Ken Livingstone on drugs

The media circus that is the London mayoral election becomes more and more like a Punch and Judy show and less like a meaningful policy debate each day (and yes, I actually sat through the Question Time debate last night). Still, the outcome will have little impact on drug policy development or implementation in London whoever wins, since the most important policy decisions are still made centrally (or by individual police forces), and anyway, there doesn't seem to be much to choose between Boris and Ken's positions on drugs, or that of the parties the y represent.

The issue has briefly grazed the news media this week with a rather barrel-scraping story in the Telegraph about how Boris had tried to embarrass Ken by associating the incumbent Mayor's apparent links to the Green party with the Green's drug policy (generally very sensible as it happens) - specifically the fact that it calls for the legal regulation of drugs. For some reason ecstasy was alighted on and the headline morphed, in classic lazy-journo style, into Livingstone in row over 'legalise ecstasy' call

I don't care if it's close, you re still both boring me

Challenged on what he is going to do about London's drug problems in the Sun online this week, Ken is quick to note that:

'I am against the legalisation of drugs'

this despite not actually being asked about legalisation in any shape or form. Assuming Ken even penned the Sun online answer, he has arguably changed his tune, or at least his tone on this issue since an interview in 1997 when he said:

“I think all drugs should be decriminalised and addicts could register with their GP for them so organised crime could be driven out of drugs.”

IRC on VirginNet, Nov 12, 1997

His short answer in the Sun seems to differ from this position somewhat and is otherwise rather empty and unhelpful, as indeed have been the answers from all the three main candidates on the drugs issue (see here, page 7, for a deeply uninspiring summary compiled by LDAN).

Whilst Paddick comes out on top from the reformers perspective but this isn't terribly surprising as he came to prominence largely because of his progressive position on drugs in the first place and also because the representative of the 'big three' party with the most forward thinking drug policy by a long stretch. Like his party he has a sound position but doesn't choose to broadcast them, and anyway, he's evidently not in the running anyway with only about 9% on most polls.

yawn

Drugscope debunks misleading Telegraph canna-panic stats

An excellent piece of debunking of some canna-panic silliness in the Telegraph from Drugscope is reproduced below. Such sensationalist and misleading media coverage does nothing to further the debate on sensible responses to the health harm associated with cannabis use and only serves to encourage counterproductive knee-jerk Government enforcement responses, whilst providing a shock headline to help shift units. Very disappointing from the Telegraph which has in the past been quite pragmatic and progressive on the cannabis issue. Ho Hum.

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On Friday 11 January the Daily Telegraph published a front-page news article under the headline: Abuse of cannabis puts 500 a week in hospital.

The Daily Telegraph piece referred to National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) figures cited by Minister of State for Public Health, Dawn Primarolo, in a response to a Parliamentary Question about the numbers of people treated for cannabis.

DrugScope sent a letter on Friday 11 January to the Daily Telegraph in response to this story; as yet they have declined to publish it. Our response is reproduced below.

Dear Sir,

The front-page headline on Friday’s Daily Telegraph (Abuse of cannabis puts 500 a week in hospital, 11/01/08) misrepresents figures given by Dawn Primarolo, Minister of State for Public Health, in her response to a Parliamentary Question this week.

We have ascertained that the figures supplied by the Minister do not relate to actual hospital admissions; the source of the figures, the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System (NDTMS) does not collect data on hospital admissions and this was evident in the Minister’s response.

The figures instead relate to those who have come forward to community-based drug treatment services seeking some form of help, advice or treatment relating to their use of cannabis. DrugScope understands that even if ‘treatment’ consists of no more than an informal chat with a drug worker, this would still have been recorded in the statistics quoted by the Minister.

Some of those clients may of course have gone on to receive treatment in hospital for conditions relating to their use of cannabis. However, figures provided to DrugScope by the Department of Health reveal that rather than 500 hospital admissions a week, the figure was nearer 14 per week (in 2006/07) for individuals with a primary diagnosis of mental health problems due to the use of cannabis. This is 14 admissions too many, but still way below the figure quoted by your correspondent.

In addition, the number of hospital admissions in 2006/07 with this diagnosis (750) was lower than in 2005/06 (946) - and it should be noted that the same individual could have been admitted to hospital more than once in any one year.

The public do need to be aware of the potential risks related to cannabis; it is not a harmless drug. But public information about the drug must be based on sound data and where that data exists, the media has a responsibility to be scrupulous in its presentation.

Yours,

Martin Barnes

Chief executive,
DrugScope SE1

GPs to ask patients in drug treatment about offending

The Telegraph reported on the 18th of June that:

"GPs, medical professionals and others working in drug treatment programmes will be required from this month to ask addicts whether, in the past four weeks, they have been involved in shoplifting, selling drugs, vehicle crime, theft or burglary, fraud, forgery or violence".

The report was in response to an initiative from the National Treatment Agency about changes they have made to monitoring forms for treatment providers.

At first sight this would seem to be offensive and invasive - your dentist, for example, doesn't ask you about your offending when they fill your teeth. On the other hand, from the NTA's point of view this is a rational way to find out if 'treatment' is actually reducing offending. As it says in their service users guide to the new form:

"Crime - Some people commit crimes to help fund their drug use, which can lead to prison, taking them away from their children, partner, family and friends. And society as a whole has to pay for it too. Research shows that treatment can help people avoid committing crime to fund their drug habit, and help them lead a more positive lifestyle. The TOP (Treatment Outcomes Profile) provides a measure of this but doesn’t expect you to reveal details of specific crimes."

So, invasive, offensive or just outcome monitoring? What's being missed here is what's being counted and what's not. The issue is this:

Is it fair to ask patients about their level of offending when the Government does not count the numbers who offend because of its having made drugs illegal in the first place?

What Government has done is effectively to pass the buck. The onus is now on 'treatment' to reduce the offending that is caused by the drugs' illegality in the first place. GPs have not been asked to find out whether the patients they are treating for tobacco addiction are offending less when they use patches. This is because the price of tobacco is low enough for a daily habit not to result in offending (and that's because it's legal).

What is going on here is perverse. The Government gets the Home Office to oversee the process of getting heroin and crack users offending (it now 'identifies' problem heroin and crack users through their offending) and then asks the Department of Health to reduce offending through 'treatment'.

This is not about treatment. It's about reducing the collateral damage created by prohibition. It is singularly unjust to demand that GPs and patients account for the efficacy of their intervention, whilst the Government/Home Office is not held to account for its policy.

NB There has been no official scrutiny of the efficacy of prohibition enforcement spending despite the fact that the crime costs arising from prohibition, according to the Home Office's own research, amount to over over £16 billion a year. This figure compares to less than a £1 billion a year spent on treatment.

Outcome monitoring fine, but let's apply some outcome monitoring to the the policy drug prohibition and its very expensive enforcement. Transform has been calling for an audit of prohibition since 2002 and was instrumental in getting the Lib Dems to adopt the call as party policy. Such an audit would provide a wealth of evidence to enable policy makers and civil society to assess the efficacy of existing prohibitionist drug policy. It is likely that it would expose and contribute to the demise of what is demonstrably a failed and counterproductive policy approach - probably the reason no one in Government seems interested in pursuing it.

Telegraph op-ed starts the build up to RSA drugs report

A decent op-ed in today's Telegraph by Philip Jonston kicks off the build up to Thursday's publication of the drug policy report form the RSA, (titled: Is drug policy working? and if not, why not?) and what promises to be a feisty week of drug policy debate with an emphasis firmly on progressive refrom. The RSA report has been two years in its gestation with Transform amongst the many groups and individuals submitting information and analysis. It has set itself up as an 'unofficial royal commission' and Jonston, who sat on the report's committee gives some strong hints about what it is likely to contain. His analysis covers familiar ground;

Drugs policy has failed. Do not take my word for it. That was, essentially, the conclusion of the Prime Minister's strategy unit in a report published last year after initially being suppressed. The aim of drugs policy over the past four decades has been to reduce demand and curb supply. It has done neither. Crime associated with drug-taking is as rife as ever. A new way needs to be found.

The RSA report that he details will no doubt take a similar line, stopping short of calling for legalisation and regulation of any currently illegal drugs (perhaps with the exception of cannabis, and probably calling for a debate or leaving the door open in the future) but clearly acknowledging the failure of prohibtion and calling for a move away from failed criminal justice measures, suggesting a variety of sensible public health led interventions as alternatives.

Hopefully the report will go further, and distinguish itself from either the Police Foundation report (1999) or the Home Affairs Select Committee report on drugs (2001), its immediate predecessors. These previous reports made much the same points about the need for reform and a public health approach and we can expect a certain amount of overlap with the RSA, with calls for more heroin prescribing, safe injecting rooms, an overhaul of the classification system and so on. Potentially, as Jonston hints:

most of us felt, without being excessively libertarian about it, that if people are harming neither themselves nor others, the state has no reason to intervene.

..the significnat new call, going beyond the previous 'unofficial royal commissions', will be for the non-prosecution of individuals for personal possession of drugs. This would be a major step forward (without which it will potentially just be rehashing the conclusions of its forbears), but we will have to wait and see....