It's time to move beyond ineffective drug criminalisation in the UK

For decades governments around the world have pursued, with varying degrees of severity, a ‘war on drugs’ as a means to manage the drug issue. The war is based on the premise that a repressive prohibitionist model is the best means to manage drug use in society. The evidence tells a very different story.

On the supply side it is widely known that cracking down on the supply of illicit drugs has almost no impact on the overall level of supply. Commodity chains shift in response to interdiction, or new sources of supply pop up via the so-called ‘balloon effect’. Markets fracture, adjust and shift, but overall supply remains the same.

The Home Office report is an acknowledgement of something else widely known, but rarely acknowledged by governments: there is no evidence that criminalising drug use has any effect on consumption rates. At the same time, there is a very substantial body of evidence highlighting the highly detrimental impacts of criminalisation on public health. Criminalisation contributes to the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C; it increases the risk of overdose and death; it ostracises people from vital public health and social welfare services; and it confers criminal records on people who don’t deserve them.

It is for this reason that earlier this year the World Health Organization called for the blanket decriminalisation of all drug use to help stem the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and incarceration-related harms. The direction in which international public health policy is heading is pretty clear. Drug use is increasingly – and correctly – being recognised as a public health issue, not a criminal justice one.

Over the next few years, the world has an opportunity with the upcoming 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs to fundamentally remake international drug policies. In 2014 the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy, Chaired by the LSE’s Professor Danny Quah, produced a report on the current global strategy endorsed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists. It concluded that ‘It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis’.

It is for this reason that earlier this year the World Health Organization called for the blanket decriminalisation of all drug use to help stem the spread of HIV, Hepatitis C and incarceration-related harms. The direction in which international public health policy is heading is pretty clear. Drug use is increasingly – and correctly – being recognised as a public health issue, not a criminal justice one.

Over the next few years, the world has an opportunity with the upcoming 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs to fundamentally remake international drug policies. In 2014 the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy, Chaired by the LSE’s Professor Danny Quah, produced a report on the current global strategy endorsed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists. It concluded that ‘It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis’.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/drugs-criminalisation-is-a-plague-on-our-society--we-must-look-to-the-us-for-a-solution-9837951.html 04/11/2014