Johann Hari

July 4, 2003, Friday

SECTION: COMMENT; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 911 words

HEADLINE: MR DUNCAN SMITH SEARCHES FOR REHABILITATION

BYLINE: JOHANN HARI

BODY:
The Conservative Party has invented a startling new
concept. It is called - say it slowly -
re-hab-il-ita-tion. Yes, the party of Margaret
"legalising cannabis would be like legalising murder"
Thatcher has finally seen that drug addiction is an
illness, not evidence of demonic possession. Perhaps
they have looked to their hero, George Bush, who is a
recovered drug user (his poison was alcohol, although
he dabbled with cocaine) and has risen to the toughest
and most responsible job in the world.

Whatever their motives, the Tories now admit that
banging up heroin users in prisons where they can get
even more heroin, and have nothing better to do,
should not be the Government's first resort. They
propose to create 20,000 new rehab places for
hard-drug users (we currently have 3,000 places to
serve 500,000), and to offer rehab as an alternative
to prison.

It would be wrong to carp. It is genuinely surprising
- and impressive - to go to the Tory party website,
see an image of a filled syringe and realise that it
is not followed by some hysterical Reefer
Madness-style propaganda. Oliver Letwin, the shadow
Home Secretray, is plainly sincere, and this is a
commendable attempt to look at an area of public
policy that has too long been a bog of stale cliches
and outdated thinking.

Moaning about the initial cost - around pounds 400m -
is misplaced. Rehab is good policy because it saves
money in the long term: recovered addicts do not clog
up the police, the courts, the prisons ... the
statistic most commonly used by anti-prohibition
campaigners in the US is that each dollar spent on
rehab saves seven further in the criminal justice
system. It is a bracing condemnation of the Home
Office under David Blunkett that the Tory policy on
drugs is now far more progressive than Labour's.

But before we get carried away, there are some
important points to bear in mind. IDS, in his speech
yesterday, croakily listed the places in Britain worst
afflicted by drug addiction: Chapeltown, Hackney,
Gallowgate, Moss Side, Easterhouse. Notice anything?
They are also the poorest parts of our country. There
is a direct and obvious link: take a kid, raise her in
misery, deny her access to any social opportunities,
bore her senseless, and just wait for the heroin to
look appealing.

No drugs strategy can be credible without a parallel
and vigorous anti- poverty strategy. But the Tories -
who, when in government, both catalysed and denied the
existence of these slums - have no credible plans to
tackle poverty at all. The Blair government's
under-rated anti-poverty strategies are having a real
effect: the minimum wage, the New Deal, the working
families tax credit and massive benefits increases for
working families have transformed the council estate
my sister lives on, and plenty of others across the
country. Yet the Tories declare that they want to
reverse almost all of these policies: a recipe for
creating far more junkies.

Even more importantly, all the available research
shows that only around 5 per cent of addicts want to
quit at any given time. If you hang out with junkies,
alcoholics or cigarette smokers, they don't sit there
longing for the day they're "clean": they enjoy their
intoxication and seek some more.

It is incredibly important that rehab is available for
those who want it, and a scandal that it isn't there
at the moment; but even with the best rehab facilities
in the world, we would still have to live alongside
the 95 per cent of addicts who don't want it. They
will still burgle, beg and mug to get their fix,
unless we do one of two things.

First, we can legalise hard drugs, massively bringing
down their price because they would no longer have to
pass through 15 different handlers between Colombia
and the streets of London, each taking their own cut.
A reduced price means far less theft. Second, we can
return to the British policy of the early 1960s and
prescribe heroin.

At the moment, only around 500 extremely problematic
users are given their heroin by the state. (David
Blunkett, to be fair, has recently increased this
number, albeit very slightly.) Mass heroin
prescription would slice great chunks of crime out of
the worst estates in Britain: users who now steal out
of desperation, because addiction is ravaging their
bodies, would no longer have a motive.

The ideal drugs policy would be a mix of both these
strategies, with a dash of terrific rehab, paid for by
taxing the profits of the drugs market that, because
of prohibition, currently go to criminal gangs. To
people like Ann Widdecombe and David Blunkett who say
that this would lead to a "drugs culture" and masses
of people using drugs, all I can say is: where are you
living? We already have a drugs culture, and it ain't
going away. No country on earth has been able to stamp
out drug use that is so widespread and popular. No
drugs is no option.

Yet IDS was still clinging yesterday to the silly
language of "winning the battle against drugs". This
is risible. The real choice is between safe, legal
drugs twinned with low crime, or dangerous, illegal
drugs and the resulting crime epidemics. Rehab
matters, and if the Tories are serious about providing
20,000 places for addicts, then 20,000 lives will be
transformed. But this is only one - comparatively
small - dimension to drugs policy. Now, if the
Conservative Party had the nerve to say that, I'd be
impressed.

j.hari@independent.co.uk