2003-05-28

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How Britain is losing the drugs war

By virtue of their endless monitoring, Whitehall knew that the same thing was happening across the country. But the outside world knew next to nothing about it. Like a sci-fi alien, the bureaucracy mutated and reproduced itself in the shape of an effective organisation. Simply, in among all the numbers that it collects so obsessively, it has chosen to measure its performance with a number which is fundamentally misleading. This is a result not so much of conspiracy as of sheer Whitehall bloody-mindedness. When the "drugs tsar", Keith Hellawell, first launched the new national drug strategy in 1998, his team wanted to mea sure the performance of its treatment wing in three ways: the number of users engaging in treatment; the number who emerged with a successful outcome; the number of drug-related offences. But Hellawell set targets for the whole strategy which were widely regarded as extravagantly optimistic, with the result that officials at the Department of Health and the Home Office, who were going to have to deliver the results, went into a collective sulk.