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Critically evaluating general trends in New Labour's drug policy since 1997:
Whilst the policy since 1997 has placed some emphasis on the 'treatment' side of the drug problem, there is an evident shift from attempts to improve the health of drug users, to attempts to reduce crime committed by drug users. This shift is seen very clearly in the increase in the use of the criminal justice system to force drug users to change their behaviour, e.g. New Labour's adoption of Drug Treatment and Testing Orders. As Nick Davies notes, the problem here is not just the moral one of whether it is acceptable to compel drug users to undergo treatment under threat of punishment. Nor is it simply the practical problem of allowing those who have broken the law to jump the queue for treatment in front of those who have not. The real problem with DTTOs is that they are a political project built on a foundation of falsehood.
When New Labour announced that courts across the board would be allowed to impose DTTOs to compel offenders to undergo drug-treatment, Paul Boateng [the government drug coordinator at the time] justified this measure on the 'evidence acquired' from three pilot schemes which 'had proved to be successful' and which had shown that there had been a 'dramatic fall in the number of subsequent offences committed and the amount of money spend on drugs by those who took part'.
It is however difficult to see true success from the findings of these pilot studies: Whilst 210 offenders had been handpicked, nearly half of them (46%) vanished or were thrown out of the scheme long before it finished its trial run. Mr. Boateng referred to one 'finding' from the study that within a month of being put on the order, offenders had cut their weekly spending on drugs from £400 to only £25. However, this 'dramatic' result was based entirely on untested claims made by those offenders who had not already been thrown off the scheme and who knew that if they were caught taking drugs, they were liable to be sent back to court for a harsher punishment. Of these people who had claimed to have reduced their spending so significantly, 94% had been failing urine tests throughout the scheme: they had failed 42% of their heroin tests, 45% of cocaine tests and 58% of methadone tests, some failing more urine tests at the end of the 18-month pilot than they had been at the halfway point. Due to these results of failure, by the end of the trial, all three pilots had stopped requiring the offenders to be 'drug free', asking only that they make progress in addressing their drug problems. Mr. Boateng also relied for his success on a 'statistic' that, within a month, offenders were committing far less crime - only 34 offences a month compared to 137.