Rory Stewart took opium at a party – but will the Tory leader hopeful see sense on the war on drugs?

Rory Stewart has the makings of a refreshingly straight talking politician; you may remember as prisons minister he asserted that he’d resign if drug use in prisons didn’t decline within a year. Lucky for him his brief changed before the year was up.

Now the international development secretary and Tory leader hopeful has confessed to using opium, the substance that produces heroin. Was this a calculated move or a comment he didn’t think would attract the attention it has? It’s unlikely to be a mistake – he’s a canny operator and clearly media savvy.

So why make this admission? Most senior public figures including politicians wait until they’re out of office before admitting they smoked cannabis but didn’t inhale. Although as with other politicians who have post-retirement enlightenment syndrome he says the opium had no effect. This seems odd as any naïve user of opium would confirm the opposite. Perhaps he’s worried that people will think the effects of drug use a couple of decades ago is impairing his judgement.

I’m not sure most people care about a politician’s drug use as a teenager or as with Stewart an unsuspecting wedding guest who felt obliged to take the opium pipe. What people do care about is hypocrisy and fairness.

Stewart and his colleagues are still fully signed up to the war on drugs, although the fact that they weren’t able to keep drugs out of prisons, arguably the most secure setting in the country, doesn’t seem to dent the conviction they have of holding the moral high ground in pursuit of the decades-long failure.

It might be that politicians like Stewart think admitting to previous drug use helps them appear to be human and one of the people, given the millions of us every year who try a drug like cannabis or cocaine. However what this admission and follow up apology misses is the idea of choice.

If you have a job, secure relationships and enjoy good mental and physical health you can choose whether to try a drug and not be drawn into a problematic relationship with the substance. But for those without these advantages and with a likely history of adversity in their formative years, drug use isn’t a choice, it’s a means of survival. Drugs like heroin soothe a range of psychological scar tissue, and they are cheap and – despite the war on drugs – easy to buy. Heroin dealers also don’t put you on a waiting list then ask multiple intimate questions, as happens in specialist drug treatment.

There are also fewer drug treatment services available – drastic cuts to the public sector have seen to that – and consequently we have record numbers of people dying due to their addiction problems; often people in their forties. While the rest of enjoy rising life expectancy, chronic drug users are dying off with an average life expectancy not seen since the Victorian era.

And yet Rory Stewart is part a government that would rather focus on “middle class cocaine users” and their contribution to the rise in violent knife crime. This is merely a distraction from the lives and deaths – and the families that grieve them – of all those working class people who have died from drug-related deaths.

These deaths have now overtaken road fatalities – and we didn’t reduce road fatalities by banning cars. Instead we invested in ways of making driving safer. That same logic needs to be applied to drug policy.

We know how to reduce these deaths already. It’s not complicated or particularly costly: provide optimum substitute treatment for those dependent on drugs like heroin and ensure the availability of Naloxone for those that inadvertently overdose, on an opiate for example.

So rather than an anxious apology to voters – or a subsequent cheap gag about the encounter as he did earlier today on Twitter – why doesn’t Stewart show some compassion and do something about the terrible fate befalling his fellow Class A drug-users?

Ian Hamilton is a senior lecturer in mental health at the University of York