Drugs don’t hurt families, Home Office admits
We all know that drugs destroy families. We know this because we've been told it over and over again. They ruin the people that take them, their relationship with those around them, and their career.
Except when you ask the Home Office for evidence of that, they don't actually have any. And it's not for want of trying. They have an obligation to find evidence for it and are unable to do so.
It's fair to say that's not the finding Tory MP David Burrowes expected when he asked the Home Office to publish the results of the so-called 'family test' on orders banning drugs.
Burrowes is one of Iain Duncan Smith's acolytes. He was in the 'addictions working group' of the work and pensions secretary's hysterically anti-drugs Centre of Social Justice. Their 111-page report on "the nature and extent of social breakdown" in Britain found that "a parent who has a serious drug problem… can exhibit very destructive behaviour patterns which can destroy the quality of life for the other parent and children, leading in turn to family breakdown".
The 'family test' Burrowes referred to is also the brainchild of IDS. It's a set of five questions on family cohesion which "all policy or legislation across government" must answer so that they can "support strong family relationships".
Before implementing a policy, ministers would need to consider what kind of impact it would have on family formation, on family members’ ability to play a full role in family life, and whether it risks any deterioration of relationship quality.
Burrowes hasn't returned my calls, but we can presume he was trying to link his mentor's family test idea with the work on drugs and addiction he was doing at the Centre for Social Justice. It didn't quite work out the way he planned.
When Mike Penning, Home Office minister, replied a few days later, his statement contained a fascinating admission.
"The 'family test' was considered when developing previously published impact assessments on drug control orders but, in accordance with the published guidance, it was concluded there were no tangible direct impacts on families and it was not proportionate to apply the specific test. Impact assessments published alongside future orders seeking to control drugs will evidence consideration of the 'family test'."
You might need to read that twice because it looks an awful lot like a Home Office minister admitting that drugs have no impact on families. After all, if they destroy families then surely their ban would have some sort of positive "tangible direct impact".
Since the family test was passed in October last year, the government has banned all sorts of things, like the snappily named 1-Cyclohexyl-4-(1,2-diphenylethyl) piperazine or the equally snappy Methyl-5-(4-methylphenyl)-4,5-dihydrooxazol-2-amine. These drugs are technically new inventions, but really they are the drugs you already know. Chemists have just tweaked them a little so they're technically outside the limits of the existing law. A typical Home Office circular from January, for instance, banned "the LSD-related compounds commonly known as ALD-52, AL-LAD, ETH-LAD, PRO-LAD and LSZ".
So if they had no impact on families, then presumably the original LSD has no impact on families either. Burrowes' question has inadvertently let the cat out the bag. The shrill warnings about drug use and family breakdown have no evidential basis according to the very department tasked with implanting them.
So we should take a moment this morning to thank IDS for his 'family test'. It has demonstrated the factual inadequacy of the government's anti-drugs message.
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