Labour has attracted a lot of scorn for its already notorious “Controls on immigration. I’m voting Labour” mug. If this can be accused of pandering to prejudice, the party’s new campaign leaflet is much, much worse.
As the Guardian reports, Labour has found a new line of attack against the Liberal Democrats: soft on drugs. Labour says Nick Clegg’s party “would end prison sentences for drug possession – even for the hardest drugs like heroin and crack” – a reference to the Lib Dems’ pledge to relax sentencing on those who possess drugs only for personal use.
It is just possible that the leaflet might swing some seats to Labour – though young people, a key group who Labour are banking on to defect from the Lib Dems, are unlikely to be very impressed. But it threatens to have disastrous consequences for drugs policy in the UK.
The War On Drugs has a legitimate claim to being the single greatest public policy mistake in the 20th Century. If America provides the most extreme example of its lunacy – thanks to the War on Drugs, the US penal population has increased sixfold since 1972, and an American is 50% more likely to be behind bars than a Russian – it is also detectable in the UK.
In 2013, 2,955 people died from drug poisoning, despite more than £3bn being spent on tackling drug use. Poorest areas are the most affected: in the North East of England, the poorest region of the UK, the drug mortality rate is over twice as high as in London.
Drugs need not exert so much devastation. Since Portugal decriminalised the possession of drugs in 2001, the number of drug-related deaths has fallen from 80 to 16; today, someone is 20 times as likely to die from drugs in the UK as in Portugal.
Belatedly, the destructive consensus around the War on Drugs might be fragmenting. Last year, a non-binding vote in the House of Commons advocated rethinking the UK’s drug laws. And – even more significantly – the Home Office produced a report on what works in drug policy. It reaffirmed what drug campaigners already knew: that harsh sentencing does not lead to reduced use of drugs.
And, despite the support of David Cameron and Theresa May for the War on Drugs, government policy on drugs has improved this Parliament. “The coalition government’s policy of focusing very much on recovery, is to be applauded, and I’ve seen the benefit of that locally,” Chief Constable Mike Barton, the leading police critic of drugs policy, told me in December.
But all these signs of hope in UK drug policy now risk being jeopardised. Out of shameless political expediency, Labour are depicting personal drug users as criminals rather than addicts who need help.
Campaigners for a more evidence-based drug policy are horrified. “It’s a classic and appalling example of gutter politics,” says Martin Jelsma, Director of the drugs policy programme of the Transnational Institute. “Accusing the Lib Dems of being ‘soft on drugs and thugs’ is a cheap populist slogan that tries to hide the Labour Party’s own co-responsibility for destroying the future of thousands of people by giving them a criminal record for no good reason at all.
“The world is moving fast away from this overly repressive and counterproductive drug control approach, but apparently Labour rather wants to side with the likes of Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia that keep defending the criminalisation of drug users. Most social-democratic parties in Europe are way ahead of Labour on this issue.”
It is a damning indictment of Labour’s approach on drugs and beyond. As with immigration, Labour has abandoned fighting for the progressive values that Ed Miliband was meant to embody. Labour now prioritises crude electioneering over reforming drug policy to save lives.
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