COMMENT
They said what..?
Spotlight on the national media
WILL A BORIS JOHNSON
government introduce drug
consumption rooms? A supervised
consumption facility would allow
the Tories to be ‘tough on crime’
by pursuing drug dealers, but
sympathetic to those in the throes
of homelessness and addiction…
At a time when the opposition
party has lost all but one seat in
Scotland, surely the strategy for
the Tories must be to capitalise
on the low hanging fruit and
facilitate the piloting of live-saving
safer drug consumption facilities?
Ant Lehane, Herald Scotland,
17 February
A TRANSATLANTIC SCHISM has
opened up over vaping and health.
In the US, the war on vaping
is being pursued by activists,
politicians and scientists who
believe that tobacco companies
are cynically promoting
e-cigarettes as a means to get
people addicted to nicotine, which
will – sooner or later – lead them
to cigarettes. In the UK, anti-
smoking campaigners and health
experts counter that for many
adult smokers, vaping offers the
best hope of avoiding a premature
death. The two sides periodically
break into open hostilities. The
claim by PHE that vaping is 95 per
cent safer than smoking tobacco,
frequently quoted by e-cigarette
manufacturers and sellers, has
been criticised as misleading by
anti-smoking campaigners in the
US… Many public health experts in
the UK believe they are witnessing
an unnecessary tragedy, and
that failure to promote the
most promising method of
helping people quit smoking is
endangering the lives of millions.
Sarah Boseley, Guardian, 18 February
I KNOW THE DAMAGE short-term
prison sentences do and I also
know how ineffective they are.
I’ve met too many people who
are serving a life sentence in
instalments, their addiction and
WWW.DRINKANDDRUGSNEWS.COM
Surely the strategy
for the Tories must
be to capitalise on
the low hanging
fruit and facilitate
the piloting of
live-saving safer
drug consumption
facilities?
mental health needs untreated,
their trauma unaddressed and
their housing, social support and
employment broken over and
over again. Our own addiction
to imprisonment as the only
response to crime feeds itself,
repeatedly setting people up to
fail as they return to prison.
Karyn McCluskey, Scotsman,
24 February
WHEN IT COMES TO DRUGS POLICY,
California is the most fascinating
large-scale experiment happening
anywhere in the world — and
it’s well worth studying, given
how legalising cannabis might
affect tax revenues and the local
economy and have unpredictable
consequences for public health
and the criminal justice system…
One report suggests that cannabis
sales in California hit almost £3bn
in 2019, and that same year around
67,000 jobs in the state were
estimated to be supported by the
industry. That’s all positive, but
tax revenues have disappointed
— raising less than a third of the
roughly £1bn a year that had been
forecasted. The main reason seems
to be the extremely high tax rates
California levies on legal marijuana
— making it far cheaper to buy
cannabis from an illegal dealer.
Rohan Silva, London Evening
Standard, 6 February
CHANGING
THE RECORD
‘P
When we start treating
people who use drugs as
grown-ups we will start to get
somewhere, Adam Winstock
told the GPs’ conference
olicy has to accept that people are using alcohol and other
drugs… most people who use drugs do so moderately.’
Running the Global Drug Survey (GDS) for the past
five years had confirmed to Adam Winstock that we
need to change our attitude and culture towards drugs.
Participants in the GDS will ‘pass the million mark’ this
year, ‘the largest drug survey in the world’.
‘Our role is to try and change the conversation,’ he said. ‘If we can
encourage people to use less than once a month, rates of dependency are
negligible. When you get to weekly use, dependency risk increases.’
So reducing people’s frequency of use was a key outcome. Not only was
this sound harm reduction practice, but also ‘people who use safely get
most pleasure’.
The more problematic areas were beyond GDS’ sphere of influence –
social inequality and deprivation. ‘Once you’ve developed dependency you
can’t usually get back to safe use,’ said Winstock. ‘Zero tolerance drug policy
doesn’t allow us to help.’
The latest drug strategy had continued to underpin failing policy. ‘The
slashing of funding is partly responsible for spiralling deaths,’ he said. ‘The
drug-related death graphs are unacceptable in a developed country.’
To moderate people’s use you had to tap into things they know, such as
cannabis can affect your driving, or make you forget things.
‘We need to treat drug users as grown up,’ he said. Even the language
around drug use ‘puts distance between us and them… it dehumanises
people’.
Furthermore, we should be moving away from what drugs people used
to why they used them. British binge drinking had become a ‘normative
delusion’, so ‘if we want to encourage moderation, we need to look at
motivation,’ he said. These motivations needed to be age relevant – so for
example health warnings for older people and embarrassment for younger
people, who might readily identify with the ‘risks of alcohol-related social
embarrassment (ARSE)’.
‘The current laws don’t work – we need marketing messages that show
how positive messages can use positive choices,’ said Winstock. ‘Messages
that talk about zero tolerance do not change behaviour.’
MARCH 2020 • DRINK AND DRUGS NEWS • 11