It’s time the UK asked some hard questions about opiate abuse and drug deaths

The Independent has long argued for drug misuse to be treated as a medical problem rather than a law-enforcement one, with the emphasis on treatment rather than punishment. Today’s official figures showing drug deaths in England and Wales have hit a record high once again reinforce that argument.

We agree with Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health, who said the criminal justice system’s approach to drug harm had failed, and called for the issue to be treated “first and foremost as a health issue”.

But it must be acknowledged that official policy has moved a long way in this direction in recent decades, and that a further shift would not be the whole answer to the problem.

Equally, we agree with Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, who condemned cuts to addiction treatment budgets – but again, higher public spending on such services would not deal with the causes of addiction.

The problem is rapidly becoming too serious for the simple recitation of well-known positions. One of the main underlying problems is that of despair combined with the availability of opiates.

As we report today, heroin and morphine are the drugs most frequently named in the drug deaths that have risen 16 per cent in England and Wales in the latest year (2018).

British complacency about the American opioid crisis should have been shattered by last month’s statistics showing the drugs death rate was higher in Scotland than in the United States. In Scotland, opioid addiction is a factor in 86 per cent of drug deaths.

Something is happening in rich western societies that goes rather deeper than the familiar debates about decriminalisation or legalisation of recreational drugs. The full medicalisation of drug supplies, for example, might reduce deaths from impure or unknown supply, but it would do nothing of itself to tackle addiction or the reasons that drive people to it.

Anyone who claims to have a simple answer to this problem should be regarded with suspicion. Yes, we should continue towards a more compassionate harm-reduction policy, and yes, more public money should be spent on treatment – and good-quality services are expensive.

It also ought to go without saying that Boris Johnson’s cheap law-and-order headlines about putting more people in jail would, if translated into policy, succeed in turning thousands of soft drug users into hard drug users.

But it is time to ask some hard questions about why so many people seek refuge in the oblivion of hard drugs, and how such behaviour can be forestalled before it needs to treated.