison in line with NHS standards.

Drug use in this country is falling, particularly amongst young people. Heroin, crack and cannabis are being used by fewer people, and whilst there are more young people taking so-called legal highs and novel drugs, their numbers are nowhere near the levels we faced when setting up the nation’s treatment response primarily for heroin addicts more than a decade ago. At the same time, more people are recovering from drug addiction in England. There is no cause for complacency, in fact we are accelerating efforts to orientate drug treatment towards recovery, but it is worth pointing out that the trends on use, addiction and recovery are heading in the right direction.

Domestically and globally, the public discourse about drugs tends to exaggerate the power of the drug, and minimises the impact of social and economic circumstances. Compared to the 2.8million who use illegal drugs there are around 300,000 heroin or crack users in England, over half of whom are in treatment each year. Probably another 30,000 or so are in treatment for dependency on other drugs e.g. powder cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy. Those who become addicted tend to be seen by the media as the victims of hedonism, the random by-product of widespread recreational drug use. A steady trickle of millionaires’ children and celebrities fuel this myth, playing to the anxieties of middle class readers about their own children. Too often, those in the public eye think they understand drug addiction because of personal or family experiences which bear little relation to the multiple disadvantages experienced by most addicts.

In reality drug addiction is targeted. The 300,000 heroin and crack addicts are not a random sub set of England’s regular drug users. If they were, they would be as likely to live in Surrey as Salford, to have been to Westminster School as Wandsworth Prison, and their childhood would have been as likely to have been overseen by a live-in nanny as much as by Newham Borough Council.

Addiction, unlike use, is concentrated in our poorest communities, and within those communities it is the individuals with the least capital who are the most vulnerable to succumb and least able to extricate themselves. Compared to the rest of the population, heroin and crack addicts are male, working class, offenders, products of the care system, with poor educational records, little or no experience of employment, and a history of mental illness. Increasingly they are also in their forties with declining physical health. They will tend to struggle more than most to make sound personal decisions, which contributes to their other problems.

The reputation of heroin is such that few people will even try it. Of those who become addicted, the majority will recognise where they may be heading and stop. Amongst them will be people who are intelligent, resourceful and ambitious who will realise they are in “in over their heads”, pull themselves up sharp, and sort themselves out. Others will not necessarily have the innate resources to do this but will have family and friends to support them to achieve the same outcome. Key to this success will be the existence of an alternative life with the reality or realistic prospect of a job, a secure home, a stake in society and supportive relationships. The access to social, personal and economic capital not only enables individuals to overcome their immediate addiction, but to avoid relapse.

The government’s 2010 drug strategy recognises that treating addicts in isolation from efforts to address their employment, their housing status and the myriad other problems they face is unlikely to lead to long term recovery. According addiction primacy as a cause of poverty, criminality, worklessness, and child neglect denies the fact that it is as much a consequence of individual family and community breakdown as its genesis. Drug addiction exacerbates problems, and unless it is addressed will inhibit or even prevent progress in other aspects of people’s lives, but addressing it in isolation is not a silver bullet.

Drugs are not the unique barrier to normal social functioning for most addicted people. Drugs are not the unique barrier to a better, fairer and safer world in drug producing countries. The debate about legalisation is a distraction from facing and comprehensively addressing the social and economic factors that underpin drug use, addiction and the drugs trade.

Paul Hayes is the Chief Executive of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse (NTA)

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7 comments

Mon, 2012-09-10 23:23 — Roland Jager (not verified)

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Fri, 2012-08-17 16:34 — Amanda Boggan (not verified)

This article is not progressive, it's full of errors. The author conflates all "use" to "abuse" with the misnomer "illegal drugs." Drugs aren't the subject of the law, people are the subject of the law. Rightfully only person's activities with drugs can be deemed legal or illegal. The issue concerns people's rights. What's happened is that through an artificial divide certain people are equated with so-called "legal drugs" and other people are equated with so-called "illegal drugs" reversing the subject of the law, the person, with a mere object and thereby disregarding whether a person is being peaceful with it or not. No peaceful person who harms no person should come before the law. The many ref
erences to legalizing a drug/ object is a linguistic error that leads to an error in law that strips the person engaged with certain harmful drugs of all rights and denies that person equality with the majority of drug users, these being persons engaged with the so-called "legal drugs", alcohol and tobacco.

Fri, 2012-08-17 08:20 — Darryl Bickler (not verified)

Lets be clear there is no war on drugs, no illicit drugs and no illegal drugs either! We should desist from using these terms because they are fictions created by the prohibitionist paradigm as forms of deception about the true nature of control.

Even talk of decriminalising or legalising drugs as mooted by Transform and Release is rooted in a fictitious construct about how the law operates. They are seeing the whole thing in reverse, ascribing legal status to objects; this is impossible. One result is that the entire system of addressing negative outcomes connected with human actions associated with drug misuse is lost. The envisaged regulatory system of controlling human actions has been replaced with an indivisible illegality imposed on some persons concerned with some drugs, this via the misnomer that (some) potentially harmful drugs are illegal and some are legal. Tom Lloyd was right in his oral evidence to point out that this is nonsense, but he did not touch upon the profound significance of the replacement of the legal subject (person) with an object (drug). Simply put, we are avoiding the elephant in the room, we completely misconstrue the Misuse of Drugs Act with catastrophic consequences for all.

The expression ‘war on drugs' masks the true focus of attack, which is people who use some drugs (and indeed the possibility that any one of us might one day wish to), it is people who endure a perpetual climate of suspicion and stigmatisation irrespective of the need for the administrators to demonstrate any of the anti-social mischief. Concurrent over and under regulation of different classes of drug user thwarts the proper application of the law and progress in this arena. When we think of a war on people, it seems unconscionable to talk about winning it, its unjust and unconscionable; the various punitive policies are arbitrary.

Via objectification, the whole human rights discourse and libertarian considerations are obscured. Many consider that this is a war upon our possibilities to benefit from open objective research into remarkable molecules. Civilisation mandates that we have inalienable rights as human beings, rights to know what is. We think, we are conscious, we are chemical - controlling body chemistry is something that should be done with anxious concern for the limitations we impose on the experience of being. Why is personal chemistry any business of the state whilst persons experiment peacefully and do not endanger others? My message is that by misconstruing the problem we lost ourselves to pernicious censorship of the self. The state refuse to recognise legitimate uses for thousands of molecules both naturally occurring and synthetic; all proportionality of interference has been lost to a double-speak concerning a supposed war on illegal objects. There is no threshold for interference into some people’s lives, they are deemed fair game before a significant anti-social outcome can even be foreseen.

We might contemplate a ‘war’ targeting the worst outcomes of drug misuse, and develop best policies concerning harm reduction and prevention. Yet we ended up in this mess by failing to differentiate between good, acceptable and bad outcomes for some drug users, after all, ‘it‘ is supposedly illegal. Yet there is no law against using any drug except opium. The law is supposed to regulate property to curb misuse, not to deny all use in almost all circumstances for controlled drugs. Information is deemed to be lacking in credibility because it is so lacking. Most people misusing drugs are completely ignored by the administrators of the law, a policy borne of “cultural and historic preferences“# that declares them lawful within the purview of the very law supposed to address such misuse, this by merit of them being associated with supposedly ‘legal drugs’ - the law is drafted to be neutral, people are not supposed to be exempt!

In the resultant artificial divide between different classes of persons using different drugs, some people are awarded privileged property rights, and others are denied their rights absolutely. This is maintained via the abuse of power inherent within the misadministration of outcome-based neutral primary law. Using a ‘smoke and mirrors’ deception, that the law controls drugs not persons, the government cannot recognise the Misuse of Drug’s Act’s true form to address antisocial outcomes via the flexible regulation of different persons with respect to different drugs#. Rather their policy protects vested interests in drugs, this by according sacrosanct status to some persons, resulting in the irrational policy that presumes that some drug taking is presumed more worthy, even holier than other possibly potentially less harmful consciousness modifying practices.

The flip side of the ’illegal drugs’ myth is the myth of ‘legal drugs’ - the lie that some people are exempted from the law. The majority would not tolerate sufferance of imprisonment for having a peaceful home brewing interest - yet a cultivator of cannabis loses their liberty. This is perverse social engineering towards poor drug choices.

www.drugequality.org

Thu, 2012-08-16 21:45 — NR23 Derek (not verified)

To talk of cannabis and heroin in the same breath - as being different versions of the same thing ("drugs") shows a skewed perspective.

It should always be remembered that the vast, vast majority of "drug" users - ie cannabis users mostly - do not suffer problems and do not need help. There is nothing "wrong" with recreational drug use, it is not something we need to eliminate, but it is something we need to regulate and that can't happen under prohibition.

Prohibition however causes a whole range of problems because prohibited drugs are not controlled drugs. Being "underground" consumers are placed at the highest levels of risk, both in dealing with the trqade and consuming the uncertain product.

The lowest level of harm is not necessarily the lowest level of use - the nature of that use is more important. A few million adults socially using cannabis is far less destructive than a few kids drining booze.

The debate over law reform is most certainly not a mere distraction, it's at the heart of the debate.

Thu, 2012-08-16 18:19 — Tony Mendina (not verified)

While I happen to support drug legalization, this piece was still a pleasure to read. It's all the more interesting to me because it's not the sort of piece I'd be likely to see here in the U.S., where the tackling of larger social issues that may relate to addiction is generally off-limits to discussion as being "liberal" or "socialist" and thus heretical.

Thu, 2012-08-16 14:54 — Paul Barbara (not verified)

To understand the drug trade, check out 'Cocaine Politics' by Peter Dale Scott, watch 'Meet Me at Mena' online, and check out 'Air America + CIA + Vietnam + drugs'.
Check out the shipping of guns to drug and other gangs in Jamaica in the 80's, in order to destabilise the Left government of Michael Manley, and the 'Fast and Furious' business recently in Mexico.
To say nothing of Afghanistan under the 'Coalition' and the puppet regime.
Under the Taliban, Opium and Heroin dipped to an extremely low level; as soon as the 'Coalition' and 'Northern Alliance' removed the Taliban, exports shot up to record levels.
Look at Columbia; the so-called 'War on Drugs' is America's excuse to arm and train the brutal military and police of that country, and to arrange for seven bases to be leased to the US (Venezuela is the real target; drugs just the excuse, like 'Communism' was used as an excuse for all the atrocities perpetrated by US-supported Juntas in Central and South America in the past, and like 'failed states' and the 'War on Terror' is also used as excuses for US abominations worldwide.