Coreplan: Realigning The Drugs Policy Debate

A seasoned and well respected drugs policy reformer-Jane Slater from Transform- concluded after a two hour House of Commons meeting that discussed UK drugs policy and racism said this:

In ten years coming to progressive drugs policy forums and debates, I’ve never been to one like this. This debate here in the UK is a game changer”.

Yesterday afternoon Coreplan, with the support of the Open Society Foundation, launched its report ‘Structural Racism As UK Drugs Policy’ to a hundred or so invited guest at a committee room in the Houses of Parliament.

The meeting was hosted by the Rt Hon David Lammy, who has taken a particular interest in this area as part of his Governmental review of racism within the Criminal Justice System.

He went on to illustrate tales of parallel lives in which an Oxford university student could smoke marijuana in or around the university campus, with the chances of him or being targeted by the police as about zero. If they happen to be remotely unlucky data then shows they’ll probably be cautioned. Their lives go untouched by the experience. On the other side of the tracks, however, -Tottenham, Brixton, or Rotherham, Black and brown young men and women are not only targeted but often persecuted, Lammy argued. Cautions are rare, and then once in the system things go from bad to extremely worse.

The report’s authors Lee Jasper and Annette Dale-Perera set out not to collate any more quantative data- there’s plenty of data that shows the extreme race penalty within current drugs policy- there goal was to give voice to the young Black men and women, and their mothers who are too often at the severe end of Government drugs policy.

Jasper told the audience that the young people interviewed desperately wanted alternatives to being terrorised by gangs. Gang members wanted alternatives to the ‘life on the road’, never knowing what’s around the corner. And mothers wanted to stop living in fear that their door would be smashed in by the police or of news that their loved one was the latest victim to gang crime.

Dale-Perera took her time to spell out the cynicism many had towards all aspects of authority, including the drugs policy reformers who advocate for decriminalisation of drugs:

Most Black youths think that decriminalisation of drugs might help young white kids have recreational drugs, but the State and the police will find another way to target and persecute Black youths”.

At the centre of the report’s findings was the demand that the kaleidoscope of Black voices become a central part of the drugs policy debate. They argue, and I agree, that by doing so the human rights prism of reforming drugs policy in the UK has as one of its central themes, ‘Institutional racism’.

Working through the prism of institutional racism one is better able to track back to all those elements that feed into a drugs policy that delivers such racial disparities.

I hope all those involved can build upon this process and this report as a matter of urgency. David Lammy’s interim findings that 40% of youth UK incarceration is BME is about as alarming as it gets.

This data not only parallels what is occurring in the US, in certain cities it excels it.

Simon Woolley