I think a good place to start would be to understand why people need to take drugs in the first place. By doing this, a ‘prevention, rather than cure’ policy could be adopted. I would suspect the reason why many people take drugs in the first place is to temporarily escape the world in which they live and forget about the problems they are facing. By addressing this issue, then maybe people would be less inclined to take drugs.

By simply punishing users (with prison sentences), isn’t going to stop them using drugs – they have an addiction, and if the addition isn’t addressed, the problem persists.

If my memory serves me correctly, there are centres in London that sell/give drugs to users with the condition that they seek help to cure their addiction; I believe that this system has been met with some degree of success. By doing this, you have a far greater chance of integrating people into, and giving something back to society rather than the tax payer shouldering the cost of prosecuting users and jailing them, only to have them re-offend when the prison term ends.

This issue has nothing to do with ‘do-gooders’ or ‘human rights idiots’, it has more to do with not understanding a world that has become more complex and thus needs new ideas to solve the problems we are encountering today. That’s not to say that we abandon prison altogether, more we find new ways of ensuring we punish people in an appropriate way that fits the offence, but also help and give them the chance to enter back into society that benefits everyone.

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Let them go cold turkey.

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I haved worked with young offenders for many years and if I thought understanding why people take drugs would help the situation I would totally approve, but we are doing the drug users no favours it doesn’t help them stay off drugs. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind and cold turkey is the best cure.

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