Drugs, Crime and Public Health. The Political Economy of Drug Policy

Citation

Klein, A. (2012), "Drugs, Crime and Public Health. The Political Economy of Drug Policy", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 193-194. https://doi.org/10.1108/dat.2012.12.3.193.1

The drugs field is traditionally split into two professional domains working, respectively, towards the reduction of supply and demand. Achieving the first objective is the responsibility of the criminal justice system, while the latter is the prerogative of public health. At strategic and operational levels the two are usually working in separate silos and frequently come into direct conflict. Police officers have been known to park up outside drug treatment clinics to search and arrest clients coming in for group work sessions or a fresh pack of needles. Medical practitioners, on the other hand, have been one of the routes for supplying underground markets. Yet, both have been indispensable components of the drug control system since is creation in the 1920s. It was the perception of medical dangers posed by drugs that engendered the first legislative controls, and it is the criminal justice system that was chosen as the primary method to enforce them. Bringing the two concerns, crime and public health, into the purview of a single volume has a compelling logic. Implicit to the title is the third concern of the book, which is policy. And while the book takes to this contentious field with a studied indifference it follows the evidence towards a clear set of recommendations. Refusing to stray beyond the remit of his data sets, Stevens pushes no further than “progressive decriminalisation.” But the preceding discussions have exposed the shambolic failure of a policy framework that has exacerbated the very harms it purported to contain and not a hint of reform on the horizon.

There is a sad but compelling logic to this conclusion, drawn from the author's own experience as a researcher at the heart of the Whitehall machine, when on secondment to he Cabinet Office. Civil servants have to tell convincing policy stories to their political masters, but are unlikely to select policies that challenge the status quo. Drugs policy, in his view is inherently ideological, not in a doctrinal sense, but by reproducing asymmetric power relations. This the argument which holds together a wide range of material and provides the author with a narrative structure of his own. It is also a private passion, the closest the author comes at revealing his own standpoint with no evidence to support him. “High levels of social inequality are not natural” he argues, “They are created by human action.” While we could argue that any social formation is the product of human action, unless the be the consequence of divine preordination, but Steven turns it into the Leitmotif for what is to follow. Drug policy plays its part in both reproducing these inequalities and masking their unnatural nature.

This is done in a nuanced and sophisticated discussion to drive criminological debates beyond the analytical frame set by Goldstein. By employing concepts from Giddens, Matza and Sykes, Bourdieu, and Jock Young, Stevens makes a convincing argument for “subterranean play and structuration,” where the pursuit of intoxication can be seen as “a fight to live a life which is not rigidly defined by the tight restraints of social inequality and immobility.” Following Borgois, he recognises the costs of this reaction, as the policy response by first overestimating the drug – crime link uses this to “squash such disobedient sighs of subterranean life.”

The consequence is a policy that is justified and in turn generates and “ideology of exclusion.” Interest groups, Stevens argues, use evidence selectively and tendentiously, to pursue their own needs. When introducing drug treatment and testing orders key factors relating to inequality of education, income and housing to explain crime are filtered out to allow for a robust criminal justice response to social problems. It allowed a New Labour government to parade itself as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” while effectively legitimating the very inequalities that gave rise to drug problems in the first place. The interests of powerful lobby groups such as the police, or vociferous opinion formers is also demonstrated in discussions of legislative reform including the Drugs Act of 2005 and the classification of cannabis.

Moving on to drug treatment Stevens is clear about motives and not so hidden agendas. The generous investment in the UK drug treatment system under successive New Labour governments sprang from one concern only – to reduce crime. While maintaining that court ordered treatment is no less effective than when “voluntary,” Stevens warns of net widening. In part this is due to clumsy policy processes with a predilection for easy for solutions, prompting the Home Office to claim that ordering more offenders into treatment can significantly reduce overall crime rates.

On this Stevens is pessimistic. Following arguments first formulated by Reinarman, Cohen and Kall, current policy has little effect in reducing drug harms and possibly even patterns of use. Harsh enforcement drives its own series of effects and consequences leading to increases in violence and the sharp rise in the incarceration rate, which in turn leads to greater offending in the communities worst affected. Drawing on police experiences from a range of countries the Stevens now drives home the main point. It is not policy that is the most important determinant of either levels of drug use or the associated problems. It is the levels of equality and social support networks which have the most effective preventative effect and are important in alleviating social harms. A cautious realist, he does not believe that the paradigm is ripe for shifting. More evidence needs to be generated for policy to change. This book is a strong piece in that process.