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Gordon Brown has launched a new ten-year drug strategy which aims to provide a "comprehensive approach" to tackling drug problems.
At a Downing Street event the Prime Minister was joined by Jacqui Smith MP, Labour's Home Secretary, along with drugs treatment workers to discuss the new strategy.
The strategy – ‘Drugs: protecting families and communities’ – includes plans to:
• Give police new powers to seize the assets of drug dealers to demonstrate that crime doesn’t pay
• Place a greater responsibility on drug users on benefits to get treatment and back in to work
• Increase the use of community sentences with a rehabilitation requirement
• Strengthen and extend international agreements to combat the flow of drugs to the UK
• Get drug-using families into treatment more quickly
• Develop support for drug treatment so that those who quit drugs are offered training and support in getting work and re-establishing their lives
Gordon Brown said that investment of almost £1 billion a year will be used to implement the key aims of the strategy: cutting drug-related crime; reducing the risk of drug use by young people; and enabling more drug users to rehabilitate and contribute to society.
• Drug users when compelled to undergo compulsory detoxification have a very poor success rate. Maintenance therapy on either Methadone or Subutex long term i.e. years and not months would give a far better success rate with drug addicts realistically being giving the opportunity to “hold down a job” whilst on therapy and stabilized.
• .However, they must have the necessary educational qualifications to obtain work in a competitive work place.
Increase the use of community sentences with a rehabilitation requirement
• Maintenance is far more effective than rehabilitation.
• Voluntary rehabilitation is the only effective method.
• Is the reason addicts commit crimes because there are not enough Drug Clinics with support workers in the Community? Once they go to prison it is too late. The majority will be compulsorily detoxified in prison with the effect of illicit drug use on the prison wings.
• Maintenance therapy should be available on request in prisons. This would maximize harm reduction and reduce the numbers of prisoners who die on release from loss of tolerance.
• Individual Governors could put this policy into effect now but as they are not aware of drug maintenance issues very few do.