Taking a new line on drugs

This report, ‘Taking a New Line on Drugs’, comes at a timely moment for drugs strategy both in the UK and across the world. The special session of the United Nations General Assembly on the world drug problem, which took place in New York in April 2016, represented a missed opportunity to move on from the ‘war on drugs’ and take a new approach, despite the pioneering policies focused on public health and harm reduction being pursued by a number of nations. In the UK, the Psychoactive Substances Act came into effect in May 2016, and we await a refreshed Government drugs strategy later in the year.

‘Taking a New Line on Drugs’ assesses the situation in the UK as regards rising health harm from illegal drugs, with reference to their context within the wider ‘drugscape’ of legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, and sets out a new vision for a holistic public health-led approach to drugs policy at a UK-wide level.

• Drugs’ are not just those substances that are currently illegal. They also include socially-embedded legal substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, used by the majority of people in the UK. Drugs strategy must reflect this reality, and not create artificial and unhelpful divisions.
• All drug use increases the risk of some form of related harm, be it to the individual, those around them, wider society, or all three. However, drug harm cannot be objectively measured on a single scale – it is multi-faceted, including physical, psychological and social harm, both to the user and to others. Every drug has a different harm profile across these categories, and so it is too simplistic to only say ‘drug A is more harmful than drug B’.
• Illegal drug use in the UK rose through the 1960s to 1990s, but has fallen over the course of the past decade. However, this overall fall hides the increase in the use of Class A drugs – those deemed most harmful under the existing classification system – and the take up of new psychoactive substances, the rate of which remains uncertain. More importantly, drug harm is not declining in line with the fall in use, and there have been increases in many types of harm including the number of deaths. Levels of drug harm, not simply levels of drug use, should be taken into account when considering the success of drugs policy.

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