Probation Journal

Government attempts to respond to drug-related crime have resulted in a significant increase in court-mandated treatment, where offenders are fast-tracked into comprehensive services under the supervision of the court. The efficacy of ‘enforced treatment’ has been recognized and forms the underpinning principles of such interventions. This article examines the structured and gender dimensions which are often overlooked when initiatives and services are developed to reduce or end drug use, and consequently drug-related offending. The differential experience of women, as offenders and drug users, can denote a distinct lack of social justice when initiatives fail to provide equitable access to resources or community disposals for women.

Recreational drug use has changed rapidly over the last 15 years in the UK. This article considers access, availability and desirability in relation to contemporary recreational drug use, current trends and future indicators, drawing on a range of academic and official studies. The relationship between the decline in self-reported use of cocaine powder and particularly ecstasy pills and an increase in sessional consumption of alcohol is explored. Changes in specific legal and illicit drugs favoured by British young adults reflect not only the ebbs and flows of fashion and taste, but government, local authority and beverage alcohol industry policy. The longer term significance of contemporary patterns of consumption lies in the broader context of socio-economic and cultural change relating to the pursuit of pleasure, the boundaries of leisure, and physical transgression in early 21st century leisure time/space.

This article explores drug taking amongst a particularly disadvantaged group of young people in Britain. It argues that as these young people make their way to adulthood, they are confronted with risks at many levels, and that these risks are further compounded by their drug use as well as by the inability of services to effectively respond to the complex needs they present. The article argues that while to some extent drug use may be understood as a consequence of, or response to, the disadvantages these young people have experienced in their lives, it can at the same time be seen to further entrench those disadvantages.

Involving communities in developing locally based initiatives to tackle the problem of illegal drugs is a cornerstone of the UK drug strategy. Whilst the notion of rebuilding communities is very much at the heart of New Labour polices, the notion of community itself has been criticized for assuming a commonality of interests on the part of what are often diverse and conflicting voices within communities. In this article we consider the potential for community based action of a kind envisaged within the UK drug strategy, within a community in Scotland that has a substantial local drug problem. On the basis of ethnographic research within this community we identified profoundly anti-drug user sentiments on the part of residents, coupled with concerns about anti-social behaviour on the part of young people and a sense of failure on the part of the police to maintain public safety. Drug users also articulated a sense of exclusion from the community in which they had grown up. In advance of developing locally based initiatives to tackle the drugs problem in the area it will be necessary to re-establish a sense of safety on the part of community members and to develop a greater degree of understanding and trust between the various factions within the community, including between those using illegal drugs and those not using illegal drugs. It is suggested that one way in which this could be facilitated is through a community based restorative justice process tied to concrete programmes of community development and possibly funded on the basis of seized assets from known drug dealers.

In several European Union countries, drug use amongst Black and minority ethnic communities is largely unacknowledged, ignored, unrecognized, or hidden by some policy-makers, drug researchers, drug service planners and commissioners, and by some members of some Black and minority ethnic communities themselves. This article presents evidence to support this statement and suggests ways forward to ensure that the knowledge base on drug use amongst these communities is increased, and drug services are accessible to all who need them. Examples of good practice in engaging members of Black and minority ethnic communities in research and with drug services are provided.

The aspirational goal of significant crime reduction through delivering drugs treatment interventions at all points of the criminal justice system cannot be easily achieved. Mainstream drugs services do not yet have the capacity or competence to routinely deliver effective treatment outcomes. Moreover, local ad hoc inter-agency partnerships do not provide a robust delivery system for such an ambitious and complex national project. The government’s fast-track approach risks setting this developing industry up to under perform. A patient evidencebased approach is required, which recognizes that modernizing the whole drugs treatment sector will be more cost effective, in the long run, than over-reliance on ambitious criminal justice interventions.

In the late 1980s illicit drug use became a major social problem in the UK. Since then policy and practice has largely been shaped by psychological and medical perspectives that emphasize the physiological and psychological nature of dependence. Concerned by the limited impact in reducing the number of problem drug users, in 2000 the government shifted the emphasis away from voluntary treatment by the health and voluntary sector, towards coercive treatment, initially in the form of a Drug Treatment and Testing Order (DTTO). The Criminal Justice Interventions Programme (CJIP), a £447 million programme to ‘direct drug misusing offenders out of crime and into treatment’ (Home Office, 2004a: 29) further illustrates and reinforces this shift. This article argues that this shift in approach is also likely to founder, as it continues to be dominated by a narrow focus individuals and their drug dependence, and fails to adequately address the social context, nature and underlying causes of problem drug use.

Drug Treatment and Testing Orders (DTTOs) were introduced as community sentences in October 2000 prior to the publication of the results of the three pilot DTTO programmes. This article critically examines the success of DTTOs to date, drawing on published research and practice experience, and argues that they were implemented with little strategic planning or national consensus. Consequently, as probation priorities concentrated on increasing numbers of orders to meet Home Office targets and newly formed multidisciplinary teams were left to implement and run orders, vast and worrying inconsistencies in terms of assessment, sentencing and practice have emerged both within and across areas in England and Wales.

Many offenders, and drug-misusing offenders in particular, lead lives which place them at high risk of harm. While drug misuse is inherently risky, drug-related death is largely preventable, and yet the probation service does little to promote harm reduction practices, which could reduce its likelihood among those under supervision. It is the contention of this article that this position of inactivity is no longer tenable.

Whether society needs protection against the effects of the cannabis plant is a moot point, but generally politicians have depended upon the ‘thin blue line’ as the bulwark against increased use. For 40 years the author viewed cannabis from within that ‘thin blue line’ and his choice of identified ‘milestones’ along the route of cannabis’s gradual social acceptance reflect an almost total lack of logical planning.