For four years I worked in His Majesty’s Prison Service. Most of my time was spent with two groups: vulnerable prisoners, often those convicted of sexual offences who couldn’t safely be located on normal wings, and men struggling with addiction. What I learned there shaped my view on drugs more than any political argument ever could.
The truth is uncomfortable. If you are born with a tough set of circumstances, poverty, unstable housing, parents battling substance misuse, you are statistically far more likely to face those same issues yourself. The data backs this up. Around 46% of people in prison report having used drugs in the month before custody. Nearly two-thirds report regular alcohol use before entering prison. A significant proportion have experienced childhood trauma, been in care, or grown up in chaotic households. This isn’t coincidence. It’s a pipeline.
County lines has made it worse. The National Crime Agency estimates that thousands of children are exploited each year in drug distribution networks. These are not criminal masterminds. Many are 14, 15, 16-year-olds groomed by older gang members, often threatened or coerced. Research shows that some county lines “runners” earn less than minimum wage once debts and exploitation are factored in. Yet they risk prison or death.
I remember one young man vividly. He was 18 years old. No stable family. No strong guidance. He had been on remand in the adult prison where I worked. I asked him how his court case had gone. He told me quietly: “I got life.” He had stabbed someone over a bicycle — a situation rooted in drug-related conflict. Two young lives destroyed. Two families shattered. And the state left to deal with the aftermath for decades.
We cannot police our way out of this.
The UK spends billions each year on drug enforcement, policing, courts and imprisonment. Yet drug-related deaths in England and Wales are at record levels, over 4,900 in the most recent annual figures. That is the highest rate since records began. Meanwhile, our prisons are overcrowded, and reoffending rates remain stubbornly high — around 25% overall, and much higher for short sentences.
Other countries have tried something different. Portugal decriminalised personal possession of all drugs in 2001. Drug use did not explode. Instead, drug-related deaths and HIV transmission fell sharply. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reports that Portugal’s drug mortality rate remains significantly below the European average. Crucially, drug use became a public health issue rather than purely a criminal one.
I have long believed we should legalise and regulate cannabis in the UK. The illegal cannabis market is worth billions globally and fuels organised crime. Regulation would remove control from criminal networks, create legitimate tax revenue, and allow quality control. Countries like Canada and several U.S. states have demonstrated that regulated markets can generate substantial tax income while reducing illicit trade.
But I would go further: we should decriminalise possession of small amounts of all drugs, paired with mandatory health assessments and treatment pathways. This is not about being “soft.” It is about being smart.
If someone is dependent on heroin, they need treatment. Nobody grows up dreaming of selling their body or stealing to fund an addiction. Addiction changes brain chemistry; it overrides rational choice. Treating dependency through healthcare, potentially supervised through pharmacies and medical professionals, allows us to monitor, support and collect proper data. It reduces overdoses, reduces blood-borne diseases, and reduces acquisitive crime.
We also need to reinvest savings. Reduced policing and prison costs, alongside cannabis tax revenues, could be channelled into youth services, mental health provision and rehabilitation. The closure of youth clubs across the UK over the past decade has removed safe spaces and mentorship from vulnerable communities. That vacuum has been filled by gangs.
History teaches us what happens when addiction is weaponised or ignored, the Opium Wars destabilised an empire. Today, depression and anxiety are rising, especially among young people. If we cling to a 1920s-style prohibition mindset in 2026, we will keep filling prisons instead of fixing lives.
Drug policy must protect society, but it must also recognise human reality. From what I saw behind prison walls, punishment alone is not working. A modern, regulated, health-focused approach would be tougher on gangs, kinder to the vulnerable, and far more effective for Britain.
* Mo Waqas is a vice chair of the Liberal Democrats' Racial Diversity Campaign and was the PPC for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East.
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15 Comments
The party voted overwhelmingly to ban the sale of cigarettes & flavoured vapes to those of a certain age – with the former having a rolling ban year on year. You’ll end up with a grown adult rolling a spliff on their sofa – legally , but sparking up a fag would be illegal ..Deary me.
I have disant memories of the old Liberal Party Council debating this issue in the 1960s. at least in regard to cannabis.. The Young Liberals put froward a convincing case, based on the evidence, for at lease decriminalisation for possession. Many more mature (in age) Liberals were converted by the arguments. We should listen to Mr Waqa’s arguments, informed by experience as well as evidence.
You are correct to suggest that a locked prison door is not the answer to this substance addiction problem. The human condition seems to require a chemical “off-ramp” from life s boring “ordinariness”, but then, I also observe that other species seem to like eating rotting (fermenting) fruit, and monkeys on tropical holiday beaches also indulge in stealing the odd tourist Pina~Colada.
Getting “off your head” begins to seem like some unwise, but conditioned universal pursuit. Moreover than that, it seems to have a double-edged outcome. Lets reflect, that a great deal of the 20th Century was built on Music, Technology, Fashion, Art, Literature and revolutionary ideas built with LSD, alcohol, and a myriad of other unethical substances in the background. Problem is, that this innate pursuit of chemical “otherness” takes some unfortunate people, to places that they cannot escape from, and that is where society needs to intervene.
I don’t have an answer, but I can see the societal tipping point, begins when risk shifts between a danger to yourself, and becomes a danger to others. When you become a danger to others, then some form of exclusion is required. Help is the answer, but for help to work, it needs to be sincerely requested.
Thank you Mo
Mo, this is exactly the argument that needs making, and it lands harder for being rooted in what you actually witnessed rather than abstract principle.
The Portugal comparison is important but often flattened. The lesson isn’t simply “decriminalise and step back.” Portugal paired legal change with serious investment in treatment, housing and social support. Without that infrastructure, you swap criminal records for health crises. That distinction matters enormously for how we design reform here.
On cannabis regulation, Canada’s experience shows that getting the architecture right is everything. Where legal markets have been poorly designed, the illicit trade persists because legal products are too expensive or access too restricted. Regulation needs to be built around public health and market capture, not just tax revenue.
At A Just Society we’ve tried to work through what a comprehensive, phased approach would look like in UK institutional terms: immediate decriminalisation, a regulated cannabis market within 18 months, medical pilots for higher-risk substances, and harm reduction infrastructure scaled nationally. We’ve also done the fiscal work, using OBR projections and justice savings to show this is affordable if sequenced carefully.
The political conditions for this conversation are shifting. The question is whether we’re willing to make the evidence-based case clearly enough to actually move it.
Policy brief webpage is here if useful: https://ajustsociety.uk/policy/drug-reform-for-justice-and-care
(Full draft policy can also be made available to anyone interested)
I feel the first step is to invest more in a health approach and see how it works; the cost of this could be justified on the basis of reducing the number ending up in prison and therefore prison costs. Legal changes can then follow. Anything that provides more evidence for a human caring approach will surely make changes of the kind suggested more acceptable to the general public.
@Tanya and Mo, apart from Mo’s fact about Portugal’s decline in drug related deaths, what other evidence is there from that country and elsewhere to show that a health approach will work?
@Mo, “punishment alone is not working” does not remove people’s fear of a more liberal approach to the law though it loosely agrees with my teaching experience that the worst behaved kids only respond to punishment if it is accompanied by a commitment of care and love.
@Nigel Great questions. The evidence base is actually pretty strong now.
Portugal’s outcomes go beyond mortality. Drug-related HIV infections fell from over 50% of new cases in 2000 to under 7% by 2015. Treatment uptake increased significantly. Social reintegration programmes helped people back into employment and stable housing. It wasn’t the legal change alone that did it, but the combination of decriminalisation and sustained health investment.
Switzerland’s heroin-assisted treatment programme, running since the 1990s, showed dramatic reductions in acquisitive crime among participants, alongside improved health outcomes and housing stability. It’s now mainstream Swiss healthcare. Vancouver’s supervised consumption site, Insite, has been extensively evaluated and shows reduced overdose deaths in the surrounding area with no increase in drug use or crime nearby.
On your sequencing point. Health investment and legal reform aren’t really sequential, they’re interdependent. Criminalisation actively drives people away from health services, fear of arrest stops people seeking help. Portugal’s insight was that you can’t build a health approach on a criminal justice foundation. You need both moving together.
Your teaching analogy is actually spot on though. Punishment without care doesn’t change behaviour, it just displaces it. The evidence consistently shows that what works is reducing barriers to treatment, not increasing the cost of asking for help.
Mo’s case is well put, well evidenced, and irrefutable. Many things are potentially harmful in the wrong hands but legal (e.g. fast cars, kitchen knives, whisky, mobile phones), and we are left to make our own choices about behaving sensibly. Many of the mind-altering drugs, used sensibly, are less dangerous than alcohol.
The most potent argument for de-criminalisation is that organised crime uses vulnerable young people for their distribution network, and get their hands on money which would be better collected as taxation, as it is with tobacco and alcohol. Recreational drug bans originated in the US in the 1960s, when it was thought that the fabric of society would be destroyed by hippies. Sixty years on, we have the fabric of society in the UK being rotted by drug lords.
Our rulers in Westminster will need a little bit of courage and imagination to de-criminalise the currently proscribed substances – perhaps more than they’ve got – but Portugal has done it, and we should follow their example.
It is good to have this insight from someone who has worked in the Prison Service and knows the reality of the failure of our nation’s drugs policy.
Just over a decade ago I was Councillor for a Ward in Bristol that had a problem with street prostitution. 90% of te women doing this were doing it to fund a drug habit. If they got prosucuted for this, or for shoplifting, they would end up in Prison for a short sentence. After completing that they would get released make contact with their old friends re-offend and get sent back to prison again. It was like a revolving door.
In another part of the ward a building became available which was suitable for a residential drug rehabilitation centre. I took a principled stand and supported the planning application. The Tories whipped up hysteria with a disgraceful campaign against drug users, the Council, the NHS, and of course me. I was accused of “bringing drug into the area” my riposte was that drugs were of course already in the area, and this plan was about taking some out of it.
In the last few days we have seen a disgraceful smear atempt by Labour agsint the Green Party’s policy to move to a medical rather than criminal approach to drugs. 30 years ago Chris Davies faced exactly the same disgraceful campaign in the Littleborough and Saddleworth by-election.
I don’t have Mo’s extensive experience to draw on, but when I was growing up in the 1960s I got to know a young man who was being helped to get off heroin by his doctor. A year after heroin use was criminalised he was dead.
It should be perfectly obvious that leaving criminal gangs in charge means the strength and quality of what is on sale, and the amounts of adulterating substances in them, creates dangers which wouldn’t exist if there was a legitimate trade, as there is with alcohol.
The reason I say imagination is needed here is that MPs really ought to try looking at this from the opposite point of view: suppose ‘hard’ drugs were currently legal, and someone wanted to ban them – including alcohol and tobacco, which kill more people than the currently illegal drugs. The first fears would surely be that a black market would appear and flourish, that probably violent criminal gangs would exploit people, tax revenue would be lost, and that there would be no quality control of potentially dangerous substances. If those hypothetical fears would prevent the introduction of a ban in my imagined scenario, there must be a good case for decriminalisation.
Another consequence of the ban on mind-altering substances which came here from America in the 1960s, where politicians were terrified that hippy culture would make it more difficult to get young men to agree to drop Napalm and millions of tons of high explosive on Cambodian villagers, was that research into their beneficial effects came to an abrupt halt. After a gap of fifty years, we are now seeing them beginning to be used to treat depression – highly effectively, it appears.
Could not agree more. I have also worked in the field and find what is going on tragic and costly. Our party needs to move more quickly and radically
Excellent article and fully agree with Mo Waqas.
When in Calgary Canada 2 years I asked a lady why they had voted to legalise cannabis and have cannabis ‘shops’ on high-streets.
” For a better future for our children. To stop them falling into crime and the hands of criminal networks. I talk to them about the health dangers always. It’s a health issue….like your’s… smoking while speaking to me on the street! “
Wow! At last some sense on drugs.
Not without issues but an overall winning strategy benefitting so many with a poor start in life. The current situation cannot be allowd to continue to fail us all.
probably too late for anyone to read, but i agree with Mo, both on the prison issue and drugs.
Sadly it will be used against us, just as the Green’s were villified for their drugs policy (not that I know what it is), and when I was phone canvassing for Tim Farron in 2017 I had a lot of comments on our drug policy. It wouldn’t be because they had sat and read it, it will have been because the tories were distorting it in their campaign.
But we are not there to please other parties and be populist, we need to be leading the way in debate, policies and as here, with reference to facts.