Analysis: Why the Tsar was deposed in favour of a new policy to crack rising drug use

Performance targets to reduce cocaine and heroin use are ripped up as Government aims to increase seizures and end Afghan production

It was a glittering occasion more usually associated with a film première than the launch of a new piece of government policy. In April 1998, after less than a year in power, Labour ministers hired the theatre of the Trocadero Centre, near Leicester Square, to tell the world of their plans for "tackling drugs to build a better Britain".

Keith Hellawell, the newly appointed drugs tsar, took to the rostrum to outline a 10-year strategy to "stifle the availability" of drugs and enable young people and former drug users to live "healthy and crime-free lives".

The showbiz atmosphere and the spectacular nature of the claims provoked a sceptical response from many of the experts present. Less than five years on, the cynics have been proved right. The tsar has been deposed and is engaged in a bitter feud with ministers responsible for drugs policy.

Mr Hellawell's strategy aimed to drive down drug- related crime, reduce the overall availability of drugs, educate young people on the dangers of substance misuse and increase the number of users receiving treatment. But instead of communities safe from drugs, crack houses and street gun battles have become part of Britain's urban landscape and heroin addiction has spread from cities to the countryside. Availability of all illegal drugs is widespread and cocaine use, in particular, has risen to recordlevels.

Drug prices are now lower than ever before, and a strategy that was largely based on the education of youngsters has coincided with an estimated one million people taking ecstasy every weekend and deep confusion over the legal status of cannabis, the drug most widely used by teenagers.

Faced with the might of the global traffickers and the expendability of street dealers, the Government announced a new tack yesterday of concentrating on "middle-market" dealers.

It also ripped up three of the four "key performance targets" of the Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain plan and replaced them with new ones described as "achievable".

Instead of 10-year objectives that aimed to cut by half the numbers of young people using heroin and cocaine and to reduce by 50 per cent the levels of repeat offending by drug users, the strategy now looks for any downward trend in these areas by 2008.

And instead of having to cut by 50 per cent the availability of heroin and cocaine, the Government has now pledged itself simply to increase the level of drug seizures and step up attempts to help Afghanistan reduce the cultivation of poppies, with the aim of eliminating the crop within 10 years.

"Let's be totally up front," said Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office's drugs minister. "We had no strategy at all in 1998. There was no evidence base."

Mr Ainsworth claimed the "direction" of the Home Office's Updated Drug Strategy 2002 was "exactly the same" as the one launched by Mr Hellawell four years earlier.

But that was not how the former drugs tsar saw it.

Still apparently enraged by the decision of the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to downgrade the classification of cannabis, he said policy in relation to that drug was "a dog's dinner". He accused ministers of confusing both police officers and young people on cannabis use.

Of the four original Hellawell targets, only one has survived.

Hazel Blears, a Health minister, said that the number of hard-drug users being brought in for treatment was increasing by 8 per cent a year. She said plans were on course to double by 2008 the 118,500 drug users who were being treated in 1998.

Treatment services are to be expanded, with a major increase in the availability of heroin on prescription for users who have problems with methadone-substitute programmes. Hundreds of new drug support workers, detoxification workers and residential care staff will be recruited, including some who have themselves overcome problems of substance abuse. The issuing by courts of drug treatment and testing orders will double by March 2005.

But many drug users will be concerned that the only way they have of gaining access services is to commit crimes.

The Government published findings by researchers at the University of York who concluded that the economic and social costs of class A drug use in England and Wales had risen to £22.7bn a year, and that the average annual cost of a problem drug user was £45,858.

The 250,000 users with the most severe problems are responsible for 99 per cent of the costs of drug misuse, the Home Office said.

The sheer scale of modern-day drug use shows how the Government – and its immediate predecessors – have failed to get to grips with the issue. Danny Kushlick, of the radical Transform Drug Policy Institute, pointed out yesterday that the 1,000 registered drug users of 1971 had grown to 250,000.

In its revised strategy, the Home Office said four million people used illicit drugs a year and one million used class A substances. The York study suggests this might be a considerable underestimate, and that there may be up to 3,486,000 class A users, of which up to 506,000 might be "problem users".

The relaunch of the drug strategy attempted to find evidence of what officials term the "green shoots" of progress. It cited self-reporting surveys which showed that since 1998 the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds using class A drugs was stable at 8 per cent. The proportion of 16 to 19-year-olds using drugs in the past year fell from 34 per cent in 1994 to 28 per cent in 2001-02.

But the positive nature of the last statistic was tempered by the warning that "within the same group there has been a worrying increase in the use of cocaine". At the forefront of government concerns is the growing use of the cocaine derivative crack. Official figures published yesterday showed that 85,000 people in England and Wales might have used the drug in the past year.

Treatment facilities have in the past concentrated largely on opiate users and there is a dearth of support for those addicted to crack. Mr Blunkett admitted yesterday that provision of drug treatment as a whole was "patchy and variable".

The Government launched a National Crack Action Plan yesterday, with fast-track crack treatment programmes in badly affected neighbourhoods and "crack-specific education" for all children.

Next spring, the Government will, once again, launch a communications campaign "driving home the risks of class A drugs". It will include the repackaging of the failing National Drugs Helpline, which Mr Ainsworth conceded was "not widely known among young people".

The Government insists the past four years had not been wasted. Mr Ainsworth said: "We have learnt an awful lot over four years about what works and what does not work."