Suggested future directions for the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction

Citation

Klein, A. and Stothard, B. (2015), "Suggested future directions for the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 15 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/DAT-08-2015-0049

Suggested future directions for the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction

Article Type: Editorial From: Drugs and Alcohol Today, Volume 15, Issue 3.

The European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction is one European agency that has steadily expanded since its foundation in 1993. Its mission has been threefold:

• to provide factual and objective information on drugs and drug addictions;

• to collect information on trends; and

• to exchange experience and information on best practice.

The vision was to develop the organisation into a reference point on all questions relating to drugs and drug use. Under the competent leadership of its outgoing director, Wolfgang Götz, the ECMDDA has grown into a formidable organisation, with over 100 members of staff churning out scientific publications from its spanking new offices on the Cais do Sodre in Lisbon. Following years of steady expansion in scale, impact and scientific prestige the organisation has more recently been contending with a far more hostile external environment. First there is the deteriorating financial situation: after years of organisational growth budgets have been cut and savings are being made.

More serious than these financial adjustments, however, are the broader changes in the social and political context. In the years following its foundation, the halcyon days of post Cold War tranquillity, European citizens had the leisure and prosperity to think of drugs as one of the most pressing social problem of the day. Prevailing models emphasised that heroin, cocaine and cannabis (or most of it) were imported into the continent from the Americas, Africa and Asia. Internationalism was inscribed into the operation from the start. For the scientific staff this meant a comprehensive work programme on protocols for defining phenomena (deaths, crimes, prevalence of use), measuring trends and making data sets comparable across different countries. Facts and figures emerging from such dispassionate analysis delivered on promises widely made across the European and political community that policy would be led by evidence. This was seen as cutting edge and effective.

A decade and a half into the twenty-first century these assumptions have all but evaporated. "Evidence led policy" is somewhere between cliché and platitude but has no traction in policy argument. Moreover, since the facts are telling us that drug deaths and drug use are, over the long term, falling, current policies must have been effective. The enthusiasm for European solutions has been dampened by the rise of nationalism in many quarters and disillusionment with technocratic solutions. For several of the member states, including the UK, it is tempting to think that bilateral agreements with producer and transit countries and task-focused cooperation under the auspices of the United Nations, can deliver better results than pooling sovereignty in the European Union (EU). Just as significant, perhaps, is the recalibrated risk assessment. Sinister drugs produced by shadowy crime groups have long given way to the far more concrete menace of Islamic terrorism and resurgent Russian militarism.

These developments have combined to relegate drugs to a secondary issue. In a farsighted move the then head of the United Nations Drug Control Programme rebranded that agency as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Of course drugs and crime will always be with us, but the political problematisation of the former goes in swings and roundabouts, while crime is a hardy perennial. Society will always be exercised about law breakers and call upon its politicians to "do something about it".

For the EMCDDA this means shifting its pre-occupation from the so-called "demand side" of the drugs phenomenon – that is patterns of use, treatment and prevention – to the "supply side". It has already forged a working relationship with Europol, another EU agency whose origins are steeped in political entrepreneurship and concern over drugs. The first results have been the drug market studies that inform, inter alia, the allocation of European funding for law enforcement activity.

There is, though, much more potential for developing this side of the work. The information provided by law enforcement agencies on drug seizures, particularly their size and value, can do with further refinement. The impact of different approaches to policing drug markets is also worth exploring, particularly with regard to developing indicators around the costs to the criminal justice systems and the criminalisation of otherwise law-abiding offenders. Once the barriers are broken and all drug-related phenomena are part of the agency’s remit, entirely new opportunities open up. A cost/benefit study that traces the impact of repressive approaches over time is long over-due.

One of the consequences of the media furore over police killings of black citizens in the USA is a new critical awareness of data sets that are not there. It is remarkable that a country that employs legions of data crunchers does not count the number of people killed by its law enforcement services. Just as astonishing, though, is that 40 years after cranking up repressive measures against drug users the UK still has not conducted a cost/benefit analysis. Policy makers prefer to point to falling consumption prevalence rates, without disclosing that these do not encompass the ever growing number of intoxicants available and a fall from peak levels still indicates a culture of consumption where forbidden substances have become normalised across large sections of the population.

This provides another opportunity for an agency spanning a range of scientific disciplines. The tenacity of a failing policy paradigm can be demonstrated by quantitative measures, but needs qualitative approaches for greater understanding. Exploring in more detail what the support for current approaches rests on, who the main constituencies are, what their motivation and how they acquire and retain political influence are questions for which a pan European (28 EU members+Norway) organisation is ideally placed.

The agency is going through the difficult process of retrenchment, restructuring and selecting a new director. It is an opportunity for taking the existing skill sets and experience into far more controversial areas of policy analysis. For policy makers and technocrats, law enforcement and treatment staff the findings may well turn out to be uncomfortable. But it would be extremely beneficial for the European citizen to get a better idea of who is deciding on the policies that she is funding with her hard earned tax-euros (crowns, pounds, zloty) and on what grounds.

Axel Klein and Blaine Stothard