Martha Fernback’s tragic experience proves the need for drug reform
|
Version 0 of 1. On 20 July 2013, Martha Fernback swallowed half a gram of MDMA powder and died. She was 15 years old. Martha should be celebrating her 17th birthday today. She isn’t because the current drug laws failed to protect her. Because prohibition hasn’t stopped risk taking, but it has made those risks worse. On Martha’s birthday her mother, Anne-Marie Cockburn, will be in parliament to listen to MPs debating whether or not the terms of the Misuse of Drugs Act should be based on an assessment of the best possible evidence. In her incredibly moving blog, What Martha Did Next, Anne-Marie argues that we are not currently taking an evidence-based approach – that under prohibition it’s impossible to fully educate people like Martha because there is no way to tell what substances contain. It’s a powerful point and one I’ll be making when I lead the parliamentary debate, which is happening in response to almost 135,000 people signing a petition calling for a rethink of our drug laws. Since it was passed in 1971, there has been no process of reviewing whether or not the Misuse of Drugs Act is achieving its dual objectives of reducing drug misuse and the associated social harms. Drug misuse destroys individuals, families and communities. Having ineffective drug policies only compounds the damage. All too often success in the so-called “war on drugs” is measured in terms of numbers of arrests or drug seizures, when in fact many of us believe we should be assessing whether or not harms are declining. As the home secretary acknowledges in the foreword to her government’s current drugs strategy: individuals do not take drugs in isolation from what is happening in the rest of their lives. Poverty, social exclusion and inequality all have an impact on drug use and drug markets. Research by The Equality Trust shows a clear and demonstrable correlation between drug misuse and inequality and there is a strong tendency for drug abuse to be more common in more unequal countries such as the UK. Therefore, ending social exclusion must be part of any effective strategy on reducing drug-related harms; in order to do that we need to marshal all the evidence we have. This is a public health concern and, as such, must be subject to the same kinds of effectiveness and efficiency standards as other areas of public health. And in these times of austerity, it is surely wrong that decisions about drugs policy are completely divorced from the usual considerations about public spending and good use of taxpayers’ money – and that we have no proper mechanism for knowing whether the money spent on the “war on drugs” is being put to good effect. No one now buys alcohol in unmarked bottles from the back of a pub. The reason is that it would be dangerous and unnecessary. And yet for 40 years, we’ve left our children to do just that with drugs. Speaking to young people, it’s clear that many of them can get hold of drugs far more easily than alcohol. There’s no denying that drug misuse has the potential to wreck lives, but surely it’s time to be honest about the damage caused by the drug laws too, which can proliferate criminality and cause public harm. It’s handed over the entire drugs trade to the world’s racketeers and gangsters, bringing untold misery with it. Essentially this means the market is wholly uncontrolled. UK drug policy is based on a deliberate ignorance of its effects. We need something much better – so that future drugs policy is based on the best possible evidence. And we need to agree as well what we want the objective of drugs policy to be. For me, it would be to protect the young and vulnerable, to reduce crime, to improve health, to promote security and development, to provide good value for money and to protect. Surely we owe it to Martha, to Anne-Marie, to the many others who have died of drug-related deaths, to their families and loved ones, to ensure that in future each and every one of us is offered the best possible protection by our drugs laws. Because despite all the accusations thrown at those in favour of drug policy reform, the bottom line is that it is not about being pro-drugs. It’s about saving lives and the only credible way to do that properly is to know whether our policies are up to the job. |