Blunkett scraps the targets for fighting drug abuse

The Government abandoned three of the four targets of its national drugs strategy yesterday and announced it would expand the provision of heroin on prescription.

The dropping of objectives, which the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, said were "not credible", was seized on by the Conservatives as "an admission of failure" in the Government's drug policies.

Mr Blunkett scrapped targets set by the former "drugs tsar", Keith Hellawell, for halving the availability and use by young people of heroin and cocaine and cutting by 50 per cent levels of drug-related crime.

In their place, the Home Office introduced more modest objectives of reducing the use of class A drugs by people under 25, increasing seizures of heroin and cocaine, and helping the Afghan government to reduce the production of opium.

Mr Blunkett criticised the targets set by Mr Hellawell in 1998 for picking figures "out of the air".

But Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, said: "The fact that the Government have dropped their targets is an admission of their failure to date."

The Home Office published its Updated Drug Strategy 2002, which announced that spending on drugs policies would increase from £1bn this financial year to £1.5bn in the year starting from April 2005.

The strategy states that "heroin should be available on prescription to all those who have a clinical need for it".

It said heroin would be provided in "safe, medically supervised areas with clean needles", although the Government insisted this did not amount to "shooting galleries".

The step marks a return towards the drugs treatment methods of the Sixties, when heroin prescribing by GPs was universally known as the "British system". The policy was largely ended in 1968, after fears of over-prescribing by rogue doctors, although about 350 heroin addicts do receive the drug on prescription.

The drugs strategy, which reported that the Government's National Treatment Agency was about to issue new guidelines on heroin prescribing, said: "Strict and verifiable measures will be in place to ensure there is no risk of seepage into the wider community."

A spokesman for the charity DrugScope said the decision to end the British system in 1968 had been a "mistake which is finally being rectified".

Ministers are worried by growing levels of crack cocaine use and yesterday launched a National Crack Action Plan, including specific information on the drug for all children.

Mr Hellawell, who resigned from his post as a government adviser on international drugs issues in protest at Mr Blunkett's decision to downgrade the classification of cannabis, has become an outspoken critic of the Home Office.

He said the Home Secretary's policies on cannabis were a "dog's dinner" which confused both the police and the public. He was supported by the chairwoman of the Police Federation, Jan Berry, who said: "Cannabis poses a serious risk to health and the decision to reclassify sends entirely the wrong message."

But Bob Ainsworth, the minister responsible for drugs issues, said: "The ex-drugs tsar has his own agenda and it's up to him to justify what he's saying and why he's saying it. He is totally wrong. If we're going to be effective in the area of drugs we have got to focus on the drugs where there is the greatest problems caused, and they are class A drugs."