Acknowledging harm done, taking the next step

By Tom Lloyd

Why is a former United Kingdom Chief Constable travelling to Latin America to argue for a change to the way drug law enforcement goes about its business? It is because in over 30 years service, from walking the beat in central London to achieving the highest rank, Chief Constable, I came to the inescapable conclusion that we have been getting it wrong.  Despite all the money and effort poured into the so-called “war on drugs”, the inexorable spread of drugs and the accompanying damage is powerful testament to failure.  What we are doing now is not only very expensive and misdirected activity, but actively counter-productive and harmful.

The harm caused by the illegal drugs market has spread throughout the world and no more so than in Latin America.  Many people’s lives are blighted by drugs, and their families left in despair and grief at the often terrible consequences.  Drug trafficking by powerful and callous criminal gangs who kill, maim and corrupt to maintain their obscene profits causes widespread fear in ordinary citizens and whole communities who rightly fear for their security. 

We must do all we can to minimise this damage, but we must also acknowledge the failures of current policies and consider new ways forward.  Death, disease, crime and addiction flourish in an illegal market exercising no control over drug quality, where ostracised users avoid treatment and support and commit crimes to fund their addiction.  Dealers increase their profits by targeting the next generation of children; the illegal market offers them no protection. 

If governments, police and civil society worked together to treat, not punish, users we could reduce harm, reduce crime and support recovery and rehabilitation.  We would also release more resources to tackle the real criminals, the drug barons.

During my career I arrested my fair share of drug users and later I commanded or oversaw many anti-drug operations.  I remember a big operation where we successfully targeted more than 100 street dealers. It was hailed as a great success by local and national politicians, much as any large seizure of drugs, or police “crackdown”, is celebrated as evidence of the success of the “war on drugs”.  However, and all too predictably, within days the dealers were back.  If success were measured by the volume of arrests and drugs seized, you could conclude that the police had done well; however, judged on success in containing the market and reducing harm, the outcome is quite different.

It all seemed so pointless; what were we achieving?  The enthusiastically spun revolving door of criminal justice took in and spat out users and dealers, often addicts themselves, to deal again. Young men and women, arrested for little more than youthful experimentation, emerged with their lives forever tainted by a criminal conviction.

Nowhere in the UK is free from drugs and the associated crime epidemic. Criminals continue to make huge profits, corroding and corrupting public and private lives.  They target each new generation of children and create addicts who are ostracised, become diseased and die unnecessarily.

Law enforcement agencies have invested significant resources over decades into trying to reduce the scale of drug markets – investigating trafficking operations, seizing consignments of drugs and precursors, disrupting local drug markets, destroying crops and arresting users.  Despite many examples of operational success, these efforts have not produced the eradication of, or a significant and sustained reduction in, the scale of the illicit market. In fact the last few decades have seen a huge increase in the drugs market, massive profits going to criminal gangs, with associated corruption and violence and even funding of terrorism.  There are avoidable deaths and diseases in users, pervasive acquisitive crime, many young people getting criminal convictions that blight their lives and our prisons so full that we cannot rehabilitate offenders.

Managers and strategists are increasingly turning their attention to how law enforcement efforts can adapt to give much better value for money and better results resulting in less harm to users, communities and the police themselves.

More recently I have been working abroad and the problems that exist worldwide are recognised at the highest levels (albeit not necessarily acted upon), with many acknowledging the harmful unintended consequences of the current approach.  A huge criminal market (with enormous financial incentives) has been created using corruption and violence to make its huge profits.

Efforts to destroy crops only destroy peasant farmers’ livelihoods and the environment, while the poppy fields and coca plants spring up elsewhere, with producers adapting to meet the demand.  Growing other crops is futile if the demand for drugs remains.

Our limited resources are directed towards this harmful “war” while public health, which is clearly the first principle of drug control, remains an impoverished baby brother.  Prevention and treatment, surely, should come first.

And users are excluded and marginalised from the social mainstream, tainted with a moral stigma, and often unable to find treatment even when they may be motivated to want it. One in three new HIV infections outside Africa is a result of unsafe injecting drug use. Unless we face these unintended consequences head-on, we will continue to be mesmerised by the many paradoxes of the drug problem.

This is a global problem that damages ordinary people throughout the world, the sort of people that I dedicated my professional life to serving and helping.  I joined the police service to help people not contribute to their difficulties.  If your child was found in possession of drugs, would you want them to be arrested, charged and convicted (with all the stigma that entails) or advised, supported and treated if necessary?  Every drug user is someone’s child and, sadly, often the victim of emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

There are those who argue that the solution is for governments to control and regulate the production, distribution and supply of currently illegal drugs in order to minimise harms to users, cut costs and eradicate the huge profits made by organised crime.  They may be right but that is not my argument. With my background in law and order I acknowledge, sadly, the continued need to fight serious and organised crime in all its forms.

Clearly that’s not easy and it takes a lot of skill, determination and money to achieve success.  If we are wasting resources on prosecuting and imprisoning users and low level dealers we are seriously reducing our capability to tackle the drug barons and organised criminals who couldn’t care less if we lock up users; we’ve been doing that for decades yet they continue to make their obscene, bloated profits.

I now have the opportunity, through the IDPC’s Drug Law Enforcement project that I am privileged to lead, to try to encourage as many law enforcement officials as possible to change their approach.  This project is looking at ways in which senior law enforcement managers can devise new strategies and tactics so that resources can be directed at minimising the power and reach of organised crime, reduce the violence associated with drug markets and support efforts to provide treatment and harm reduction services to drug users.

We argue that the legitimacy of policing the drugs laws is being threatened by these problems as the public lose confidence in the current approach.  We challenge people to consider the desirability and effectiveness of the criminal law being used to deal with drug users, particularly the young, and argue that the relative ineffectiveness of current drug control activities is a strong reason for considering changes in approach.  We also suggest that new objectives be developed to focus more on reducing the harmful consequences of the drugs market rather than just on its scale.

We can work together to improve mutual understanding, we can develop partnerships to achieve common goals and we can seize opportunities to become more efficient and effective in the fight against the serious, organised criminals.  Law enforcement can play its part in facilitating the treatment of users rather than frustrating, often inadvertently, efforts to give them the support they often need.  

My experiences of the problems associated with this issue in the UK: death, disease, crime, addiction and corruption are serious enough, but I do acknowledge that thousands, if not millions, of people in many countries in Latin America suffer far more.  This is not a competition about who is suffering most, but there is real urgency about who in authority is going to say that we must change what we are doing or the problems will only get worse. 

We can do things differently.  In Boston in the 1990s the US police successfully concentrated on reducing the number of murders as a greater priority than pursuing futile efforts to reduce the scale of the illegal market. In Portugal, decriminalisation of the possession of all drugs for personal use since 2001 has unblocked a hopelessly overcrowded court and prison system, and evaluations of this approach have shown a broadly positive impact on the recidivism and social reintegration of drug users and a significant cost saving to the government.

The Swiss people voted by a two-thirds majority last year to ratify their successful heroin prescription programme as official government policy. For 15 years heroin has been prescribed in special clinics under controlled conditions, resulting in less crime, death and disease and fewer new users.

After this “medicalisation”, heroin is no longer cool. Importantly, of the previously hopeless individuals many now hold down a job and live normal family lives.  This is good news, but we must move more quickly.

I led a different approach in an East Anglian city where we offered a choice between treatment and arrest to prolifically offending drug users.  They almost invariably chose treatment, and detectives were surprised to learn that not only did this save time and precious resources, but it was also the most effective way of tackling burglary they had ever seen.  We thought and acted in new ways and achieved better results, for everybody.

I’m sure there are many other examples of innovative approaches to tackling this issue that need to be developed, shared and implemented as widely as possible.

Prosecuting users is misguided and counter-productive; prosecuting dealers without tackling demand or their profits does not work.  If the money wasted on misinformation, low-level enforcement and condemnation had been spent on tackling the underlying causes, so many lives blighted by drugs and crime could have been different. 

Recently political leaders and others in Latin America have stood up and argued for change; governments are actively considering decriminalisation as a way forward.

This is very encouraging and if it leads to concerted national and international action, long-lasting, effective and humane solutions will be developed and implemented.  We know that we must change and we also know that police officers like to make things happen.  I hope that my knowledge and experience can, in some small way, help to bring about beneficial change.  This is the time for police leaders throughout the world to challenge the status quo and focus resources on serious, organised criminals, not blighted users, and to focus on harm reduction not some pie-in-the-sky dream of a drug-free society.

Photo by Walter Mesquita

* Tom Lloyd was Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire Constabulary