Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

A report from crime reduction charity Nacro,  advocates providing facilities where addicts can use drugs in safe and hygienic conditions, reducing the risk to themselves and tackling open drugs misuse on the streets and estates. It also states that treatment services should be better resourced.

Title: Drugs and crime: From warfare to welfare
Author: Dr Marcus Roberts
Series: Drugs Crime Report 03
Date published: May 2003
Number of pages: 99

The report, 'Drugs and crime: From warfare to welfare', suggests that Britain's punitive drugs laws undermine the development of strategies to support and treat crack and heroin addicts. Rather than an approach based on policing and punishment, the report calls on the Government to steer resources towards getting addicts off drugs, while minimising the personal and social harm caused by those who continue to use them. In the UK, three quarters of the money spent on tackling drugs is spent on policing, courts, prisons, customs and associated law enforcement measures.

According to the report current drugs laws unduly burden our prison system. Almost 12,000 people are presently in jail for drugs offences, including around 40% of all sentenced women prisoners. Many of these offenders will be users in need of treatment and support.

Sentences are disproportionately tough. Supply of a class 'B' drug carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years, greater than that for illegal possession and supply of firearms or for wilful neglect of a child. The law fails to distinguish between criminal gangs making millions and young people buying small quantities of drugs on behalf of their friends.

Key Findings

• Recreational drug use is becoming a routine part of our culture. It is particularly common among people in their late teens and early twenties and is increasingly spread across all sections of society.
  
  

• Generally speaking, experimental drug use does not result in any serious or long-term harm. However problem drug use damages both users and communities.
  
  

• Problem drug use is closely linked to poverty, exclusion and other social problems.
  
  

• A very high proportion of crimes are committed by people with drug dependency problems, at a huge cost to society.
  
  

• Huge sums of money are made out of the drug trade, with the value of the global market estimated at around £300 billion a year. Drugs are now the third most profitable trading commodity after oil and arms.
  
  

• More drugs are now being seized and more dealers being prosecuted, but more drugs are still reaching the streets.
  
  

• Drugs are widely available in prisons
  
  

• There is powerful evidence that treatment programmes greatly reduce levels of drug use and associated criminal activity by those who participate in them.
  
  

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