A Fresh Look at Our Drug Laws Is the First Step Towards a Sane, Evidence-Based Policy

One of the most talented actors of his generation found dead in his bathroom. Over a hundred young people needing treatment after a gig in Belfast where drugs were found. Teenagers dying after a taking Ecstasy on a night out. Every day the media present us with examples of the miserable failure of the "war on drugs". Yet the government presses on with the prohibition approach, refusing to acknowledge the obvious reality that it's not working.

When I was elected MP for Brighton Pavilion, the city had the highest mortality rate from drugs in the country. I wanted to find out whether doing things differently would help save lives, and was part of efforts to form a local commission to take a fresh look at the city's strategy to reduce drug-related harm. Thanks to innovative new approaches - increased training in the administration of naloxone which can prevent overdose, better data collection on drug use trends and improving services for people with a dual diagnosis - some great progress has been made. In the last few years we've seen a higher than average increase in numbers of people leaving treatment successfully.

Yet national policies, part of the broader international 'war on drugs', are the main barrier to further progress. The UK still approaches drug addiction as a criminal issue first and a health issue second. As the former Chief Superintendent of Brighton and Hove Police has said: "The use of drugs is not well addressed through punitive measures. Providing people with treatment not only resolves their addiction - thereby minimising risk of overdose, drug related health issues, anti-social behaviour and dependence on the state, for example - but cuts the cost to the community by reduced offending".

Those costs are enormous. In England and Wales alone, an estimated £3billion a year is spent fighting the war on drugs, to little effect. Over half of the 85,000 people in prison are thought to have serious drug problems. Rates of cannabis use by young people in Britain are amongst the highest in Europe.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that our approach is being dictated by a law that's over 40 years old and is not fit for purpose. There has never been an impact assessment of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act; nor has there been a cost benefit assessment, or any attempt to compare its effectiveness in reducing the social, economic or health costs of drug misuse with alternatives. Successive governments have seemed singularly uninterested in whether whether our current prohibtion-based approach is an effective use of public money.

Where alternative approaches have been adopted, the results have generally been positive. In 2001, Portugal adopted a new policy whereby drug possession was changed from a criminal offence to an administrative offence, following which there was a reduction in new HIV diagnoses and in drug-related deaths. In Switzerland, a series of new policies focusing attention on drug use from a public health perspective, led to a decline in crime rates. An investigation by Release looked at 21 jurisdictions that had adopted some form of decriminalisation of drug possession. Overwhelmingly, it found that such an approach does not lead to an increase in drug use but does improve outcomes for users - in terms of employment, relationships and likelihood of staying out of prison.

As Russell Brand has argued, if "we are aware that our drug laws aren't working and that alternatives are yielding positive results, why are we not acting?" Over the past year, I've been calling on the government to carry out an independent and authoritative review of the Misuse of Drugs Act. My epetition has received over 50,000 signatures, and the figure is rising rapidly. If 100,000 people have signed by the end of this week, the issue will have to be debated and voted on by MPs.

Slowly, it's starting to feel like this isn't such a hopeless cause. Even in the US, where Nixon first used the term "War on Drugs", the wind is changing - the Republican governor of Texas has stated his intention "to implement policies that start us toward a decriminalisation and keep people from going to prison and destroying their lives."

And now the deputy prime minister, back from a trip to Columbia, is arguing for "a proper debate about the need for a different strategy." It's not often that I agree with Nick, but on this occasion, he's dead right. Prohibition is costing lives, as well as billions of taxpayers' money - a fresh look at our drug laws is the first step towards a sane, evidence-based policy.

You can sign the epetition here and join our Thunderclap here

Written by Caroline Lucas MP, Green Party

Follow Caroline Lucas on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CarolineLucas      

Big Bad Corn

This graphic was sent to us by a kindred spirit organisation in the US (http://www.learnstuff.com/). I think it demonstrates very well the problems caused by bio fuels. Ironically, big business pushes bio fuels as a 'green' alternative to oil based fuels, and a cure for climate change.

Here is the presentation.................

If you’ve ever creeped your way through a corn maze at Halloween, you know how it can grab ahold of your imagination, turning benign stalks into monsters and discarded cobs into severed limbs. It’s just a trick of the light–but take a look at the ways that the U.S. uses corn, and you’ll see that a holiday thrill isn’t the scariest thing about this product. It was first subsidized in the late ‘70s as a fossil fuel alternative, but it’s turned out to be inefficient source of fuel. Not only that, ethanol from corn actually increases the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a higher rate than gasoline. Yet, the U.S. pays $10 to $30 billion dollars each years in farm subsidies to raise even more of it, with no clear benefit to consumers. So every time you eat a pound of corn products–which statistics say you will do 37 times over this year alone–remember this graphic, which was created so you can learn stuff about the effects of corn, America’s biggest agricultural product.

Downhills School Govenors Sacked by Government

Six months ago I volunteered to become a local authority-appointed community governor at Downhills primary school in Tottenham, north London. Last Thursday, I tuned in to BBC radio to learn that I had been fired. Our governing body was dissolved without notice and I, a "big society" governor who is not a parent at the school, may not be allowed to set foot inside again. Many of my former colleagues have been reduced to tears: what had we done to deserve to be despatched in such a ruthless manner?


The reality is that we were victims of our own success. The secretary of state had to remove us, using his sweeping powers under the new Academies Act, because of the resistance we had put up to plans to force the school to become an academy. With our parent-led protest and threats of judicial review, we were in danger of setting a precedent for other schools opposed to a forced academy conversion.


On 8 March, shortly after the Downhills Ofsted report was published (which judged the school inadequate and put it in special measures), my fellow governors met department of education officials and were told that Michael Gove was minded to impose an academy order. Under this order a school can be forced to become an academy governed under an interim executive board (IEB).


The following Monday we wrote to Mr Gove. We said we did not rule out becoming an academy but also considered remaining a community school in local authority control a viable option. We wanted to consult the school community on both options before making a decision. In the end we conducted our own ballot, which showed that 90% of parents who responded were against academy conversion.


In our letter we presented our action plan to address the serious failings identified in the Ofsted report. We recruited an executive head from an outstanding school in Haringey to assist our deputy head, who had been praised by Ofsted. We suggested the governors ourselves should be mentored by the governors at the outstanding school.


We asked for more information about the Harris Federation– the government's preferred sponsor – and for an explanation of why they were considered right for Downhills. We requested raw data for each Harris academy showing progress in maths and English, particularly for disadvantaged children.


Instead we were dismissed without answers. The summary justice dispensed by Gove to our governing body and that of neighbouring Nightingale school indicates that he will not let anything stand in the way of his grand design. But he is making a serious mistake in treating parents and governors who question his plans with such brazen contempt.


We are not Trotskyites or political extremists – far from it. One of my colleagues is a hedge-fund trader who spends every Wednesday evening on football training classes. I am a lawyer who has spent the past five years working at a UN war-crimes tribunal. I joined Downhills governing body because I wanted to do some useful work in the local community. I knew next to nothing about education policy and had no bias against academies. My own poorly performing state secondary school became an academy years after I left, and I only wish it had changed earlier.


I have nothing against the Harris Federation, whose track record is by all accounts impressive. What I do not accept is the argument that academies are the only means of achieving a good education for our children. There are plenty of outstanding schools in local authority control. How a school is run is what's important, not whether an academy or the local authority is in charge.


What persuaded me to join the Downhills campaign were the views of the other governors, parents, staff and the local community. They had legitimate concerns and felt the school could be turned around under local authority control. Many of their arguments I disagreed with, but as the majority wanted the school to remain under a democratically elected, accountable local authority, I was persuaded they were right. At the very least I believed they were entitled to have some say on who should be in charge of the school when such dramatic changes were under consideration.


No doubt Gove's supporters will say Downhills was a failing school that needed dramatic intervention. I find that argument unconvincing. Downhills is certainly not among the worst performing schools as our key stage 1 results for 2011, which at 61% were above the national floor standard, indicate. And it cannot be right that every underperforming school needs to be converted to an academy. Where there are strong arguments for an alternative this should be properly considered. The views of parents and the local community should also be taken into account.


It seems that we will never know the answers to the questions we asked. Our dissolution and replacement with an (Interim Executive Board) IEB, highlights the academies' lack of transparency. As David Wolfe, a leading education lawyer points out, academies do not want to disclose information about how they are run and often back out of legal challenges to avoid so doing. We have league tables for primary and secondary schools and we now need them for academies too. Otherwise parents and governors can have no way of gauging whether a centrally selected "chain" academy provider is a suitable match for their school.


The big guns that have been brought in on the new IEB running Downhills will be under tremendous pressure to deliver results. No one would question their credentials – the new IEB members include "superhead" Dame Sylvia Morris, honoured for her work at a primary school in Southwark, Dan Moynihan, the CEO of the Harris Federation, as well as Robin Bosher, its primary director. But they have never been seen at the school before and we can only wonder how much they know about Tottenham, what links they have with the local community and what sort of welcome they expect from parents who have so overwhelmingly backed our campaign against forced academy conversion.

Written by Roger Sahota
First published at The Guardian here

A Fair Deal for Haringey Children: the problem of unfair school funding

The funding of education in Haringey is unfair. Haringey is placed fourth on the list of London boroughs according to levels of deprivation yet it is funded as if it had been placed ninth. The result of this is that schools in Haringey receive over 1,000 pounds less per child per year than those in neighbouring boroughs such as Islington and Hackney.

Haringey is an outer London borough with inner London characteristics and problems. It has an ethnically diverse and, in certain parts of the borough, highly mobile population with a relatively high proportion of children with special educational needs, receiving free school meals and/or speaking English as a second language. For some time now there has been a campaign to get a fairer deal for Haringey children and Haringey Green Party has supported this campaign. The Department for Children, Schools and Families is presently consulting on proposals to change the way it allocates money for education, beginning in September 2011. For the sake of our children, it is vital that Haringey schools receive the increase in funding that they need to improve the life chances of some of the most deprived children in the country.

Each one of us can make this outcome more likely by taking part in the consultation. The consultation document is off-putting at first sight. It is long and full of technical detail. But all we need to do is to fill in the first page and then go to question 14 about ‘Area Cost Adjustment’. The options proposed by the Government are less than satisfactory and would not completely remedy the present unfairness. One of these options is the ‘hybrid’ model which, if adopted, would provide Haringey with an extra 10.8 million. The other, called the General Labour Market approach, would leave things roughly as they are.

To respond to the consultation, visit www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations and click on ‘Consultation on the future distribution of school funding’. Consultations are listed in order of their closing date. The consultation about school funding closes on 7th June. The form can be filled in and submitted online or it can be downloaded and sent by email or post.

Kathryn Dean (pictured, centre above, wrote this piece), she is a Green Party candidate at the local elections for Fortis Green ward