The blog is in response to Home Secretary Priti Patel’s Telegraph piece ‘People are Dying,’ from Anyone’s Child member, Pat.

Having failed to curb rising drug-related deaths in the UK, the government has now pledged a  £148million package to clamp down on county-lines and drugs supply and prevent addiction. While more money is very welcome, we believe that far more is needed to truly protect our communities, including a change to our drug policy which recognises that the ‘problem’ lies not with drugs per se, but with the harms created by the illegal market.

Letters to the Editor, The Telegraph, submission

I respond to Priti Patel’s piece ‘People are dying’ (Telegraph 20.1.2020) as a mother who recently lost her young adopted son to a heroin overdose. The system-wide approach to problematic use of illegal drugs that Patel advocates turns out, on closer inspection, to be more of the same old policies of heavy handed law enforcement and criminalisation that have spectacularly failed to solve the growing drug crisis in the UK during the past half century. In fact they have made it worse. Boasting about the numbers of drug busts, arrests and the value of drugs and cash seized, she seems unaware of research that shows that such activities, whilst costly in police time, do nothing more than interrupt street drug supplies for a few hours or days. It’s such a profitable illegal trade that there are always other gangs ready to step in and take the place of those removed. The only solution is to take the supply of harmful, often adulterated, drugs out of the hands of criminals and to remove their market by regulating and licencing drug supply and use, as is done with tobacco and alcohol. Criminals do not care about the content or dosage of what they sell and that is why there are so many deaths. A derisory small amount of the new money that Patel announces is to be spent on mental health and other services for those individuals and families blighted by drug dependency and there remains no acknowledgement that Britain’s exceptionally high drug-related mortality rate is driven largely by austerity, deprivation and childhood trauma. Regional patterns demonstrate this. They are the real causes of Britain’s massive drug problem and addressing them is the only solution.

Pat Hudson

Campaigner with Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control

Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University

Furthermore, Patel celebrates that the funding thus far has resulted in ‘3,400 arrests, more than 550 county lines being closed, more than £9m street value of drugs and £1.5m cash seized‘. Below, Ex-undercover police officer and member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Action Partnership), Neil Woods, exposes the truth behind drug busts and why they’ll never reduce the supply of drugs.