Danniella Westbrook is luckier than she knows.
May 2, 2003, Friday
SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 21
LENGTH: 1207 words
HEADLINE: DANNIELLA WESTBROOK IS LUCKIER THAN SHE
KNOWS
BYLINE: JOHANN HARI
BODY:
Here's a great idea for a TV show: let's take a
fragile recovering coke addict who's just had her
septum restored (it was eroded away by the constant
coke use, you see). And let's dump her in the middle
of an Australian jungle with a horde of weird egotists
and a pair of unnaturally cheerful Geordie midgets,
bombard her with insects and rats, and watch her go
mad! Sounds cruel? It's nothing compared with the way
we treat most drug addicts in this country under our
current failing system of drug prohibition.
Danniella Westbrook is currently enduring a week on
I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, watched by 10
million of us. (She seems only marginally less
miserable than in her former life on EastEnders, where
her character, as I recall, seemed to run away to
Spain on an abnormally high number of ocassions.) But
the blunt truth is that if she had not been lucky
enough to have the wealth to pay for private rehab,
she would probably be reduced to the state of most
female Class A drug addicts in Britain: selling her
body on the streets in a desperate bid to feed her
addiction for the next week, day, hour.
In a country with a population of 58 million people
and between 250,000 and 500,000 problematic Class A
drug-users, we have 3,000 rehab places available on
the NHS each year. That is not a misprint. 3,000
places - which works out as one rehab place per 83 to
166 addicts. I cannot find a single expert on our
current drugs policies who believes that Danniella
would have ended up in one of these extremely limited
slots. This is because she was not involved in theft,
most of our treatment places are designed for opiate
users (despite the advice of the World Health
Organisation), and she has two young kids (places that
can accommodate women with children are even more hard
to find).
Without an EastEnders-enhanced bank account and a
millionaire husband, Danniella would have been left to
the vagaries of underfunded detox programmes "in the
community". As she tried to stop, she would still have
been surrounded by her coke-using friends and
temptation at every turn; the chances of succeeding in
weaning herself off would have been slim.
The repercussions of this policy are massive. Tiggey
May, a senior researcher at South Bank University,
studies British prostitutes. She explains: "A huge
number of the women I meet on the streets want to go
into rehab, but they know that finding a place is
extremely difficult. The proportion of addicts who are
women is increasing, but mother and baby units haven't
been created at anything like the same rate, and most
women don't have somebody they can just leave their
children with... A majority of the women working on
the streets are crack addicts, but they don't get the
support to change their lives that they badly need."
And it's not just the women themselves, the countless
lost Danniellas whom nobody watches on prime-time TV
and nobody notices, who suffer: it's you and me. A
Home Office-commissioned study last year found that
the economic and social cost of Class A drug use add
to an amazing pounds 10.1-17.4bn a year - and 88 per
cent of that spending goes on crime. Half of all
property crimes, according to Home Office Minister Bob
Ainsworth, are caused by addicts. Every second theft,
then, is a consequence of the failure of the
government to invest in rehab: remember that next time
you come home to see your door broken open and your
valuables gone.
If ever there was an example of where "tough on crime,
tough on the causes of crime" could be put into
practice, this is it. The long-term savings - for
police and court time and government money - involved
in providing rehab are massive, and the political
capital waiting to be seized in a country terrified of
crime is vast. If the Government needs an easy source
of revenue for funding this massive crime reduction
programme - one of the few methods which has been
shown time and again to work - they could legalise and
tax the vast and unstoppable drugs trade that already
exists in this country. Drug-dealing happens every
second of the day, and only the most blinkered
authoritarians now think that it can be stomped out
through "crackdowns". It is only a misplaced fear of
public opinion that stops the Blair government - which
does not consist of fools - from admitting this.
They know perfectly well that the country that has
most vigorously tried this kind of drugs repression,
the US, has ended up with the biggest drug problem of
all developed nations.
Meanwhile, the country that abandoned this policy
soonest and opted instead for funding rehab and harm
reduction, the Netherlands, is seeing its junkies age
without a large younger generation to replace them.
(It is worth bearing in mind that the US drug war is
now being fought by a President who has himself
tacitly admitted that he has used cocaine, a crime for
which he is happy to send others to jail for 20
years.)
There is a myth that those of us who campaign for
drugs legalisation would happily see the whole country
descend into an opium-induced trance. The defenders of
prohibition conjure up a post-legalisation dystopia:
one year after drugs are legalised, they imagine,
heroin-injecting housewives will lie in a blissed-out
sleep in Britain's gutters next to shaking,
cocaine-hungry bank managers. The whole of Britain
would become an omnibus edition of I'm A Celebrity...
This is absurd. I defend the right of individuals to
use drugs recreationally and in moderation, and this
is possible with both cocaine and heroin. (The British
Government backs this in one sphere at least: US
pilots and soldiers fighting alongside "our boys" in
Iraq have been given amphetamines to sharpen their
concentration. Why soldiers and not, say,
journalists?) But crucially, just as I support and
occasionally enjoy limited drug use, we legalisers
also see reducing the number of addicts as absolutely
central to our agenda.
There is no contradiction here: it is far easier to
fight addiction when drugs are in the open, carefully
regulated and sold in pharmacies (thus bankrupting all
drug-pushing). Most important, under legalisation -
which will happen in a European country in the next
few decades, I am sure - we will have huge sums of
money that would go not into the bank accounts of
criminals (as it does today) but into a flowering of
well-funded rehab projects across the country. Drugs
legalisation and reducing the number of drug addicts
are not opposing goals: they are as firmly linked as
Siamese twins.
It is the supporters of the current system who are not
serious about fighting drug addiction. They prefer to
cling to the discredited myth that the supply of drugs
can be stamped out by plugging every port and
coastline on this island, and that we can carry on
spending a pittance on rehabilitation.
So if you think Danniella seems to be cracking up out
there in the Australian rain forest, spare a thought
for all the other women with drug problems who lack
her advantages in life. It is the prohibitionists -
who refuse to tax the drug trade and spend the money
this would raise on rehab - who are inflicting this
living nightmare upon them.
j.hari@independent.co.uk
