10 Interesting Things about Alcohol and Other Drugs (January 2015)

We scour the data on alcohol and other drugs and here are 10 things we found in the last month that might interest you, including:

• The number of high risk drug users, 
• Police estimates of the cost and purity of drugs, 
• Trends in property crime, and how drug services may have contributed to it's decline
• Numbers in treatment in Wales, 
• Benefit claimants with drug problems in Scotland (and alcohol problems across the UK), 
• Detection of drugs in prison, and 
• The support needs of single homeless people

As always any misinterpretation of the data you spot are down to me (and please do let me know so that I can fix them).

A threat to us all: tackling organised crime a priority for Home Secretary

On the 11 June the Home Secretary gave a speech about organised crime and illicit finance, as you might expect drugs played an important part in her analysis of the problems that society faces as a result of the activities of these sorts of criminals.

As you’ll see she’s keen to portray organised crime as something that affects us all:

Most people don’t think of themselves as being a victim of organised crime, but the chances are that everyone in this room has been affected by organised crime in one form or another. Maybe you were caught up in their activities. Maybe your house was burgled by somebody addicted to drugs shipped here by a criminal gang. Maybe your emails were hacked. Maybe your insurance premiums are inflated because of organised scams. Maybe your taxes are higher because of fraud. Whatever your precise experience or experiences, the chances are that organised crime has affected all of us here today. 

She also suggested that it poses an existential threat to national security.

The threat from serious and organised crime is very significant and it is forever changing. Whether it is online or offline, overseas or at home, whether we are talking about drugs, stolen goods or trafficked people, organised crime amounts to a serious threat to our national security.

Her analysis of how those in organised crime create or use hollowed out states to create a alternative power structures (including justice, housing and jobs) is similar to that set out by Nils Gillman in his interesting lecture on deviant globalisation that you can hear here.

While decrying their value system May recognises that there is innovation in the ways that people involved in organised crime attempt to subvert the control systems that are in place.

Niche skills are bought to order – last year, for example, a drugs trafficking network brazenly hired cyber criminals to alter cargo manifests in an attempt to smuggle their goods in containers.

Her view of how this leaks into the legitimate market seemed to focus on individual corruption or exploitation rather than suggesting that there is systemic collusion between business and this huge illicit market.  But she announced there will be a cross-government anti-corruption plan in the next few weeks, which may take things further, meanwhile the approach she set out sees partnership rather than regulation being the way to reduce the threat of organised crime’s involvement in the financial sector.  She said that she’d recently met with chief executives from the financial services sector and there was going to be a Financial Sector Forum set up to share information on the “criminal finance and cyber threats we face”.

More broadly than the anti-corruption plan the Home Secretary also talked about the new Serious Crime Bill that was announced in the Queen’s Speech, and how this would close some loopholes in recovering the proceeds and assets of crime, and the wider strategy that the government have been pursuing in relation to serious and organised crime.


The take home messages for me were:

• Her analysis of the problems posed by organised crime – that it affects us all, that organised crime can supplant the state if we don’t take care, and that there is innovation that needs to be countered – seems strong.
• While drugs made up an important theme in her speech there’s no sense that I had that May is interested in really doing anything different to change drug policy other than to have a much stronger central control over serious crime enforcement responses.
• She sees the financial sector as an important partner in addressing serious crime but recognises that corruption is an important tool that organised crime uses to enable it to operate.

Andrew Brown

Director of Policy, Influence and Engagement

DrugScope

Seen but not heard – young people’s treatment issues

In June I spoke on young people’s treatment at the Drugs and Alcohol Today conference. It had been a while since I’d focused on young people’s issues. The new treatment agenda has been built around a vision of recovery that is more relevant to adults (for example, substitute prescribing and abstinence). It is this agenda to which a lot of DrugScope’s own policy work has been responding. I’d not registered some government initiatives, notably the Department for Education’s Positive for Youth programme, including a recently published ‘discussion paper’ on Preventing youth crime and substance misuse. Although, to be fair, it is not exactly prominent on the DfE website and some colleagues in children’s charities were not aware of it either.

In February 2010, we published Young people’s drug and alcohol treatment at the crossroads. Many of its recommendations are still pertinent. For example, we called on government to monitor the impact of funding changes on young people’s services with a focus on local variation; we also made the case for a national policy framework for young adults. But, equally, a lot has changed since then. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is no longer with us (and perceptions are that the Department for Education has a narrower policy focus), Every Child Matters is effectively gone and Public Service Agreements (PSAs) most definitely are. Above all, we are seeing local authority budgets being squeezed to an extent that was not envisaged then, along with a strong emphasis on localism and reducing the involvement of central government.

In December, the London Drug and Alcohol Network (LDAN), part of DrugScope, conducted a survey of young people’s treatment providers. We spoke to 18 London service providers; only three said their current funding situation was safe, and many anticipated substantial cuts. An article in the latest issue of DrugScope’s Druglink magazine shows that this issue has not gone away. Addaction have told DrugScope that some local authorities have imposed funding cuts on their young people’s services of up to 50 per cent.

It’s not all doom and gloom. A lot of the work young people’s services do could fit well with a more public health oriented approach to drug and alcohol issues, when treatment budgets are transferred to the new public health service and local Directors of Public Health. Concerns that the NTA has backed away from young people’s services may partly reflect the fact that much of what those services deliver is not treatment in the normal (or narrow) sense of that word; in financially austere times, it is perhaps understandable that an agency with a strong treatment focus would reconsider that investment. For better or worse, public health has a broader scope. There is also specific provision in the 2010 Drug Strategy for Directors of Public Health and Directors of Children Services to work together, pooling public health and early intervention budgets.

But this is a critical time for the development – indeed survival – of young people’s services. DrugScope will soon be meeting officials in the Department for Education as well as with colleagues at the National Children’s Bureau to ensure that the pressure is maintained. A clear and compelling narrative on young people’s services is currently lacking from government. Nor does there seem to be any mechanism for monitoring what is actually happening to these services on the ground. With the lives of some very vulnerable young people at stake, this cannot simply be a local matter for local people – not least, because with DfE estimates showing that £1 spent on young people’s treatment saves between £5 and £8 in subsequent costs, this is an issue with profound economic and social implications for us all.

Young People’s Drug and Alcohol Treatment at the Crossroads is available at: http://tiny.cc/YP-crossroads

Dr Marcus Roberts, Director of Policy and Membership