A culture of dependency: Labour fails to deal with drugs

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 27th Feb 2008

Andrew Duffield

Once again, Labour has published a new strategy on drugs and, once again, it has totally failed to grasp the underlying nature of the drugs problem, so condemning more young people to a life of dependency, debt (leading to serious crime) and, ultimately, to a premature death - either directly or, ever increasingly, as a result of gang violence.

The failure of successive Home Secretaries to deal effectively and decisively with the scourge of Britain's "drug culture" is a reflection of their complete and collective inability to acknowledge the economics that drives it, and to intervene in a way that would start to solve the problem instead of exacerbating it. Jaqui Smith is no different to any of her Tory or Labour predecessors; like them, she is ignorantly, idiotically and indirectly responsible for much of the anti-social behaviour that blights modern Britain - as well as the untold misery and, yes, murder that also results. And yet the answer is available to her and her government, if only they had the guts to articulate it.

The certain and sustainable way to deal with drugs and the destruction they cause is to remove economic value from the equation. Take the supply chain out of the hands of the criminals by supplying addicts for free, through state sponsored clinics, regulating and controlling the quality of substances so that dependent users know what it is they are getting and taking. Then link supply to treatment, removing the stigma of criminalisation in the process and helping users to admit their problem to friends and family for further help and support.

Unfortunately, Labour has other ideas. In addition to the death and despair caused by ongoing prohibition, Jaqui Smith's government now wants to overturn a central tenet of British justice - that one is innocent until proven guilty - by seizing assets when someone is arrested on the suspicion of supplying drugs rather than on conviction. The police state is here and now.

Meanwhile, the prosperous peddlars of social disorder are given every incentive to get richer and richer. Death stalks, the politicians posture, and utter, unbridled incompetence reigns supreme.