The Vision Project

Again, they are all sold without any information or
quality assurance. The job of policy makers should
be to aim toward the ‘sweet spot’ in the graphic
above, where the level of public protection is
highest, and harms are at their lowest.
Worse though, people who use drugs that are
prohibited are demonised to one degree or another
- and in fact, that demonisation is literally written
in to the UN drugs treaty. The preamble to the
Single Convention on Drugs states that ‘addiction’
to the drugs included in the treaty constitutes a
‘serious evil’ (the inclusion of the term is a result
of the influence of the Vatican at the UN, when
the treaty was drafted). And it isn’t a big step
from defining ‘addiction’ as evil, to identifying
people who use drugs as evil. Drugs identified for
prohibition are often described as a ‘scourge’ and
a ‘menace’, and it is all too easy to identify ‘users’
as the ‘menace’, as they so often are - treated
somewhat akin to the threat of cancer or a virulent
disease that requires elimination. And this is a big
part of the reason that the deaths of over 3,500
people each year, mainly opiate users, are treated
with such apparent disdain by policy makers across
the political spectrum. That’s ten deaths a day, 70
a week, 280 a month.
The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
(FCTC), on the other hand – and also held in place
at the UN – is based on the right to health, not
the demonisation of people who smoke tobacco.
It is important to note that the FCTC was a
belated attempt to fetter the worst tendencies of
Big Tobacco, but its principles are fundamentally
different to those of the Single Convention on
Drugs.
And those principles play out very differently for
those people from deprived and marginalised
communities. Criminalisation, and the
demonisation that accompanies it, serves only to
further marginalise and exclude those who need
to be included the most. In my work with people
who were caught up in the criminal justice system
(CJS), middle-class users were notably absent. The
CJS is not even-handed when it comes to issues of
class and inequality.
The senior executives at HSBC who were
responsible for the failure to notice the laundering
of $881 million of Mexican drug money weren’t
even arrested, let alone charged, after a formal
intervention from the then Chancellor, George
Osborne, claiming that criminal proceedings
could cause a “global financial disaster”. The Old
Boys’ Network will not intervene for the tens of
thousands of ordinary people who are prosecuted
in the UK each year.
People from disadvantaged and from BAME
communities, those who are street homeless,
those who are already broken by a system that
discriminates against them are the ones who
bear the brunt of criminalisation. And it is up
to those of us in the drug sector to stand up for
those people who make use of our services. We
must call out the cruel system that punishes those
using drugs to relieve their personal pain and the
impacts of social inequality.
That is why the Royal Society for Public Health
called for the decriminalisation of people who
use drugs in 2016 (it is worthy of note that the
only flak that the Royal Society took in the media
came from The Times, who, in their editorial, called
on them to go further and legalise and regulate
drug supply). It is why Westminster Drugs Project,
Blenheim CDP and Kaleidoscope have all taken
organisational positions supporting reform.
There is now support for reform on Labour and
Conservative back benches, while the Liberal
Democrats and Green Party already support legal
regulation of cannabis and decriminalisation of
personal use of other drugs, and supporters of
reform will be meeting MPs at a mass lobby of
parliament on 25 June this year. Now is the time to
call out a cruel policy that causes and exacerbates
social exclusion and speak out for policy reform
that supports inclusion and care for those who
need it most.
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THE VISION PROJECT