As we are coming up to a general election, one in which the drugs/crime link will play its part, it's perhaps worth going back in history to look at other elections in which telling porkies about drugs and crime helped political parties to win office.

Our first example shows how linking drugs and crime helped an American President get re-elected and stay in office. The President in question was Richard Nixon (himself no stranger to excessive drinking and prescription drug abuse) and the time was back in the late 1960s early 1970s. Nixon (or 'Tricky Dicky' as he was known) won the 1968 election on the back of a law and order campaign. When he got in, he found that the President actually didn't control law enforcement anywhere except Washington DC itself. What he did control, however, was the Federal budget, the cash in other words. Faced with a further election in 1972 and rising crime rates, he gave his staff (many of them to become Watergate conspirators and inmates of Federal prisons) the task of finding a solution (real or imaginary) to street crime. What they came up with was a moral panic about drugs, heroin in particular. What followed were stacks of Government cash to fight a "war on drugs".

Nixon's henchmen started by manufacturing an 'epidemic'. In 1971, the Nixon administration claimed that addicts were responsible for $18 billion of property crime a year. Whereas the total for all US property crime was in fact $1.3 billion a year.

Okay. Having multiplied the figure for property crime then the next trick was to grossly inflate the number of addicts. Official statistics showed that there were around 68,000 US addicts. With a bit of jiggery-pokery these figures were reworked to give a figure first of 315,000, then a figure of 599,000. A tenfold increase in junkie numbers in two years! As in Britain, other politicians and the American media swallowed this shit without a murmur.

Then came the real masterstroke. A couple of years after Nixon’s re-election, the boys at the White House reworked the figures again to show a decrease in the figures to 150,000. A decrease which was hailed as the evidence for the success of the war on drugs!1

Our second example, comes from our old friends Tony and Jack, back in the early 1990s when they were setting out to win power from the Tories. In 1994 Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary and just getting started in the drugs cause crime game. Addict crime, he once told Parliament, made up 70% of the total of property crime "in some areas". Some time later he stated that addicts were responsible for 50% of all recorded property crime2 . Even John Major’s Tory Government found that hard to swallow. So they commissioned the then Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence to both estimate the costs of addict property crime and how much of the overall property crime figure this represented. The ISDD found that giving a soundly based answer to the question was made extremely difficult by incomplete research data and the very dodgy and mistaken assumptions about these questions that were floating about then. After surveying the British and the international literature, the best they could come up with was a figure (for the early 1990s) of between £58 million and £864 million each year. Equivalent to between 1% and 21% of the annual cost of acquisitive crime reported to the police in 1992. Roughly up to one-fifth of recorded property crime then. Whether it was 1% or 21% or somewhere in the middle (or anywhere else for that matter) the ISDD simply couldn’t say3. These estimates appeared in the Tory’s national drug strategy.4

Well that wasn’t good enough for Tony and Jack. Even the top of the range estimate of up to one-fifth was nowhere near Tony’s 50%. By now Tony was Leader of New Labour and Jack had got Tony’s job as Shadow Home Secretary and an election was coming! So, in 1996, Jack returned to the debate in a paper called Breaking the Vicious Circle: Labour’s Proposals to Tackle Drug Related Crime. One piece of research the ISDD had used was a study of 279 male heroin addicts admitted to methadone maintenance programmes in Southern California between 1978 and 1980. 160 were Chicano and 119 white5 . In this study, the addicts surveyed all said they earned 48% (almost half) of their income from property crime. A figure higher than any other research study in America or Europe had found and one the ISDD thought owed more to the way the study was designed than how Californian addicts raised money. Indeed, the ISDD suggested that the "simplistic" methods used in this study would be one reason for dumping it, but to calculate a full range it was included.

Jack had no such problems with this study and promptly built it into his calculations. Using this (and various other inflated assumptions) Jack got the figure to £1.318 billion annually6 . Roughly a third of the supposed annual property crime figure for that period in the 1990s and by then everyone had forgotten Tony’s earlier statements completely. Well done Jack! Champagne all round! New Labour won the election and that is how we got stuck with the now impossible to argue with ‘fact’ that addicts are responsible for around one-third of recorded property crime.

Notes

1 J. Epstein (19) Agency of Fear:

2 Drugs - the Need for Action 1994, Labour Party, London

3 N. Dorn, O. Baker, T. Seddon, (1994) Paying for Heroin: estimating the financial cost of acquisitive crime committed by dependent heroin users in England and Wales ISDD, London

4 HMSO (1994) Tackling Drugs Together HMSO, London

5 E. Deschenes, M. Anglin, G. Speckhart (1991) ‘Narcotics Addiction: Related Criminal Careers, Social and Economic Costs’, Journal of Drug Issues 21(2), pp383-411

6 J Straw (1996) Breaking the Vicious Circle: Labour’s proposals to tackle drug-related crime Labour Party, London.