The failure of British drug policy is clear. Today, parliament’s health select committee published a new report stating unambiguously that it is broken and ineffective.

Axar.az reports citing foreign media.

“Every drug death is preventable,” it said. Our spiraling levels of drug-related deaths are a consequence of bad planning and adherence to failed policies, based on criminalization.

The committee’s recommendations on treatment are, to anyone who follows this debate, painfully familiar. We need better commissioning, less retendering, and much more investment. We also need to move away from the disastrous insistence that nothing short of total abstinence should be viewed as a success.

People seeking help or recovery need to be supported. They need to be kept alive. Opiate substitution therapy, heroin-assisted treatment, drug consumption rooms, safety testing and low threshold access to naloxone, which reverses opioid overdoses, are all proven to help achieve that. To oppose their wider rollout is to bury one’s head in the sand. It allows people to die on the principle that there is only one path to a better life.

But the committee goes further than that. It recognizes that the entire framing of drug policy is misguided. We need to think about drugs as a health issue, not a criminal justice agenda.