Another pointless "crackdown" on middle class drug use

The last time a senior Tory announced a crackdown on middle class drug use at a Conservative Party conference it turned into a rather bad trip.

Eighteen years ago the shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe proposed £100 fixed penalties for anyone caught possessing “just one joint” of cannabis. “No more getting away with just a caution, no more hoping that a blind eye will be turned,” she thundered to delegates in Bournemouth. “Parents want it. Schools need it. Our future demands it. The next Conservative government will do it.”

But it turned out her colleagues weren’t so keen. Eight shadow cabinet ministers subsequently cheerfully relayed to newspapers that they’d smoked marijuana while at university, leaving Widdecombe’s policy and her political credibility looking more wrecked than Hunter S Thompson’s hotel room.

Back in 2000, Sajid Javid was a fresh-faced investment banker at Deutsche Bank. But today he seems to have got a case of the Widdecombes.

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“We need to make people understand that if you are a middle class drug user and you sort of think, ‘Well, I’m not doing any damage, I know what I’m doing,’ well, there’s a whole supply chain that goes into that,” the home secretary told the Daily Mail, citing the repellent“county lines”drugs trade, and associated exploitation of vulnerable children by criminal gangs.

“You are not innocent – no one is innocent if they are taking illegal drugs.”

We’re promised a Home Office “review” in which even “professionals” will be targeted.

When one is talking about any market, illegal drugs included, one does indeed have to consider the forces of supply and demand. Javid’s right about that. QCs and surgeons sniffing cocaine in the toilets of posh London clubs create demand just as surely as heroin addicts on a Bristol council estate or homeless spiceheads roaming around Manchester’s Piccadilly station. And the demand stimulates a lucrative and often violent black market supply industry.

So curb the demand and kill the supply? Once again we are reminded that a little bit of economics is a dangerous thing. The question is not whether demand drives supply – it clearly does – but how amenable demand, from all sections of society, will be to the kind of crackdown Widdecombe and now, apparently, Javid envisage. How “elastic” is consumption to new sanctions and enforcement?

The evidence suggests not very. The US government’s hardline “war on drugs” over the past 40 years has done nothing to reduce rates of substance abuse among the American public. Rather this inordinately expensive policy of prohibition has delivered mass incarceration and political destabilisation for countries like Colombia and Mexico.And there are other ways to reduce the social harm done by drug abuse, other ways to curb demand.

Not long after Widdecombe’s humiliation, the government in Lisbon embarked on an experiment. Rather than “cracking down”, in 2001 Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the personal use and possession of illicit drugs. The results are not entirely conclusive  –but they are pretty encouraging. Drug use among the Portuguese population, which had been in the grip of a heroin addiction epidemic, seems to have been in decline over the past decade, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Drug use rates among 15- to 34-year-olds are now low relative to those in other European countries. The numbers of people seeking heroin and cocaine addiction treatment have slumped (although they have risen in the case of cannabis).

Overdose deaths have fallen. The drug-induced death rate in Portugal is now around three per million,five times lower than the EU average rate and 15 times lower than the rate here in the UK. There has been no upsurge in drug-related crime.

Widdecombe’s zero tolerance speech won “loud applause” from that Bournemouth conference hall 18 years ago. If Javid wants a better legacy than hers on drugs he should follow the evidence rather than the ideology.

Thanks to austerity the modern policeman's lot is not a happy one

A policeman's lot is not a happy one. 

If Gilbert and Sullivan were writing today would they cite not only the "enterprising burglar" and his "felonious little plans" but also the misery of payday loans and the need to take a second job as a driving instructor? 

According to a new survey by the Police Federation, almost half its members worry about their finances and 12 per cent feel they don't get paid enough to cover essentials. 

Eight per cent of respondents say they have taken a second job - up from six per cent of those surveyed last year. That implies around 10,000 police officers are doing something on the side to make extra money, whether taxi driving, plumbing or fitness training.

"[It] clearly cannot be right or acceptable that those employed to keep the public safe cannot make ends meet or put food on tables for their families," says John Apter, the Federation's chair.

Apter also links government cuts to rising violent crime rates. "We are in crisis and that is a direct result of the pressure the government has put on by a reduction in funding," he says.

That's a verdict echoed by Labour, which has pledged to recruit an extra 10,000 officers by 2022.

It's not particularly surprising to see the Federation pressing for more money for members. The police are part of a swelling chorus of public sector anger over eight long years of government-imposed pay restraint.

Is the police service in as dire a condition as the Federation claims? And is government austerity to blame? The data point unambiguously to a major squeeze. Spending on individual forces in England and Wales is down by between 10 and 20 per cent. The number of full-time equivalent police officers has collapsed from a peak of 144,000 in 2009 to 123,000 last year.

According to the Office for National Statistics, the median annual pay of a police officer last year was £ 40,616. In 2010 it was £ 38,464. That's a rise of 6 per cent. But prices have risen 15 per cent over the same period, meaning officers' real terms average pay has fallen by close to 10 per cent.

Are drastic cuts in numbers responsible for recent increases in violent crime? Are real terms pay reductions creating a demoralised and increasingly ineffective force? It's difficult to be categorical. Looking back over recent decades, there's no clear correlation between police numbers and reported crime. Police numbers and funding rose strongly in the 2000s, when recorded crime was falling. But that was a continuation of a longer term trend which began in the mid-1990s and which was seen across the Western world.

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows no clear association since 2010 between the scale of cuts in each force and key performance measures from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary.

Yet a rise in reported stress levels among officers certainly coincides with the cuts. The recent disturbing spike in violent crime such as robberies is also consistent with police forces being overstretched.

A leaked internal report from the Home Office suggested the fall in police numbers "may be an underlying driver". The most recent independent police pay review report highlighted a "significant reduction" in new recruits in 2016.

And the new home secretary, Sajid Javid, has broken with the denials of his predecessor Amber Rudd and pledged to fight the Treasury for more "resources" for the police.

Other austerity policies in recent years have contributed to a growing and more complex workload for the police. "Many of the problems the police are now dealing with - homelessness, mental illness, children leaving home - were previously picked up by other departments of local government," points out the University of Sussex's Richard Disney, someone who has studied the economics of UK policing in depth.

Even if, being generous to the government, austerity did succeed in squeezing some inefficiency out of the police, it's a strategy that has now pretty clearly run out of road. Further cuts to funding and real terms pay reductions for officers really will hollow out the service.

If the modern police officer's lot is not a happy one, ultimately, the same will be true of the public.