Sadiq Khan denies claims that he has delayed releasing the findings of of his London Drugs Commission, set up more than two years ago, because they might cause him electoral problems. It is, though, easy to see why doing so might have been tempting.
When the commission was announced in May 2022, the right wing media, permanently enraged that Khan is London’s Mayor at all, flew into a predictable frenzy over the possibility that cannabis, the drug with which the commission is principally concerned, might be effectively decriminalised by the Metropolitan Police.
Then, Susan Hall, Khan’s Conservative challenger in the mayoral election campaign, set about exploiting Londoners’ concerns about policing and crime. Imagine the glee with which she would have greeted any suggestion in the commission’s report that continuing a purely law-and-order approach to illegal drugs and their associated harms would continue to produce few benefits. Tory supporters are an endangered species in the capital, but many would be motivated by accusations that Khan was “soft” on crime of that kind.
Meanwhile, on the near horizon was a potential Labour national government whose Prime Minister-to-be had publicly ruled out changing drug laws if he got to Number 10. Why would Khan, with his obvious interest in a Labour general election triumph and an enusing good relationship with Keir Starmer and his administration, rush into the national spotlight a set of findings about such an emotive issue that risked stirring up trouble for them both?
I make these points not to back up those who accuse Khan of holding back delivery of the commission’s work for political reasons – though I can see why they might have their suspicions – but to underline in the abstract how perilous it continues to be for politicians to put themselves in a position where they can be accused of abandoning the “war on drugs”.
When, then, will the outcomes of the London Drugs Commission’s deliberations be made known? What might their implications be? Pressed about the matter during Mayor’s Question Time last week, Khan conceded that he hadn’t met the commission’s chair, former justice secretary Lord Charlie Falconer, “for some time”, but said he would be disappointed if its report didn’t come out some time this year.
There followed exchanges between Assembly members (AMs) from three different parties, who agreed and differed with each other and the Mayor in productive ways. Newly-elected Green AM Zoë Garbett, a former NHS and public health worker who was her party’s mayoral candidate this year, expressed her view that the only way to reduce drug-related deaths, exploitation and the mountains of money spent on enforcement is to “legally regulate the trade, supply and access to drugs and put them in the hands of health professionals”.
Conservative Shaun Bailey, lately best known for attending a lockdown party at Tory HQ and inventing a road-pricing scheme during his unsuccessful 2021 mayoral campaign, had, earlier in his career, provided useful challenges to the more slapdash liberal positions on youth crime. His MQT intervention was a throwback to those days as he warned that alcohol, despite being a legal intoxicant, does huge damage to people and society just the same, and asserted that “poor communities, largely black communities, will suffer from the legalisation of drugs” and would oppose any such move.
For Labour, group leader Len Duvall, went along with some of this. “We must always remember the harm and distress caused to sections of our communities that do not always have the support networks that others have,” he said. He was clear that an evidence-based debate about drugs and the law should be had, but stressed, “we also need to get our language right”.
Bailey’s fellow Tory, Andrew Boff, who, in contrast to his party colleague, has long campaigned for the legalisation of cannabis, urged Khan to act on an Assembly motion passed earlier this year and fund two drugs-testing centres where, following an example set in Bristol, users would be able to ascertain if illegal substances of any kind are contaminated. Such an initiative, Boff maintained, would also “open the door to other services” that might assist those and other users, including those struggling with addiction.
The Mayor signalled his sympathy for much of this, promising to have a transcript of AMs’ thoughts put before the commission’s members, and highlighting the work of the London Drugs Forum, a body jointly chaired by Sophie Linden, his deputy for policing and crime, and Dr Tom Coffey, his senior health adviser. It seeks to combine the efforts of criminal justice and health agencies to lessen drug-related harms. The forum, Khan said, is already making a practical difference.
He also reminded AMs that he has financially augmented Project ADDER, a Tory national government scheme launched in January 2021 – over a year before he set up the London Drugs Commission – which piloted a “whole-system response to combatting drug misuse” in 13 areas, including Hackney and Tower Hamlets. ADDER stands for Addiction, Diversion, Disruption, Enforcement and Recovery and the scheme has been exploring optimal solutions to dealing with drug misuse, including “out of court disposals” – ways of handling drug offending without giving people criminal records.
Yet the Mayor also emphasised that the London Drugs Commission is very much focused on cannabis in particular rather than illegal drugs in general, including the deadlier kinds, and that he does not know what its findings will be.
If that sounds over-cautious, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The advent of a Labour national government can only be an improvement for Khan – and for London – on the Conservatives, especially the London-spiting version version led by Khan’s predecessor as Mayor, Boris Johnson. Yet a friendlier greater power in Westminster might also bring certain constraints, inhibiting bold policy actions that might cause Labour ministers to frown.
We don’t yet know what the new government and its new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, will do with their drug strategy inheritance. Project ADDER followed the publication of the first part of a review of drug harm and prevention conducted by Dame Carol Black. This was commissioned by the Home Office when Theresa May was PM and praised by the respected Transform Drugs Policy Foundation (TDPF) as a “forensic, often brutal assessment of the systemic failures and dismal outcomes of UK drug policy”.
However, the second part of Black’s review was restricted to looking at how to upgrade drug service provision, meaning arguments for changing enforcement practices and decriminalisation were not examined. Then came the launch under Johnson of a “ten-year drugs plan to cut crime and save lives” which, peppered with references to “levelling up”, pledged a “world class treatment and recovery system” alongside much chest-beating about busting organised crime.
The TDPF damned this “new approach” as “conceptually identical to previous strategies”. There was, though, praise in it for Project ADDER, perhaps underling the still largely subterranean existence of at least some cross-party recognition that drug harms cannot be lessened by law enforcement and treatment alone and that diversion might be more fruitful than prosecution – not that that had stopped Johnson’s Downing Street tutting-tutting over plans for Lewisham, backed by Khan, to pilot counselling rather than arrest for under-25s caught with small amounts of cannabis.
What happens next with drug policy in the UK could serve as an instructive test of the promised re-set of relationships between the national government and regional Mayors. There are grounds for anticipating that the London Drugs Commission will recommend bigger steps towards the decriminalisation of cannabis, not least because in 2018 Charlie Falconer wrote a powerful critique of the “war on drugs”, apologising in the process for the part he played in waging it under the previous Labour government.
Starmer has embraced the principle of Mayors being sometimes better placed than Westminster politicians to make decisions for the cities and regions they serve. Hopes have been expressed that Mayors will receive government blessing for trying out innovative policies which, if they succeed, could then be adopted elsewhere. Will we see London, carefully yet boldly, lead the way along a path to radically reducing an illegal drugs market which, in the words of Carol Black, “has never caused greater harm to society than now”?
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