“C” for reform

These are interesting times indeed. The government seems to have woken up to the need for proper data collection in its research concerning illegal drug use, the legalisation debate has been raging in the Guardian, heroin trials are a success and Gordon Brown finally used the “C” word. Change is in the air at last, although it would be a brave man who forecast where it was all leading.

Government studies into illegal drugs have long been undermined by a sloppy attitude to data collection – something born of necessity due to the fact that prohibition prevents any proper, statistically valid, collection of data in most areas. This was something this blog highlighted a while back with regard to cannabis with the Home Office Cannabis potency study. That study used data from samples supplied by the police:

For operational reasons some forces chose to send in material from only one Borough Command Unit or from one of several forces collection points. Some forces experienced internal logistics problems; others were very enthusiastic and sent in everything received during the trial period.

Significant conclusions were made about the change in cannabis “potency” in recent years based on this invalid method of data collection and compared to results from previous years when even less care was taken with the collection of data. These results were used in part to justify the move of cannabis back to class B. This sort of sloppy approach to science has been typical of the Home Office over the years and so it was with great interest that we heard this week of a study which had been pulled for precisely the reason of weak data.

The ill-fated study was called “Project Blueprint” and was pulled because it was not “sufficiently robust”, this has to be something of a first. As with all things the government makes a mess of, it tried its best to hide the story which as far as I can tell didn’t appear in the mainstream press at all. Indeed, had it not been for Eric Carlin’s blog and later that of the BBC’s Mark Easton the story would probably never have seen the light of day.

Eric explained what Blueprint was about:

The project was promoted from the outset as the most important drugs education research project ever to be undertaken in the UK. For those, like myself, who continue to believe in the importance of early intervention at school, family and community levels with young people, Blueprint was supposed to show us whether providing drugs education by Blueprint’s methods, based on effectiveness research from elsewhere, could have significant impact in a UK context.

The resulting report which admits the failure of the study is online and can be seen here

It seems not only the Home Office, but also  the Institute for Social Marketing at the University of Stirling and The Open University set about it with an amazing disregard for the rigours of scientific study and as Mark Eaton reported:

Yes, a significant programme to assess whether a new way of preventing young people using illegal drugs actually worked could do no such thing. It emerges that they had failed to follow two of the most basic rules of such research:
• Make sure your sample is large enough
• Make sure you have a control group for comparison

What is even more interesting is that this basic design flaw in this £6million study seems to have gone unnoticed for six years by anyone in charge. Frankly that simply isn’t believable.  Conspiracy theory supporters might prefer to speculate that the results the study did produce were not the ones the government wanted to hear, indeed the report states:

It was originally intended that the local school sample would act as a comparison group so that the efficacy of the Blueprint programme could be tested. However, analysis during the development of the evaluation concluded that to be able to detect differences between the two samples would require a sample of at least 50 schools. This was considered beyond the scope of the evaluation, both in terms of the resources it would require and what was appropriate for the evaluation of an untested approach.

Perhaps that reads as if the effect of the drugs education program was not as great as they were expecting? Whatever the truth it is refreshing to see the Home Office at last acknowledging the  vital importance of good data collection and analytical methodology in such studies, we can only hope this is the start of something good.

Also this week the pilot study into heroin maintenance reported good results, with a recommendation to roll the service out to more centres around the country. This has got the prohibition lobby up in arms, as might be expected. After all, what is heroin maintenance if not a form of legalised heroin distribution? As usual The mail quoted Mary Brett of Europe Against Drugs:

She said: ‘Most drug addicts want to give up, and addiction can be cured. We should be trying to help them back to a normal life.

‘But this isn’t even trying to cure them, it’s just giving them their heroin for free. It is defeatism.

‘What are we going to do to help alcoholics? Give them alcohol on prescription?’

She added: ‘I fear it will be the thin end of the wedge. It will start with the most hardcore cases, but treatment services will find it easier to just give them a prescription, and more and more will be included in this scheme.’

Interestingly the Mail now allows all comments to go up and more, allows readers to rate them in terms of popularity. What’s interesting is that the most popular of the readers comments as selected by the Mail Online’s readers are supportive of the heroin maintenance scheme.

The Daily Express was truly outraged with the screaming headline “FURY AT BID TO GIVE ADDICTS FREE DRUGS” (here). It quoted Tory justice spokesman Bill Aitken:

“Drug treatment has got to be on the basis of abstinence or it simply does not work in the long term. This is nonsense, indeed it is dangerous nonsense.”

Also wheeled out was Professor Neil McKeganey of Centre for Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University, another well known opponant of drug law reform who said:

“drug services should be focused on helping addicts get clean”.

The is actually the nub of the issue. What is the aim of drugs policy? Is it as these two commentators insist about making people lead drug free lives, or is it about reducing the harm drug use can cause both for the user and for the rest of us? Sadly the Express wasn’t willing to allow its readers to have their say on this issue, but as one respondent in the Daily Mail put it:

Give these addicts free heroin or let them break into my house and steal all my valuables. Hmmmm, that’s a hard one.

Drug law reform campaign Transform  summed it up quite neatly as always:

Of course supervised use of legally regulated supplies of heroin significantly improve the lives of users, who otherwise have commit crime to raise money to score dirty drugs from gangsters, for consumption using dirty paraphernalia in marginalised and unsafe environments. The lesson here is that moves to take users out of the illegal market and into a regulated supply where drugs are quality controlled will produce the kind of outcomes we all want to see.

What this scheme does, however, is to present us with the dilemma of having to decide when a heroin addict is so far down the road of addiction that deterrence and/or substitution has and will always fail so that we give up attempts to impose non-use on him and allow heroin maintenance. Critics will argue that all an addict has to do is to hang on long enough and he’ll get what he wants. Well, that’s the problem with trying to fit something like this into the prohibition regime, it is, as Mary Brett and others of her ilk will no doubt suspect, another thin edge of the wedge of radical intelligent thinking.

The radical intelligent thinking  has been much in evidence this week in the Guardian with a series of articles about drug law reform, most presenting the case for ending the war on drugs, with one brave attempt by Prof Neil McKeganey (again) to try to argue the case against. Interestingly as several readers picked up in the comments section, Prof McKeganey is a professor of “drug misuse research”. This is an interesting title which itself implies an agenda by the inclusion of the word “misuse”. Prof  McKeganey isn’t studying the use of drugs in modern society but their “misuse” – a value laden term if ever there was one. It could therefore be assumed from his title that he would be a supporter of prohibition and so he is.

Anyway, he did his best to argue the case against drug law reform:

Heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and lord knows what else on the NHS? Sounds less like a solution and more like a social policy in search of a disaster.

So here we are, some 12 years after Jack Straw killed off any hope of “New Labour” introducing any form of drug law reform at the 1997 party conference and yet it’s still a subject getting the headlines. The reason being of course that the problem isn’t getting better and that more and more people are seeing that drug prohibition has been and is still an expensive failure, which, of course, brings us to Mr Brown and his use of the “C” word.

The “C” word is “cuts” to public expenditure which we now know are in the pipeline  once the next general election is out of the way. There are some pretty big elephants in the room which include ID cards and the Trident replacement, but also there is the drug war. The whole drugs war fiasco is something the government is very keen remains uncosted. Transform have been trying to get the government to subject the drugs policy to a proper cost-benefit analysis for some time, only to be stonewalled by them. Instead Transform has produced its own report  (A Comparison of the Cost-effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs) which identifies the sort of savings we could make.

If the government is serious about the need to make cuts to important public services like education and health then it should certainly look at the drugs policy. For this reason, if for no other, drugs law reform is back on the agenda.