But will increased powers to police tackle drug use amongst youth, or continue to lose the trust of ethnic minorities in the justice system?
An upcoming report, by First Wednesday – Europe’s largest community of entrepreneurs and investors in the cannabis sector – has identified a systemic, deep-rooted issue of social injustice for ethnic minority communities when the personal use of recreational cannabis is policed.
Pagefield has been working with Hanway Associates – who specialise in strategy and M&A for the cannabis sector – focussing on composing messaging for businesses and promoting campaigns to increase patient access to medical cannabis, in the wake of it being decriminalised for medical use in 2018.
As a communications agency, concerned daily with how the political system grapples with changing economic trends, consumer habits, and wider geopolitical issues, we are concerned that the report has serious implications for the general policing of cannabis in the UK, as more individuals continue to access cannabis for medicinal purposes.
Specifically, we noted the data from the Children’s Commissioner for England which indicates the nationwide protocol for the strip searching of children has a ‘pronounced and deeply concerning ethnic disproportionality’. Black children in England and Wales are six times more likely to be strip searched when compared to national population figures.
So how many of those children were subsequently arrested? Home Office information indicates that of the 94,975 children stopped and searched by police forces between 2021-22, 50,787 between the ages of 10 and 17 were arrested – making it just over half.
On paper then, strip-searching might seem like an effective deterrent in keeping kids away from drugs and out of trouble. But when we look at the ramifications felt by the almost 50% of children found not to be in possession of a controlled substance, the picture is far less positive. These young people expressed they suffered trauma and subsequently expressed negative attitudes towards the criminal justice system – with cases like that of ‘Child Q’, who was forcefully strip searched in a school in London back in 2020 showing the level of how distressing these searches can be for young people, falsely accused.
Only 36% of black children have a sense of trust in the police, compared to 75% of white youngsters. This statistic has no doubt been influenced further by the peripheral atrocities committed by the police globally against ethnic minority communities, whether this be the murder of George Floyd in the USA, or the fatal shooting of Chris Kaba in the UK. However, much of this mistrust is prompted by the disproportionate treatment meted out to black and ethnic minority communities more generally by the police – with data from the Children’s Commissioner indicating that more than half of those children arrested (52%) were strip searched without an appropriate adult present.
It is important to note that in 2022 the Government announced its intention to further expand the power of police to carry out suspicion-less stop and searches in relation to protest activity – outlined in the proposed Public Order Act 2023. We can only hope that this widening of the scope doesn’t bring a wider scope of discrimination with it.
In addition, the Government’s newly proposed strategy to tackle antisocial behaviour, and, as described by the Prime Minister himself, ‘make our streets safer and invest in communities the length and breadth of the UK’, leaves room for further concerns.
Under the newly proposed Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, the Government has expanded the police’s ability to test individuals for use of a broader range of drugs and has doubled down on its prohibitive stance towards drug use – continuing to criminalise ethnic minority youth using drugs, rather than refer these vulnerable people into healthcare services. Unhelpfully, those pushing for the legislation tend to deem those engaged in antisocial behaviour as ‘gangs of teenagers’.
With the most recent ONS data on drug use showing that one in five individuals in the UK, aged 16 to 24 years-old, were reported to have used controlled substances in the year ending June 2022 – the same rate as the previous year – the issue of young people using drugs is far from disappearing.
Prohibitive measures which seek to deal with personal drug use, without effectively collecting data to capture the effectiveness of this approach in rehabilitating offenders and reducing overall drug use, have continued to fail globally. Perhaps it is time that the Government looked more towards methods aimed at reducing harms to individuals rather than imposing more harms upon them.
To sign up to receive a copy of the upcoming Social Justice and Equity Report from First Wednesdays, please email nick.birko-dolder@pagefield.co.uk
