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The drugs policies don't work
Exclusive
Published: 16-Oct-2004
By: Simon Israel & Mat Precey
It was called simply "The Project" - a three year plan to combat drugs in Derbyshire.
For the first time treatment programmes were linked with tough police enforcement.
Such a joined-up approach to the fight on drugs is now being embraced across the political spectrum.
So has the Derby trial worked? Results out this weekend say no.
The number of dealers, the supply of heroin and the crime rate were all unaffected.
So where does this leave the government's strategy on drugs?
Dozens of children have been walking past this corner building for years on their way to and from school, a hundred yards down the road.
Two years ago before police moved in they had to steer their way through an odd assortment of people who would hang around this corner.
The premises is longer associated with drugs and has changed hands.
The dealers who operated from there were led by the Stevens brothers…
The Stevens brothers
…running what a judge described last week as a thriving business, in a fashion which would be the envy of high street stores, serving 70 customers a day. Tempting them with two-for-one offers and bonus hits.
Steve Holmes is a former drug squad officer who for the last three years has been working on an experimental project funded by the Treasury and the Home Office to marry up enforcement and treatment, and make some inroads into this invidious trade : a microcosm of a national plan.
“Law enforcement has little impact and treatment in some areas will have little impact. What the project tried to do was see whether law enforcement and community work and treatment linked together would have a bigger impact than each one doing their own thing, and I think it’s shown that no matter how hard you try, that doesn’t happen”
Steve Holmes, Derbyshire Police
The Derbyshire Drug Market Project was the first attempt to map out the true scale of the drug problem in a single county.
Its findings are frightening :
There are 10 thousand heroin/crack users in the county at any one time
Their average heroin bill is around £10,000 a year
The retail heroin market's worth an estimated £82 million a year
The crack market is between £14-£29 million a year
The estimated total annual income from the class A drug market in Derbyshire alone is around £100 million a year
It was then up to a Manchester University professor brought in by the project to evaluate how joining up enforcement and treatment could affect such markets.
“However hard you blitz a town with enforcement, you can’t close the supply of heroin and crack. A lot of people on the inside know that already but the drugs strategy kind of implies that we should be able to disrupt these markets in a significant way, and I think what we’ve realised is that we knew you couldn’t do it in cities, and now we realise that you can’t even do it in country towns.”
Professor Howard Parker, Derbyshire Drug Market Project
Cotmanhay in Ilkeston was one of six rural areas targeted in the experiment. The aim was to choke supply.
Thirty dealers were taken out and the treatment agencies moved in - but there were snags.
“We were suprised, we thought there’d be large numbers of people moving into treatment and there’s no way that happened. So, in those early days there was a big suspicion about the treatment agencies actually being undecover police officers.”
Adrian Evans, Chief Executive, Derbyshire Drug Market Project
Brazen street dealing has gone, but the market's still there, now simply hiding behind closed doors. Police action has pushed it underground.
Phil's been off heroin and in treatment with the charity Addaction for several years. But he still gets offers on the street.
”For every bloke they get, there’s another to take his place. It’s something they’ll never get rid of. But I want it to go away”.
‘Phil’, former heroin addict
Each of the Project’s police operations and mass arrests did little, it was found, to affect local recorded crime rates.
Of the dealers removed, 50 per cent were already in some form of treatment and only a total of 73 users were introduced to treatment.
"The notion of putting treatment and enforcement together is at the heart of all the new drugs interventions programmes that the government is rolling out. All we’re trying to say is we’ve learned a lot about the difficulties of delivering this effectively and we hope they’re going to listen. I think if they’re going to dismiss those findings, then a lot of taxpayers money will have been wasted”.
Professor Howard Parker
Privately those involved in the project believe the best that can hoped for is to keep a lid on the problem.
It's unlikely any Home Office minister would ever come out and admit that.
“Treatment works” the Government now firmly believes.
But then it has to - for every other policy has failed.
The Derbyshire experiment shows it won't be easy to produce the desired results.
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