11 - The UK’s Ten-Year Drug Strategy

Summary

For decades now, the UK government has laid out its plans for drug policy in the form of official drug strategy documents. The first of these was published in March 1985 under the title Tackling Drug Misuse (Home Office, 1985). It presented a range of policies that were to reappear in various guises in subsequent documents. Its proposed solutions to ‘drug misuse’ included working with international partners to cut supply, enforcing domestic drug legislation, and programmes to prevent the use of controlled drugs and to treat people who develop problems with them. The latest drug strategy was published in December 2021, entitled From Harm to Hope: A 10-Year Drugs Plan to Cut Crime and Save Lives (HM Government, 2021). These strategies are the results of complex processes of interaction and debate which take place largely within the machinery of government. They are influenced by the generative mechanisms of policy making, including its underlying social and cultural structures. These create the preferences of particular policy actors and enable or constrain them in putting these preferences into policy by putting them in advantaged or disadvantaged positions in the policy making process. This means that drug strategies are excellent cases for developing our understanding of how drug policy making works.

The 2021 strategy provides a particularly interesting case because it was so surprising. Much of it was reminiscent of previous documents. It was presented, like several of its predecessors, as a new approach which would at last reduce the harms of drugs. This was to be achieved by a combination of supply reduction, law enforcement, prevention and treatment. So far, so familiar. The surprising element was that this strategy, for the first time in over a decade, came with substantial funding attached. The first drug strategy of the most recent Conservative era, published in 2010, made big promises but was doomed to failure by the lack of funding to back these pledges up (Stevens, 2011b). The 2017 strategy added no new funding, instead continuing the cuts of the austerity programme that began under David Cameron's Chancellor, George Osborne (HM Government, 2017; Stevens, 2019).