Identity Theft? Re-Framing the Policing of Organized Drug Crime in the UK as Harm Reduction

Abstract

The central defining characteristic of a harm reduction approach to drug policy, as argued by Lenton and Single (1998, p. 213), is it focuses on reduction of harm as its primary goal rather than reduction of [drug] use per se. However, Hunt and Stevens (2004, p. 337) note that while there is some consensus around what harm reduction is and what it has achieved, it lacks a formal definition. Caulkins (2004, p. 305) argues that the debate over the merits of harm reduction against use reduction approaches has - unhelpfully in his view - tended to conflate goals and interventions. On this basis, harm reduction has been seen as the province of drug treatment and public health interventions whereas use reduction has been seen as the province of law enforcement when in his view each is better characterized as a goal rather than a specific set of policies.Hunt (2004, p. 231) points out that harm reduction is most commonly characterized as a public health-based movement. It embodies, he suggests, a rights-based concept that positively asserts the claims of drug users to respect and dignity in the provision of health and social care services. Inciardi and Harrison (2000, p. vii) have also suggested that at the core of the concept of drug harm reduction is the belief that people who use drugs should not be regarded as enemies of the state. On one hand, harm reduction is characterized as a rights-based appeal to soften the hard edge of prohibition and its negative characterization of certain individuals but on the other, drawing on Caulkins distinction, it does not logically exclude policies that may at first appear to be integral to the enforcement of prohibition by the state, if they could be shown to have, say, public health benefits.Outside of the somewhat rarefied confines of the harm reduction debate any discussion of the political saliency of the term harm reduction in relation to public policy must be set against the deeply ingrained perception, held by a very significant constituency in liberal democratic societies, that success in drug policy coheres around some notion of stopping bad people.Furthermore, that the predominant harm associated with drugs has its root causes in the actions of criminals. Strategies to reduce drug supply are thus intrinsically bound in important ways to defense of the state in mainstream political discourse. This in turn has important links to the construction of harm that is applied. Despite the association of harm reduction with the personal well being of drug users a broader concept for understanding harm was developed in the early 1990s. Newcombe (1992) produced a schema of types of harm (health, social, and economic) that occurs on different levels (individual, community and society). As Hunt and Stevens note (2004, p. 337) this opens the possibility that harms to be reduced can encompass both drug users and non-drug users alike. However, the schema gives no guidance on how to value different types of harm.This article examines the recent emergence of an apparent reframing of the approach to drug policy by the government of the United Kingdom (UK) in terms of harm reduction. Law enforcement has been given a prominent role, exemplified by the self-declared description of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), formed in 2006, as being a harm reduction agency with law enforcement powers. The article will examine the emergence of SOCA and the extent to which the redefinition of its role stems from a wider government attempt to reconfigure the UK approach to managing drug problems in relation to harm, and whether this reflects a more pessimistic, or a more pragmatic view of drug policy outcomes. It will explore the recent etymology of harm in UK drug policy discourse and ask whether in encroaching into an area that has hitherto encapsulated acceptance of the inherent limitations of law enforcement, SOCA shows that there is a need to reassert or redefine the use of concepts of harm in relation to UK drug policy. …