Parliamentary Cocaine Trade Report - Good, bad and downright ugly

Today the Home Affairs Committee publishes a report on the Cocaine Trade - to which Transform made a written submission and was invited to give oral evidence. Whilst there is some limited useful content and recommendations, the report overall is desperately disappointing and unlikely to impress or please anyone. It is characterised by weak analysis and poor scholarship, leading to a set of mostly pointless recommendations. Occasionally the recommendations are actively obnoxious (see sentencing recommendations below) - the overwhelming impression being of an ill considered and rushed inquiry that has been badly chaired and poorly supported - and one that has a distinct pre-election feel to it (the evidence has been shaped around a pre-decided narrative).

This is particularly disappointing coming from the same committee that in 2002 produced one of the most important, thorough and influential drug policy reports of the modern era (especially given the fact that three of the committee members from 2001 are still members). Also disappointing is that the report lacks anything approaching the analytical rigor of the last major Select Committee drug report; the Science and Technology committee report on the classification system from 2006, with key analysis from that 2006 report (on, for example, drug harms or the deterrent effect) notably absent from this new HASC cocaine report. It really does seem like a massive step backwards - with few lessons learned, and others forgotten or actively abandoned.

Before chronicling some of the report's multiple failings, first we should acknowledge its strengths. Transform is pleased that the Committee has called for “a full and independent value–for–money assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and related legislation and policy”. This was one of Transform's specific calls to the committee in both our written and oral evidence, and something we have campaigned for since 2002.

We hope that the Government will now reconsider our call to evaluate drug policy using established Impact Assessment tools in the light of this new HASC recommendation, as it was dismissed by the PM, following a private meeting with a Transform representative last year.

We were also pleased to see this recommendation being supported by discussion of the Home Office 'value for money' study that Transform secured publication of earlier this year. Given that the media will almnost certainly ignore this section of the report I think it is worth reproducing in full (note: i. Steve Rolles is from Transform, ii. David Nutt was still chair of the ACMD at this point):

20. Some witnesses suggested there was a need for a cost/benefit analysis of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, to assess the evidence of whether the Government’s drugs policy offered value for money. Steve Rolles called specifically for a value for money impact assessment of the 1971 legislation, and told us that the Act had “never been subject to that kind of scrutiny and it is time that it was”. Professor Nutt supported an impact assessment, saying “I think my Council would be quite comfortable if people wanted to review the Act”

21. On 21 January 2010 the Home Office published an evaluation completed in June 2007 by an academic at the University of York entitled Drugs Value for Money Review, which Transform had been campaigning for three years to have released under a Freedom of Information request. The review as published made two key conclusions. Firstly, that there was a real lack of data collected by Government to enable an assessment of how effective its drug policy had been, particularly on the supply side. It stated:

Policies to reduce the availability of drugs produced the greatest analytical challenge. The absence of robust and recognised measures of success, combined with a limited base of research evidence makes it particularly difficult to draw conclusions about supply-side policy.

Secondly, it concluded that Government spending on drugs had not been properly evaluated, making it hard to draw conclusions about whether resources were appropriately allocated:

There is no single, comprehensive, agreed overview of cross-government expenditure. Evaluations of effectiveness are patchy and incomplete, making it difficult to assess value for money and to decide how to best allocate resources in the future

There was a similar indictment in analysis carried out by the UK Drug Policy Commission—a grouping of expert drug treatment and medical practitioners—in April 2007, which concluded that it was “difficult to estimate government expenditure on drug policy, as it is not transparently reported” and that “the UK invests remarkably little in independent evaluation of the impact of drug policies, especially enforcement. This needs redressing if policy makers are to be able to identify and introduce effective measures in the future”

22. The Home Office review was intended to inform the Government’s new Drugs Strategy 2008–2018.32 However, the publication of the strategy in February 2008, only eight months after the review was completed, suggests it is extremely unlikely that the serious criticisms voiced in the review about the lack of an evidence base on which to assess the effectiveness of expenditure on drugs could have been addressed in time.

24. We were very interested to learn that a Government review completed in 2007—the publication of which the Home Office had fought for three years—concluded that the effectiveness and value for money of the Government’s drugs spending could not be evaluated. It is at best careless that the Government nevertheless pressed ahead and published its Drugs Strategy in February 2008 without publishing a proper value–for–money analysis of where resources would be most effectively targeted. We therefore support calls for an full and independent value–for–money assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and related legislation and policy. This assessment must also address the concerns about inadequate data collection raised in the 2007 review.

Beyond this section there is little positive to be said about the report, and much to criticize. Large swathes of it are essentially a workmanlike summary of evidence taken from various sources, prominently including the UNODC World Drugs Report, and various documents from the EMCDDA, NTA, SOCA, UKBA and others. There is nothing wrong with any of this of course, the researchers having done an adequate job of compiling some potentially useful supporting evidence. There are, however, some serious sins of omission. The problems come partly from the evidence that was missed or ignored, but perhaps more importantly, the weak policy analysis that flows from all the evidence presented as we will discuss.

The most notable omission from the evidence considered is the World Health Organisation' s cocaine report from 1995 (details and link to the full report here) the largest global study of cocaine use, risks and policy ever undertaken. This report was suppressed under pressure from the US (until it was leaked into the public domain years later) essentially because it did not fit with the prevailing prohibitionist political narrative. That the HASC has chosen to overlook it, despite it being flagged up in Transform's written submission (and sent separately to the committee secretariat) is a telling reflection on the committee's mindset.


The tone and overarching narrative of the report are framed in the press release that accompanies it, which contains some very dramatic language about the nature of cocaine, and from the outset makes the cardinal error of conflating prohibition policy harms with drug use harms:

"In a report published today, Wednesday 3 March, the Home Affairs Committee warns that a deadly, socially and environmentally destructive drug seems to be becoming more widely acceptable in the UK, and says more must be done to tackle the demand side in the UK alongside international efforts to disrupt smuggling."

This mistaken conflation of drug use and drug policy harms (something that, disappointingly, David Nutt's evidence also failed to challenge) was something Transform specifically warned against in its written submission;

"Any discussion of the cocaine trade in the UK, and what our response should be, requires that we separate the public health problems associated with cocaine use per se, from the secondary criminal justice harms associated with its prohibition."

The press release then produces a 'must try harder' admonition of supply side enforcement agencies' commitment to 'stemming the flow':

"The Committee praises SOCA’s and UKBA’s general approach, namely to actively disrupt the cocaine trade overseas and thereby prevent it reaching the UK..... The Committee was shocked to discover only 3.5 tonnes of the estimated 25–30 tonnes of cocaine which does enter the UK border was seized in the UK last year. The Committee says interception of 12–14% of cocaine reaching the UK is ‘woefully inadequate’, while UKBA’s target to seize 2.4 tonnes of cocaine this year is ‘deeply unambitious’ and lower than the amount it seized in both previous years"

Adding that :

"The Committee suggests UKBA’s low seizure target reflects a culture of complacency"

This summarizes the key failing of the report's analysis; the implied suggestion that the failings of supply side enforcement could somehow be solved with more resources or better organisation, or that the supply of cocaine could genuinely be prevented such that the cocaine problem would somehow diminish or even disappear. This all harks back to the denial-of-reality prohibitionist analysis that: drugs are bad, therefore we will ban them and make the problem go away. Once you have bought into this hopelessly naive premise, as the committee chair seems to have done, all other facts and analysis naturally have to be shaped around it. This is the process that we then have to endure for the majority of the report.

For no obvious or stated reason, the report spends an inordinate amount of time critiquing both UK cocaine seizure rates and the collection and presentation of seizure statistics, somehow managing to completely avoid grappling with the actual impact of seizures on levels of availability. It is important to bear in mind that seizure rates, even if you buy into the overarching prohibitionist analysis (see above), are a proxy measure (or process measure) for the efficacy of supply side enforcement - the actual outcome measures of which are levels of availability, and ultimately levels of use/misuse. At one point the report does note that:

The doubling in wholesale price of cocaine at the UK border between 1999 and 2009 does indicate that more effective supply-side enforcement may have squeezed the supply of the drug to the UK. However, we do not consider that the substantial fall in purity of cocaine at street level can be attributed to supply-side enforcement. The consistency of purity at the UK border but fluctuating levels found in street–level seizures within the UK—some with as little as 5% purity—suggest to us that the fall in purity is not so much driven by overall squeezing of the cocaine supply to the UK, but rather associated with the emergence of a ‘two-tier’ market in which there is demand for lower price, more heavily cut cocaine on the street, as well as higher end product by other consumers. The use of more sophisticated cutting agents which themselves mimic the analgesic effect of cocaine may mean that less pure cocaine has gone to some degree unnoticed. And the increase in the number of users may in itself have driven the available cocaine to be more thinly spread, thus reducing purity levels. (Paragraph 162)

This is the nearest we get to a discussion of the impact of seizures on actual availability but appears to suggest that the impact is marginal at best. The committee suggests that current seizure rates of around 10% are inadequate, but does not suggest what % would be good enough - or suggest how such improved seizure rates might be achieved, or explore possible knock on impacts even if it were (like, for example, displacement to other drugs). There are some rather random examples of enforcement best practice based on the committee's field trips, but it is far from clear if they are seriously suggesting that such models - if rolled out nationally/ internationally - would somehow deliver the desired outcome of actually reducing cocaine use/harms. Crucially they fail to engage with key elements of the analysis:

1. The unintended negative consequences of supply side enforcement - as spelt out in detail in the submissions of Transform and others, as well as being detailed by the UNODC. Some of these harms are mentioned - such as environmental destruction, but again these are blamed on cocaine users rather than the prohibitionist policy environment the committee is evidently supporting. The role of prohibition in creating opportunities for criminals is mentioned only once, in a Transform quote (below).
   
   
2. The' balloon effect' - that even seemingly 'successful' localised supply side enforcement will only achieve a displacement of illicit activity, not elminate it. Steve is quoted in the report saying that: 'History shows with crystal clarity that an enforcement response cannot get rid of the illicit drug trade…it is a fundamental reality of the economic dynamics of unregulated illegal markets where demand is huge; the opportunity is created and criminal entrepreneurs will always exploit that opportunity. Every dealer or trafficker you arrest, another one immediately fills the void.' Only for this analysis to translate into an ambiguous conclusion that 'Neither supply–side enforcement nor demand reduction can on its own successfully tackle cocaine use.'.
   
   
3. At no point do they get to the heart of the matter to highlight the futility and counter-productive nature of supply side enforcement as evidenced by 40+ years of increasingly expensive failure. No examples are given of countries that have delivered good overall drug policy outcomes (in terms of reduced drug use/harms) from more effective or well resourced supply side enforcement (for the simple reason that there aren't any).

As Transform made clear in our written submission:

10. Decades of supply-side enforcement experience at all scales, from international interdiction efforts to arresting dealers on street corners, demonstrate how its successes can only ever be marginal, temporary and localised. This failure results not from incompetence, flaws in execution, or under-resourcing, but because this approach ignores the economic forces of supply and demand in an unregulated illicit market controlled by criminal profiteers.

We also quoted the committee's previous drugs report:

12. Enforcement also has a Darwinian-style ‘survival of the fittest’ effect – it is the most efficient, ruthless, and violent criminal networks that prosper. So the more energetically prohibition is enforced, the worse the ‘cocaine problem’ becomes. In short, as the 2002 HASC drug inquiry report concluded:

“If there is any single lesson from the experience of the last 30 years, it is that policies based wholly or mainly on enforcement are destined to fail.”

Whilst the committee isn't bound to agree with any of this well established historical critique of supply side enforcement, they should at least have tackled it and made the case in support of the wider supply side enforcement paradigm. Nowhere in the report is there anything even approaching this sort of discussion. The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit Drugs Report of 2003 demonstrated in detail how global prohibition creates much of the harm associated with the production, supply and use of cocaine and heroin. Like the SciTech classification report, and the 2002 HASC drugs inquiry report, it is not mentioned, nor its central findings engaged with.

The same analytical shortcomings and conceptual misunderstandings of supply side enforcement flow through the analysis of crop eradication in South America and the comments on localised UK police operations. Even where useful insights do occasionally appear in the report , in the form of quotes or references, these are never allowed to impinge on the unrelentingly poor analysis of the recommendations and conclusions. It is particularly noteworthy that nowhere in the report is the detailed submissions from the Transnational Institute (arguably the world's leading NGO authority on the international cocaine market and related policy) or the International Drug Policy Consortium quoted or referenced.

In large parts of the report there is evidence that either the inquiry's remit was far to broad, or (looked at another way) that the inquiry has dealt with a series important issues with a woeful lack of depth and detail. Key debates and areas of policy are dealt with in a few paragraphs - a couple of cursory quotes and facts (when far more substantive literature reviews are needed) followed by a rather limp and unconvincing recommendation. Without going into tedious detail on each of the many areas the report attempts to cover, consider for example:

• Prevention and media campaigns - much backslapping about the Government's FRANK campaign supported a single piece of Home Office polling research, but nothing on the wider literature critiquing such mass media campaigns (including that of the WHO 1995 cocaine report, which is not referenced despite its commentary on this point being flagged up in Transform's written submission), or any reference to the ACMD Pathways to Problems report which did consider such efforts in the sort of detail the HASC has conspicuously failed to.
  

• The role of celebrity drug users: Whilst the committee, you suspect rather dissapointedly, acknowledged that 'There is no evidence that celebrity use has made more people turn to cocaine, indeed our witnesses argued strongly against it,' they were, almost laughably, unable to stop themselves from continuing to makes such an assertion regardless, 'However, the seeming propensity of celebrity users to ‘get away with’ using cocaine does contribute to a general trend of glamorising use, as does the social acceptability and normalisation generated by ‘successful’ people who appear to function normally, often holding down high-flying careers, whilst using cocaine.' . This was another example of fitting the facts around a pre-determined narrative (see this appearance of HASC Chair Keith Vaz on channel four news 8 months before the report is published). Guess which part of the report was given most prominence in the press? To find out put cocaine into Google news search...
  
  
• Treatment - a very cursory analysis followed by a call for more residential rehab - but no comparisons of value for money related to treatment outcomes are provided, that would actually support such a call.

• Cocaine harms - The discussion of cocaine related health harms lacks any sophistication, seemly built around the preconceived requirement to make it clear that cocaine is not 'safe'. This seems like a classic straw man, as we are not aware that anyone has been saying that cocaine was 'safe' (no drug is), nor do the committee provide any examples of anyone doing so. The concept that there are a range of cocaine products and range of cocaine using behaviours associated with a spectrum of risks (from negligible to extreme) is largely jettisoned in favour of less-than-useful headline grabbing generalisations about 'lethal' cocaine. Public understanding of risk is not helped by this sort of language - its hard to see what it seeks to achieve, and it goes against much of the more nuanced analysis we have seen from the Sci-Tech committee in 2006,and the HASC in 2002. The discussion of cocaine deaths similarly lacks any breakdown, analysis, or caveats - rather defaulting again to the the 'lethal cocaine' narrative, or cocaine the 'dangerous and lethal drug' (presumably in that order) as HASC chair Vaz describes it in the press release.

There was a similarly limited engagement with the debate on legalisation and regulation. This was a marked contrast to the HASC 2002 drug inquiry which recognised the harms of current policy, and called on the UK Government to initiate a debate on alternatives to prohibition, “including the possibility of legalisation and regulation drugs – to solve the global drugs dilemma” (It is worthy of note that one of the members of the 2002 Committee who supported that recommendation was David Cameron). Steve's contribution is key to the section the Enquiry calls 'Decriminalisation':

Decriminalisation

Several witnesses argued that the supply of and demand for cocaine could not be effectively tackled whilst it remained an illegal drug, but one which for which there was demand. Steve Rolles of Transform Drug Policy told us that:

"When prohibition of something collides with huge demand for it you just create an economic opportunity and illegal criminal entrepreneurs will inevitably exploit the opportunity that it creates."

Lord Mancroft agreed:

"We have controlled drugs in this country but you only have to walk within a mile of this palace to realise that the controls do not work, because anywhere on the streets of London you can buy any of these drugs… The way forward is a range somewhere from the way we control alcohol or indeed the most dangerous object in our everyday lives, the motorcar. If you go outside in the street and step in front of a moving motorcar you will find out how dangerous it is, so what do we do? We do not prohibit it. We license the vehicle, we license the users, we made them pass a test, we make them have insurance so if they damage anybody they have to pay up, we tell them how fast they can use it, on which side of the road. That is control."

The response to this is the most cursory of engagements with the concept of deterrence associated with punitive enforcement, deploying two quotes, one from John Strang:

However, others told us that there was little evidence that decriminalisation would affect demand, and that in fact it would be likely to increase it. For instance, Professor Strang of the National Addiction Centre told us:

"There is no question that the illegality of a substance is a major deterrent to its use…one would have to presume that if legal constraints were taken away the level of use would almost certainly increase."

And one from David Nutt, then ACMD chair:

Professor Nutt also said he would be “surprised if making drugs legal would actually reduce use”. He argued that the, at least partial, success of controlling drugs could be seen in the rise in popularity of ‘legal highs’ being bought over the internet: "People are buying drugs over the Internet which are currently legal, presumably because there is a deterrent to getting illegal drugs…The law must influence people to some extent."

That is all we get - no evidence provided in support of the above Nutt and Strang comments, and no review of the literature on deterrence, no more discussion or analysis. Nothing. This section just ends, somewhat patronisingly, with the comment:

"There is no doubt that the arguments set out by Transform Drug Policy and Lord Mancroft will continue to be debated."

Finally we were deeply disturbed by the recommendation to increase sentences for users, purely on the basis that current sentences were not long enough for prisoners to finish there prison-based treatment programmes. Again - no evidence is given that such programmes are more cost effective than the various non-prison based cocaine treatment options (which have a pretty poor efficacy record anyway - albeit better than prison, and much cheaper).

Related, is the call for harsher penalties for supply, which reeks of populist posturing and is, once again, unsupported by evidence that it would deliver better outcomes. Both of these calls - which would incur significant expense and add to pressures on an already overstretched prison service - sit entirely at odds with the work taking place as we speak by the Sentencing Advisory Panel, (also mentioned in the Transform submission, but ignored in the report) which is seeking to reduce drug related penalties across the board.

We could go on picking holes in the report - but hopefully, if you have read this far, you will have got the point. This is a dreadful report; ill-conceived and poorly executed, a wasted opportunity and a publication for which the committee should be, quite frankly, embarrassed. It entirely fails to do what Select Committees should be doing; scrutinize a policy area shrouded deliberately in obfuscatory myth and taboo. Instead it keeps politicians protected by the glass bubble of pseudo-science and populist fear mongering. The real tragedy is that this process could have been used to expose a failing policy to useful scrutiny and instead has, in large part, wasted taxpayers' time and money on a report that serves primarily to entrench a hugely counterproductive status quo.

It will surely be ignored and quickly forgotten. Indeed our initial glee at finding our Impact Assessment recommendation had been adopted progressively turned to despair as we read through the rest of its shoddy analysis, which rather undermines the one thing about it worth celebrating.

thanks to Steve for help preparing this analysis

Book of the Month - Chasing Dragons

Our book of the month for March is Chasing Dragons by Kyle Grayson. The book is listed in our extensive library of relevant and interesting titles and as ever we are grateful to our book reviewer David Hart who has written the following .


From Chinese opium smokers at the start of the 20th century to Somalian khat chewers at its end, Canada has long been home to groups of people whose drug use has led them to be defined as a security threat, and who have been subject to repressive measures by the state.

This book sets out to show how the way drug users have been portrayed in Canada has always been contingent on who has been regarded as speaking the truth about drugs, how Canadians have wished to see themselves, and how they have sought to position themselves relative to other countries, particularly the USA.

A central theme in the book is the tension between the degree to which Canadian authorities are prepared to use repressive measures against drug users and the country's self-image as a liberal, progressive state sharing a border with a punitive, conservative one. It will be a surprise to some readers to learn that Canada was at the forefront of prohibitionist lawmaking in the early 20th century, and that less has changed since than many Canadians would like to believe.

Several subject areas are discussed in the light of this: the popular perception of the relationship between drug use and race, which in the early part of the 20th century was overtly racist in seeing ethnic minorities as a threat to the morals and health of white Canadians, now manifests itself as a sort of cultural racism, whereby Canada cannot claim to be an inclusive multicultural society if it persecutes ethnic minorities simply because they are ethnic minorities, but it can and does limit its inclusiveness non-politically threatening cultural practices such as cuisine, music and dance, while still portraying, say, Somalian-Canadians who abstain from using khat as more enlightened, or at least more welcome in Canada, than those who continue to use it despite it's contraband status.

The process leading up to the decriminalisation of cannabis for medical purposes is also discussed, and again there is a discrepancy between the degree to which Canadians can claim to be living in a more liberal society than the USA after Canada's federal government was forced by the courts to introduce its Marihuana Medical Access Regulations in 2001, and the fact that it remains very difficult for patients to actually receive medicinal cannabis, and the state still pursues a punitive approach to non-medical use. There is also an informative chapter on Canada's rave culture which sprung up in the 1990s and soon found itself demonised by law enforcement representatives for condoning MDMA use, and compelled to organise itself politically in defence. Again, the end result is a situation that looks more liberal on paper than on the ground; while a code of conduct for rave venues was created, so much power was left in the hands of the police in determining how many officers to assign to an event (and charge the organisers for) that the law enforcement community is effectively able to make legal raves economically unviable.All the while, the book seeks to demonstrate how the policy options that could legitimately be debated regarding drug use have been constrained by the public attitudes about drug users.

Unfortunately, much of the early part of the book is phrased in the densely structured, obscure-word-laden language of the post-modernists, making it difficult to follow the sentence structure, let alone the argument. I'm sure it could have been expressed concisely and clearly, but probably the author is just following the fashion in academic circles, rather than willfully seeking to obscure the message. At any rate, once we hit chapter 4 the text becomes comprehensible, so don't be put off; this is a book that has a worthwhile contribution to make to the study of how defining behaviour or persons as a security issue shapes the very way a country can define itself.

UNODC censors its own website making the case for cannabis decriminalisation

note: for an update on this story see here  (the censored section has returned in dramatically edited form)

The page on the UN Office on Drugs and Crime site that we flagged up on the blog earlier this week, has now been censored to remove the section featuring a rare outbreak of pragmatism making the case for cannabis decriminalisation.

This seems rather pathetic. The page in question has sat unmolested since September 2006, over 3 years, only to be stripped of the decrim-arguments now, the day after we blog about it. Why, its almost as if......

Anyway, as people should all know by now the internet never forgets, and you can read the page as it was using the ever useful Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

• Page before
• Page now (note missing section 4)

I hope that the fact they have rather childishly censored this page on their own site will help teach the UNODC another lesson: Internet users do not like being treated like idiots and tend to respond rather badly.

So to all our internet friends: Please link this and the previous blog as much as possible, blog about it elsewhere, and use twitter, facebook and all your other internet toys to get the original page (and its censorship) as much publicity as possible.

By all means contact a few journo friends as well, see if you can get it in the news. They should be interested as it makes considerably more interesting news than (or at least an interesting counterpoint to) the latest tedious INCB report, obsessed as ever with attacking countries who, wait for it, dare contemplate decriminalising drug possession.

UN Office on Drugs and Crime makes the case for cannabis decriminalisation

UPDATE:  25.02.10 - Dissapointingly The UNODC YouthNet page discussed below has apparently now been updated with the section on cannabis decriminalisation removed - read more in this follow-up blog

 
It was interesting to stumble over this page titled 'Cannabis - a few issues' on the UN Office and Drug and Crime website, nestling within the on 'Youth and Drugs' pages of the the UNODC 'Youthnet' micro-site, making a clear and convincing case for decriminalisation of cannabis possession.

The page open with this introduction:

Cannabis (including marijuana, hash, hash oil) continues to be a controversial drug in many countries as people try to figure out the place that the drug has in their society. In the Western world, marijuana smoking by young people has become a very common activity - in some countries even more common than tobacco smoking. The UN's international conventions require countries to treat cannabis and other drug offences as criminal offences. However, these conventions leave the door open for countries to establish alternative measures as a substitute for criminal prosecution. Consequently, much of the debate about cannabis is around the legal status of the drug.

These questions are not simple. For that reason through the month of November, the Global Youth Network is going to review what is known about cannabis use and young people in a four- part series dealing with:
(i) the level of use worldwide;
(ii) why some young people use cannabis/why some have problems;
(iii) the harms associated with cannabis use; and
(iv) the effect of cannabis laws.

What follows is a refreshingly sensible and balanced review of the issues highlighted. Most interestingly is the final section on the cannabis laws, copied in full below,  making a strong case for cannabis decriminalisation:

Cannabis Series - Part 4
The effect of cannabis laws 

A number of countries are debating their marijuana laws, in most cases, trying to decide whether the penalties for possessing small amounts of cannabis should be reduced. Some advocate legalization of cannabis, that is, making it available through controlled, legal sources, as are tobacco and alcohol. However, most policymakers see that option as a huge social experiment, with outcomes that are difficult to predict. Others advocate that possessing personal amounts of cannabis should no longer be viewed as a criminal offence and penalties should be reduced. This is because, even though marijuana is not a harmless drug, an increasing number of health officials, researchers and politicians in these countries view the penalty to be out of proportion to the potential harm of using cannabis. The following are some of the arguments being made for reducing the penalties so that possession of small amounts of cannabis is no longer a criminal offence:

A criminal record is a serious matter
A criminal record labels a person caught with possessing small amounts of cannabis as a criminal and severely limits their ability to find employment, professional certification and to travel to other countries. Criminalizing a behaviour has a number of effects: it may make it more attractive to some youth, and it may result in the further marginalization of some youth, making it more difficult to help them.

Reducing the severity of the penalty doesn't seem to lead to increased use
Cannabis use (particularly heavy use in combination with other substances) poses risks, so it is important that any change not result in increased use. Based on the experiences of those countries or states that have reduced their penalties, various reviews agree that there is no indication that this will happen. For example, the 11 US states that decriminalized marijuana possession in the 1970s did not see increases in use beyond that experienced by other states; neither did the Australian states that have introduced a civil offence model over the past decade.

Laws don't seem to matter one way or another to young people
Over the past 10 years in most Western countries, the use of cannabis by young people has increased and attitudes have generally grown more tolerant toward the drug, with no difference between countries that had stiff or reduced penalties. For example in the Netherlands, where cannabis use is not a criminal offence, usage rates are lower than in the US, which has some of the toughest cannabis laws in the Western world. Young people who do not use cannabis generally say that their decision is based on health concerns or that they are just not interested. They aren't as likely to mention the laws as being a factor in their decision. In fact, research with teenage students suggests that the criminalization of cannabis and the stigmatization of cannabis use as a dangerous and forbidden activity makes it even more attractive to some.

Resources could be better placed elsewhere
Cannabis offences can take one or two officers off the street for up to several hours + their time for court appearances + tying up other court resources. These $$ could have more impact put into apprehending producers and traffickers, or directed at prevention, education and treatment. Although the law is an important means of controlling behaviour, accurate and balanced information and education should be seen as the primary means to enable young people to make informed choices about their drug use. For example, laws cannot distinguish between levels of use, whereas educators can help young people by providing clearer messages (for example, all drug use contains some risk - heavy use can result in serious problems for young people, while light, infrequent cannabis use poses fewer risks).

A case example
In Canada police are often reluctant to apply the penalties for possessing small amounts of cannabis, not only because of the work involved, but also because they do not want to saddle a young person with a criminal record. When a young person is found in possession of small amounts of cannabis in Canada, the typical police response is some combination of taking the drug, detaining the person in the police car or station, giving them a warning and letting them go. As a result, young people feel that the police do not take the laws very seriously; some also feel that they are applied unevenly depending on a person's ethnicity, the clothing they are wearing, etc.

One of the options being considered is to give the person a ticket, like a traffic ticket. Even though this would seem like a softer approach, it would in fact represent a greater penalty than many young people currently experience. And if the police "widen the net" (that is, become more active in apprehending youth) as apparently occurred in Australia when penalties were reduced, it would actually mean that young people would be more likely to be penalized.

Another possible outcome is that parents are more likely to be involved when their child is fined than if they are just "slapped on the wrist" and let go, providing an opportunity for parent/child discussion on the issue.

Also, creating a reduced penalty option reduces the deviance attached to the behaviour, which does lead to a climate more open to actual health promotion messages (e.g., that using around driving and sexual situations, or using to the point of intoxication, or using in combination with other substances or medications, or while involved in physical or cognitive activity can be harmful).

This section, that could have been written by any number of drug law reform NGOs that leading figures in the UNODC have been happy to make disparaging comments about in the past, has, it would seem, been sitting unbothered on the UNODC site for some years (the Youth and Drugs pages don't appear to have been updated since 2007).

There are clearly a range of views on this issue within the UN drug agencies, but the arguments put forward above are strikingly at odds with those traditionally expounded by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), for example, that has been vocally opposed to any moves towards increased tolerance, decriminlaisation, or decreased penalties suggesting that such moves would increase use and undermine international drug control (famously attacking the UK s decision to reclassify cannabis in 2001).

The current Director of the UNODC, whilst sticking to his rather unpleasant mantra that countries 'get the drug problems they deserve' and generally lambasting what he sees as the 'liberalisation' of drug policy, has actually been open to, even supportive of, reducing cannabis penalties, for example suggesting  that administrative penalties, such as fines and treatment referrals would be appropriate for personal possession offenses (slipped into this otherwise ridiculous 2007 op-ed/rant). The UNODC's 2009 World Drugs Report also begrudgingly acknowledges that the decriminlisation of personal possession (of all drugs) in Portugal in 2001 helps "keep drugs out of the hands of those who would avoid them under a system of full prohibition, while encouraging treatment, rather than incarceration, for users" noting further that "It also appears that a number of drug-related problems have decreased". 

It is notable then, that at the same time as UK politicians are making a song and dance about 'sending out the right message' by is increasing cannabis possession penalties (upping prison sentences from 2 to 5 years),  a real, active and public debate around cannabis decriminalisation is opening up, even within the most conservative bastions of the UN. More importantly this debate is being driven not by politics, but primarily by the reality of the policy's increasingly widespread adoption and the growing evidence that it has not unleashed the pandora's box of addiction, crime and depravity anticipated by some of its more vocal opponents.

And, ironically enough, I found the UNODC Youthnet drug site in the links page of one such opponent's website.

Another contemptuous Home Office rejection of a request for better evidence in UK drug policy

In April 2009 Transform published a groundbreaking report, titled 'A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs'

We sent a copy to the Secretary of State in July 2009 with the letter below. Our tardiness was to put to shame however, by the time it took the Home Secretary to respond - we received his response today, 15th Feb 2010 - eight months later. According to the Home Office the delay was partly due to awaiting Gordon Brown's response to our call for an Impact assessment. Clearly this delay wasn't because of the effort that went into the content of the response, which is as ever, contemptuous.

Our letter and the response from the Secretary of State are shown below.

The civil service manual for answering correspondence is:

1 agree with what you can,
2 ignore the rest and
3 restate government policy whilst you're at it.

The response from Alan Johnson shows the manual being followed to the letter.

Here's our blog on the saga of the withholding of the Home Office 2007 (Christine Godfrey) value for money study mentioned in Alan Johnson's response. That report took almost three years to emerge after our initial request...

The letter to the Home Secretary and his response speak for themselves. To enlarge the view just click on the page you want to see.

Those moved to do so might want to contact their MP or prospective parliamentary candidate to suggest that they support our call for an Impact Assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Tobacco regulation: saving lives vs personal freedom

The UK’s Department of Health (DoH) has announced an ambitious new strategy for reducing smoking in the population from 21% currently, to 10% by 2020.

In 2007 the Government brought in a ban on smoking in virtually all enclosed public and work places. This move added to earlier regulatory controls including the restrictions on displaying tobacco products, prominent graphic health warnings on packaging, raising the age access limit, and progressive increases in tax. These came on top of bans on all forms of tobacco advertising, and historic increases in investment in public education of smoking health risks. Combined, these measures are widely seen as having contributed to a substantial reduction in smoking across the population since the 1970s.

Transform has supported these policies, including the ban on smoking in enclosed public places, that have demonstrably delivered positive health outcomes without the need to resort to criminalisation of users or abdication of market control to criminal profiteers, quite the opposite in fact. For more discussion see our recent submission to the DoH 2009 consultation on tobacco policy.

Along with a raft of new public health measures (such as extending tobacco cessation treatment provision) The DoH is now considering extending tobacco regulation further. Policies that are being consulted upon include:

• Plain packaging - removal of all logos/branding
• Ending the sale of tobacco from vending machines (a significant source of tobacco for young people)
• Promoting smoke-free homes and cars
• Reviewing whether to extend legislation from enclosed public places and workplaces to areas like entrances to buildings

Plain packaging in particular seems like a good idea, and one with a strong evidence base that can hardly be seen as restricting user freedoms. One suspects that it wont happen in the short term at least, with a tokenistic ban on smoking around entrances, that wont serve any real purpose being the move that is actually enacted. Some countries are already going further. Finland, which outlawed tobacco advertising as far back 1976, aims to make smoking in a car carrying anyone under the age of 18 illegal by this summer.

Other countries, such as the US, are lagging behind in many of these moves, at least at Federal level (some states such as California have introduced very restrictive controls on smoking in public places). Last year Barack Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This legislation, which was passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 307 to 97 and the Senate 79 to 17, granted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) extensive new authority to regulate tobacco products. It means that the FDA would regulate the content of tobacco products, prohibits the use of the terms “light,” “mild,” and “low” on packaging and in advertising and mandate dramatic changes in the nature and strength of cigarette warnings, which by 2012 would have to cover the top 50% of both front and rear panels of cigarette packages. And it also stipulates that the FDA must reissue its 1996 regulations, which, among other things, would prohibit outdoor advertising of tobacco products within 1000 ft (305 m) of a school or playground, limit advertising in publications with a “significant youth readership” and ban brand-name sponsorship of sporting and cultural events.

To most Europeans, none of this seems new or radical. However in America such stipulations are frequently seen as a threat to the First Amendment of the Constitution – in other words they contradict commercial freedom of speech. Opposition to these policies comes not only from the tobacco manufacturers but also the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU sent a letter to senators arguing that,

‘… regulating commercial speech for lawful products only because those products are widely disliked — even for cause — sets us on the path of regulating such speech for other products that may only be disfavored by a select few in a position to impose their personal preferences.’

This idea that tobacco advertising controls are an unacceptable infringement on freedom of speech seems mistaken, when it has been recognised the world over that tobacco, specifically smoked tobacco, is not a 'normal' commercial product in that it causes direct and serious measurable health harms (around 50% of smokers will die prematurely as a result of their use) even when used as directed. This sets it aside from even alcohol.

The WHO has estimated that, at current global rates, there will be 1 billion tobacco related deaths during this century. Even the ACLU accepts there are must be some limits on freedom of speech. If the prospect of a billion deaths is not enough not justify some restrictions (not on use remember, just marketing) you have to wonder what would.

What is of more interest to Transform, however, is the policy disconnect that exists between tobacco policy and drug policy more generally. Most governments have acknowledged that using tobacco is hugely damaging to health and that stricter regulations are proven to reduce levels of use relative to prevalence patterns that emerged during the unregulated commercial tobacco promotion of earlier in the last century.

In the developed world, tobacco has been falling since the 70's, As a result of improved regulation, the reigning in of commercial marketing and increased public health education. This is in stark contrast to use of most illicit drugs.

If increased regulation and public health education has been proved to successfully contribute to a reduction in tobacco use and health harms, it is follows that these same policies might also be successful in reducing the harms associated with other – currently illegal – drugs. Unfortunately, we cannot even begin to explore the options for better market regulation whilst drugs are subject to rigid blanket prohibitions that mean no such market interventions are possible, default control falling to criminal profiteers and the economic dynamics of a completely unregulated illegal market.

For more information about proposed models of regulation for tobacco, alcohol and currently illegal drugs, see our Transform's new book – ‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’.

Epic three year FOI battle to release suppressed Home Office drug strategy evaluation reaches its denouement

Update: 13.30pm 21 January

We are delighted to announce that the Home Office has finally made the report available: Drugs Value for Money Review July 2007 Report . See below (end) for an update commentary    



Update 2: 26 June


New information on this case has been inadvertently revealed by the Home Office: see Home Office internal document reveals bunker mentality of secrecy and suppression

-------


Introduction

Transform is not unique in being given the runaround during the process of making an application under the Freedom of Information Act. But even we were surprised by the absurdity of what ensued when we requested a seemingly innocuous report in mid 2007.

Danny Kushlick, Head of Policy at Transform, intermittently spent the next two and a half years jumping through a series of FOI hoops to get hold of a document that most who have seen it acknowledge is indeed fairly innocuous, in so far as it is not dissimilar to public domain publications by the same author, and was presumed to consist largely of data publicly available via the Home Office Development and Statistics site, and elsewhere, for anyone with the determination and know-how to hunt it down (see update above - this has proved to be the case). There are no state secrets here, just some fairly straightforward statistics and value for money analysis.

Nor was this the first time Transform has faced this sort of hurdle. In 2003 Tony Blair requested a report on UK and international drug policy from his Number 10 Strategy Unit. Transform's FOI requests for this document were met with a series of rejections, firstly on the basis that it was a 'private piece of work' and later that it contained 'security sensitive' information. When it was finally leaked in full to the Guardian in 2005 it became clear that it did not contain anything remotely security sensitive - indeed the 50 or so redacted pages in the censored version that was belatedly released by the Cabinet Office appeared to be entirely random (background and document summaries here).

What follows is a time line of the process that Danny had to go through in order for Transform to access factual and statistical research material of the kind that democratic governments ought to make available as a matter of course.

We should perhaps not be surprised; punitive responses to drugs are rooted in distinct moral ideologies and political posturing, not evidence of effectiveness. Any juxtaposition of the rhetorical prohibitionist fantasies with empirical reality is untenable for a Government deeply committed to a 'war on drugs'. In the context of a rhetorical and actual war on drugs, especially one that has evidently delivered increasingly counterproductive outcomes, despite ever more resources being poured into it, the Government's only recourse is to propaganda. Anything, certainly anything based on credible academic research, that might contradict the view that the war is being won must be either suppressed, spun or sacked, lest reality be exposed to meaningful public scrutiny, at which point the whole prohibitionist paradigm is threatened.

This sorry FOI tale could not make that political reality more clear.


Freedom of Information Request Time Line

July 2007

The ten-year drug strategy review is announced, and a review consultation process for the next ten-year strategy launched – an event of potentially huge significance for drug policy in the UK.


August 2007

Transform felt that this public review and consultation process, billed by the Home Secretary as the ‘largest ever public consultation on tackling illegal drug use’, would usefully be informed by any research the Government had undertaken or commissioned to evaluate the effectiveness of the different elements of the strategy, on various criteria.

The Government has made repeated commitments to ‘evidence based policy’ – so we asked to see the evidence - not least the evidence they were nominally basing their decisions on.

Transform was aware that various unpublished research existed, although we lacked specifics beyond information that a ‘value for money’ study had been commissioned by the Home Office to inform its strategy review process. This piece of work – undertaken by independent academics (including the highly respected Christine Godfrey from York University) – was precisely the sort of objective evaluation that should be informing the public review and consultation process. As this was publicly funded research, was purely evaluative and did not contain advice to ministers, and did not contain security sensitive information, it seemed to be clearly in the public interest for it to be made available to inform the public strategy review/ consultation process.

As this study was unpublished (our direct requests for it had been summarily rejected), and because we were unclear what other potentially useful research was also languishing unpublished in the Home Office archives, on the August 2nd 2007 we make a broad-scope Freedom of Information request to the Home Office for copies of:

• All unpublished research undertaken or commissioned to inform the strategy review process.
  
  
• All unpublished research undertaken or commissioned by the Home office since 1997, including research that was not completed or is still not completed, into the effectiveness and/or efficiency of the Government's Drug Strategy in preventing drug use and drug harms, or reducing drug-related offending.
  
  
• Any unpublished research undertaken or commissioned by the Home Office since 1997, including research that was not completed or still is to be completed, which examines the value for money of the Government's Drug Strategy.

We additionally asked for details of any other research (not the research itself):

• undertaken or commissioned by the Home Office since 1997, including research that was not completed or still is to be completed, into the effectiveness and/or efficiency of the Government's drug treatment programme; or into the effectiveness and/or efficiency of the Government's drug education/prevention strategy in reducing drug use and drug related harms amongst young people
  
  
• any unpublished options appraisals undertaken or commissioned by the Home Office since 1997, including any that were not completed or are still to be completed, into the Government's Drug Strategy

September 2007

In an experience that was not to be repeated, we received a rapid response to this initial FOI request. In what would become more a more familiar experience, the request was rejected. The reason given was that:

"We have estimated that the cost of answering your requests would exceed the £600 limit and we are therefore unable to comply with it"

this was made on the grounds that:

....the Home Office is not obliged to comply with any information request where the prescribed costs of supplying you with the information exceed £600. The £600 limit applies to all central government departments and is based on work being carried out at a rate of £25 an hour, which equates to 3 1/2 days work per request.

(more detail/discussion on this first rejection here)

August – December 2007

Instead of publishing an evidence based evaluation and review objectively considering the successes and failures of the previous ten years, the Government produces a consultation document that is a quite shameless piece of political propaganda (critiqued here and here in detail as part of Transform’s consultation submission). It receives widespread condemnation:

• In November it is savaged in the House of Lords
  

• It is then criticized in unusually strong terms by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (which remember, also operates within the Home Office) which notes that:

"it is unfortunate that the consultation paper’s ‘key facts and evidence’ section appears to focus on trying to convince the reader of success and progress; rather than providing an objective review and presentation of the current evidence. The ACMD found the consultation paper self-congratulatory and generally disappointing.’

‘It is of concern that the evidence presented, and the interpretation given, are not based on rigorous scrutiny."

• Following a complaint from Transform, the consultation document is also condemned by the Government’s own Statistics Commission which accused the Home Office of spinning the data to make it look more favorable and failing to ‘provide a balanced presentation of the relevant statistical and other evidence’. This is covered by the Guardian newspaper: ‘Whitehall accused of drug cover up’

October 2007

The Government’s public drug strategy consultation process closes, with the various Home Office strategy evaluations requested by Transform resolutely unpublished and unable to inform public debate or any aspect of the review consultation process.

The Observer reports on the obvious failings of the consultation process: Drug strategy debate ‘is a sham’


February 5th 2008

Following a separate FOI request to the Treasury, Transform secures the release of a previously unpublished ‘Stock Take of Anti-Drug Interventions and Cost Effectiveness’.

The overall impression from this document is one of quite staggeringly poor evaluation, based around ill thought out targets, themselves based on meaningless process measures or proxy measures, all built around a rudderless, and politically determined policy. The quality of outcomes, even based on the data available, clearly does not support the strategy as it is presented.

This is most obvious regards supply side interventions which, despite costing between £1 billion and £3 billion a year even in 2001, can demonstrate no evidence of effectiveness whatsoever;

“There is little evidence on cost effectiveness of CJS activities. However, while insufficient to form robust conclusions that little we do have does not offer strong support”.

This received Coverage in the Economist (09.02.08): ‘Hard to Swallow’


February 7th 2008

Despite failing to secure release of the relevant documents in time for the consultation and review process a renewed FOI request is made to the Home Office, this time specifically for the single named document, the 'value for money' study (with which Christine Godfrey was associated) - to avoid any potential for the £600 cost exemption to be re-deployed. A response is promised by March 6th.


February 26th 2008

The new ten year drug strategy is published; aside from some populist window dressing it is the same as the previous strategy. Transform’s press release states that:

“The new drug strategy arrives after ten years of disastrous policy failure, yet during last year’s sham consultation and review process the Home Office utterly failed to acknowledge failure or meaningfully engage in a debate on policy alternatives. Instead, success has been claimed with a shameful parade of cherry picked statistics and Home Office spin.”

May 15th 2008

More than two months late Transform finally receives a response from the Home Office to the February 2008 FOI request (refined from the August 2007 FOI request). It states that:

“We have very carefully considered whether the material should be disclosed but we have decided that this is exempt from disclosure by virtue of section 35 (1) (a) of the Freedom of Information Act.”

The basis for this rejection is given in full as follows:

“This exemption is a qualified exemption and provides that information can be withheld because the material was used for the formulation of Government policy. Our reason for this is because the work informed the policy development work undertaken by the Home Office and Other Government Departments in formulating and publishing the new Drug Strategy. The material is also reflected within the published appendices within the new strategy document pertaining to the most recent evidence review on the strategy and on the resources being invested by Government Departments for delivery of the Drug Strategy.

Section 35 is a qualified exemption under the Freedom of Information Act and therefore requires the public interested balancing test to be considered, I have outlined this below.

Public interest in favour of disclosure:

In favour of the release of this information is the general public interest in openness and transparency in policy making and discussion which may lead to increased trust and engagement between the public and the government. Such openness makes government more accountable to the taxpayer in terms of the quality of decisions taken, and the spending of public money. In addition openness enables individuals to gain a better understanding of decisions which directly affect them, and therefore make informed contributions to public debate.

Public interest against disclosure:

Reasons in favour of withholding the information under section 35(1)(a) are that advice should be broadly based, there may be a deterrent effect on experts or stakeholders who might become reluctant to provide advice because it might be disclosed. Further reasons are that the impartiality of the civil service should be protected; it might be undermined if advice was routinely made public as there is a risk that officials could come under political or public pressure not to challenge ideas in the formulation of policy, thus leading to poorer decision making. The analysis work helped inform the development work on the new Drug Strategy and is reflected within the evidence review and resources appendices within the new strategy document.

On the basis of the factors outlined above, I am of the opinion that the balance of the public interest currently favours withholding this information under section 35.”

It is important to be clear that the requested document was an independent academic evaluation of the drug strategy's effectiveness as related to its costs. It was factual/statistical analysis, not advice to ministers, and it had absolutely no bearing on the impartiality of the civil service - who were not responsible for it.

The reasons given for withholding it were clearly spurious. On May 19th Transform therefore took the only available course and requested that the decision be subject to an internal review.


June 26th 2008

The Home Office informs Transform, in response to a follow up inquiry, that the original request for an internal review has been ‘lost’. August 21st is given as the date by which a full response will be provided.


August 21st 2008

The Home Office informs Transform that the review process is taking longer than anticipated and ‘with regret’ the date for a full response is moved back to October the 2nd.


October 6th 2008

The Home Office informs Transform that the review process is taking longer than anticipated and ‘with regret’ the date for a full response is moved back to November 2nd.


November 14th 2008

The Home Office informs Transform that the internal review report is complete but ‘still in the process of being approved’


December 3rd 2008

The internal review finally reports back with a detailed and highly technical 9 page letter concluding that whilst the non disclosure of document under section 35 (1) (a) of the Freedom of Information Act, at the time (May 2008) was applied correctly, it is now considered that these stipulations no longer apply. Although this shift would only apply to a ‘redacted’ version (some content still not deemed in the public interest for security reasons), seemingly, progress at last :

“In summary, I consider that the exemption provisions of s35(1)(a) were correctly applied to the information held at the time your original request was being handled. Now that the 2008 Drugs Strategy has been approved and published, and given that this information in the analysis is both statistical and factual in nature – i.e. not solely opinions or thoughts, but based on hard-facts and calculations – the provisions of this exemption, the supporting harm, prejudice and Public Interest Test arguments no longer favour withholding this information under this exemption"

However, the review also concludes that non-disclosure of the document can and indeed will be maintained for the entire document on the basis of (the previously unmentioned) section 36 of the FOI act which covers ‘Prejudice to the effective conduct of public affairs’. Transform also learn that invoking section 36 of the FOI requires ministerial approval, and that such approval has been sought and granted.

The letter informs Transform, after a lengthy (and in the context rather unnecessary) discourse about why drug policy data is of such interest and importance to the public, that:

“It is of little or no doubt that the information contained in the analysis would be of great interest to a large number of people. What is of interest however, even to a majority percentage of the population, is not necessarily in their best interests to disclose.”

The specific reasons given for why non-disclosure is in the public’s best interest (requiring a ministerial level invoking of section 36) are that firstly:

“given that this strategy is still in the early stages of being implemented, it is felt that the likelihood of prejudicing the delivery of all areas of this strategy is fairly significant at this time.

One of the key considerations here is that the premature disclosure of the preliminary thinking behind this strategy may end up closing off better or alternative options that might become available because of adverse public reaction.”

And secondly that:

“appropriate expert advice might not be sought in the future because of a possible reluctance of those who might supply it to engage in a debate where their contribution might not be disclosable. This would ultimately be likely to lead to poorer decision making as the relevant contributions to support that process may not be forthcoming.”

December 4th 2008

Transform entirely rejects both of these arguments as both unfounded and mis-applied, and immediately appeals the Home Office decision to the Information Commissioner’s Office.


August 27th 2009

The Information Commissioner makes a full review of the case including a number of discussions with the relevant Home Office officials, finding against the Home Office, ordering them (and legally obliging them under the FOI act) to revisit the decision to withhold release of the document, the presumption being that release will be forthcoming on the basis that the public interest arguments made were inadequate to justify non-release.


November 20th 2009

The Home Office finally concedes, and agrees to release (a redacted version of) the report.

But........not until after March 2010

Still maintaining that the Section 36 exemption was valid at the time it was invoked (no mention is made of the section 35 exemption deployed previously) the Home Office state that:

“In light of the passage of time since the development of the 2008 drug strategy, which was informed in part by the Christine Godfrey report, we now consider that the majority of the report may be disclosed.”

But that:

“After careful consideration we have decided that some of the information contained within the report is exempt from disclosure by virtue of section 23(1) of the Freedom of Information Act. This provides that information supplied by, or relating to, the bodies dealing with security matters, is exempt from release. Section 23 is an absolute exemption, and as such no further consideration is required.”

The reason given for this delay until an unspecified date after March 2010 is that the National Audit Office (NAO), is due to publish a report of its own on local efforts to combat drugs in March 2010 and the Home Office says that to have two reports about drugs out at the same time “risks misinterpretation of the findings of the [NAO] report”

As the Economist coverage of this latest development notes (‘Inconvenient Truths’ Dec 3rd 09):

‘This is believed to be the first time that a public body has openly refused to release information in order to manage the news better’.

Richard Thomas (who stepped down as information commissioner in June 09), speaking to the Economist, questioned the novel defence:

“Certainly my office was always quite sceptical of anything which said publishing information is going to confuse the public. If that’s the case, normally you need to put out some extra material alongside it to provide adequate explanation. It’s not a reason for withholding something.”

Also speaking to the Economist Sir Alan Beith, the chairman of the parliamentary Justice Committee, which oversees the FOI act, said of the Home Office’s excuse:

“That’s really scraping the barrel. On those grounds you would have to ban the various hospital reports that are coming out at the moment [see article] because the public are confused about that too. It’s not an argument for censorship, it’s an argument for an even more open and clear debate.” The Home Office was making “a quite ridiculous attempt to hide from freedom of information,”

The Economist also notes that ‘the legality of the decision is also in doubt, after the department admitted that its refusal to release the document had not been approved by a minister, as is required by law. A Home Office spokeswoman called it an “administrative error”. Retrospective ministerial authorization was being sought as The Economist went to press.’


December 14th 2009

Following the Economist coverage, the Information Commission informs Transform that the Home Office has now agreed to release the document before the NAO document is published. It has requested that it is released before Christmas.


January 2010

Home Office informs Transform that the document will be released on 21 January 2010 – two and half years after the initial request, and two years after the public consultation on the drugs strategy it could usefully have informed has closed.

• Check the Transform blog in the next few days for updates on this story - and a full report on the (un-redacted portions of) the report when we have finally read it.
  
  
• And finally, if anyone reading this far has an unredacted version of the report - please send it (anonymously if you prefer) to Transform (info@tdpf.org.uk). Seriously, we are all grown ups here and this has gone on for far to long.

Update: 13.30pm 21 January:  It's worth a look to discover what the Home Office thinks is too sensitive for public viewing.

What it shows is a basic lack of meaningful evaluation, and that what little evidence they do collect is clearly unable to demonstrate effectiveness or value for money, especially on the enforcement side where most of the resources are expended. It provides a stark contrast to the absurd rose-tinted picture painted by the 2007 consultation document produced by the Government (see below). That we were presented with that piece of shameless propaganda and not this (only now released) academic research is scandalous and should rightly be a source of anger and concern to all in the drugs field involved in the review consultation process, regardless of their policy views.

Nor were the problems of poor evaluation/data and poor outcomes that the report demonstrates previously unidentified. The CSR Treasury stock take from 2001, released under a separate Transform FOI request (see Feb 5th 2008 entry in the Time line below), tells an almost identical story. They had 6 years to address these obvious failings (in data collection and evaluation - let alone outcomes) and utterly failed. There can be no excuses.

The report also demonstrates that the various justifications (see below) given for its suppression during the strategy consultation, and for the following 2 years, were entirely spurious. The Home Office have behaved pathetically, like children in a playground with a secret, and treated the public with contempt in the process. They still are; note the ridiculous redaction of 'SOCA' throughout, except in a footnote referring to one of the redactions (they can't even do censorship properly).

This saga was an attempt to conceal a piece of research that showed the policy in an unflattering light, and its censorship was purely political; a disgrace for the Government and particularly for the Home Office and ministers directly involved.

We will provide a more detailed analysis later, but worthy of note is the item in table 3 on page showing expenditure by police in 05/06 - £2 billion out of £3 billion total expenditure, £1.7 billion of which is 'indirect costs of dealing with drug-related crime'. It looks suspiciously as if it fits with Transform's analysis that enforcement creates the very costs that prohibition is supposed to reduce.

Danny Kushlick said:

"The withholding of this report demonstrates yet again how the Government is committed to the rhetoric and fantasy of success of the current strategy, whilst doing its damnedest to keep the truth out of sight of the public. The edifice of prohibition comes crashing down as soon as evidence is pitched up against it. Ultimately we are being duped into supporting a policy that is demonstrably failing to deliver anything even approximating to value for money"

Previously on the Transform Blog:

• CCJS report: Home Office suppresses research that contradicts ministers
  

• Home Office refuses to release strategy evaluation research - September 2007
  
  
• New UK Drug Strategy publication: background press briefing - February 22 2008
  
  
• Transform FOI requests; old reviews released, latest ones withheld (also in the Economist) February 07 2008

More rank hypocrisy from the Home Secretary

Alan Johnson is leading for the Government in trying to convince us that it is curbing the worst excesses of alcohol retailers.

Apart from the fact that the Government has failed to take on the drinks industry with any degree of principle, Alan Johnson's criticism of some retailers as irresponsible, smacks of hypocrisy of the highest order.

In a news item in the Telegraph today he is quoted as saying:

“Alcohol-related crime costs the UK billions of pounds every year and while the vast majority of retailers are responsible, a minority continue to run irresponsible promotions which fuel the excessive drinking that leads alcohol-related crime and disorder."

Johnson is accused by the Health select Committee, the Royal College of Physicians and Alcohol Concern for not going far enough to regulate alcohol sales, rejecting a series a strongly evidence based proposals including minimum unit pricing (which might not be popular in an election year therefore deemed 'not sensible'). Johnson appears happy that Football clubs and national sport squads run around with drink brands emblazoned across their shirts at a time when there is a growing epidemic of problem drinking amongst their key audience: young people. Even for alcohol brands to continue to sponsor high speed driving events (mixed messages anyone?)

But he is also charged with overseeing the control of illicit drugs, the (ever growing) market for which he has chosen to give in its entirety to organised criminals and unregulated dealers, thereby losing any control of the trade whatsoever, pushing up the street price, fuelling the majority of acquisitive crime and bringing misery and mayhem to some of the most deprived communities on earth.

Sending out the wrong message?

In the grand scheme of things who do you think is being more irresponsible?

Should you wish to let Mr Johnson know what you think, you can contact him at:

Home Office

Direct Communications Unit

2 Marsham Street

London SW1P 4DF


Further reading:

• Supercasinos, drugs and alcohol prohibition: more than a whiff of ministerial hypocrisy
  
  
• Transform Submission to the Department of Health Consultation on Alcohol Policy October 2008 (pdf)

David Bratzer and Law Enforcement Against Prohibition Have Fought in the Trenches of the War on Drugs and Want to End It

Great interview with serving Canadian policeman and LEAP member David Bratzer, in this month's Mautime magazine




from the full interview:

"[LEAP] believes that all drugs should be legal and regulated. The argument in favor of regulating these drugs is not that they're harmless, but rather that they're so dangerous they should be controlled by the government. Remember that under prohibition the government has no control. It's the violent drug dealer who decides the price, purity, cutting agents, advertising methods, business location and hours of operation. And these drug dealers certainly are not asking kids for ID, or encouraging their customers to seek addiction treatment. We need to move away from prohibition and begin considering models that give the government control over the market for these drugs.

More information on Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) here

Gordon Brown responds to Transform's call for Impact Assessment

I received a letter from Downing Street this week, in response to my meeting with Prime Minister Gordon Brown to call for an Impact Assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act. In July of last year I met with the PM to ask the Government to compare and contrast the impacts of the current prohibitionist legislation with alternatives, including legal regulation and control. Here is the briefing that I gave him.

His response is in full below. It includes the following:

"We do not intend to undertake an impact assessment comparing the costs and benefits of different legislative options for domestic drug policy. We see no merit in embarking upon such an undertaking in view of our longstanding position that we do not accept that legalisation and regulation are now, or will be in the future, an acceptable response to the presence of drugs."

So let me get this straight, the Government will not review the evidence of efficacy of the current policy or compare it with alternatives because it is committed to the current regime and, without exploring the outcomes of the Misuse of Drugs Act or prohibition, has decided that alternatives are "not acceptable". So far, so bad. Let's not let evidence get in the way of an effective drug policy (witness the sacking of David Nutt). Meanwhile our tax pounds will be spent on prohibition, without checking whether the policy is of any use, or heaven forfend, totally counterproductive...

I am also not overly reassured by:

"We are working to ensure that UN drugs activity is based on evidence and effectiveness..."

Do not forget that the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has identified the Drug Control System as the cause of much of the 'drug problem'.

But there's more - the absolutist position - that regulation will not be acceptable now "...or in the future..." Yes folks, that means for ever!

...and is a statement that is completely undermined by the fact that legal regulation is the Government's chosen option for alcohol, tobacco, caffeine etc etc

It also suggests:

"The methodological challenges involved in attempting to calculate the scale of the drugs market (supply and demand) and the costs of its harms are very significant."

Oh, so it's too hard is it? I can think of many experts from all round the world who would be delighted to assist in this task. At any rate, this "challenge" is created by gifting the market to unregulated dealers in the first place.

With David Cameron back pedalling on his previously held position (when he sat as a backbencher on the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2001/2), that the UK should initiate a debate at the UN on alternatives to prohibition, the outcome of the upcoming general election is unlikely to herald early reform in the right direction.

Should you wish to ask your MP or parliamentary candidate if they support an Impact Assessment, feel free to use our briefing or contact us for advice.

Transform will be bringing you more on drug policy election shenanigans over the next few months.

(Click on the images to enlarge the letter and view it full screen)

New HCLU short film about Transform's Blueprint

Thanks to Peter Sarosi from HCLU for producing this short film featuring Transform's new publication 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation', filmed at the recent DPA conference in Albuquerque.