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Combating poverty requires doing better on addiction
03 December 2009
One of my roles in Parliament is to handle the child poverty brief for my party and this is an area I have spent a great deal of time on recently. I am particularly keen to look at the various ways in which people get trapped in poverty such as educational failure, worklessness and family breakdown to see how we can help people break free. A major cause of poverty for some families and their children is addiction. It is shocking that around one a half million children are growing up in substance abusing households – over a million where alcohol is abused and 350,000 where there is drug taking.
Over the last twelve years the Government has spent £10 billion fighting illegal drug use in the UK. That’s more than we spent on the Iraq war and the evidence is that it is a war we are losing. Seizures of heroin, cocaine and cannabis have plummeted between 2000 and 2007. The number of addicts has increased from by 200,000 over the last decade and we have twice the proportion of Sweden and three times the proportion in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, most areas adopt a zero tolerance approach to drugs and they the bulk of their budget is spent on enforcement and prevention while also providing effective addiction care.
The UK has not got it right in spending most of its £10 billion on treatment which often does not lead to recovery, but keeps people on the state’s opiate, methadone. For many drug users, this has become a long term sentence of dependency and I think we should have higher aspirations and move to an abstinence based treatment regime.
Some people do not regard cannabis as causing serious problems. I strongly disagree. It is still illegal although the Government’s initial decision to downgrade its status was unhelpful. I have sat with the parents and family of too many of my constituents who have told me how cannabis has ruined the lives of their loved ones, to take any other view. Professor Robin Murray of the Institute of Psychiatry points to eight cohort studies since 2002, all of which point to an increased risk of psychosis in people who smoke cannabis, with particularly severe problems for younger cannabis smokers.
Police figures show that alcohol-related violence increased by almost 50% since the Government introduced 24 hour drinking. Admissions to hospital for alcohol related problems such as liver disease have also doubled in the last decade.
I would like to pay tribute to the work of Addaction and Alcoholics Anonymous locally, who do excellent work. We all have a duty though to make sure we teach those around us the importance of handling alcohol responsibly and saying no to illegal drugs. I would also like to see some of the high strength binge drinks and drinks like Alcopops taxed more highly and supermarkets prevented from selling alcohol below cost price.
Tackling addiction is central to tackling poverty as children deserve to have a proper share of their parents’ income spent on them, rather than on feeding their parents addictions.
