The strategy is cast first and foremost as a campaign against crime. It acknowledges the health damage and the misery endured by people who have problems with drugs but, both implicitly and explicitly, it treats these as being of less importance than the damage done to others by drug-related crimes and other anti-social behaviour.

The strategy identifies its objective as ‘reducing the harm that drugs cause’, but its view of harm is a hierarchical one, with the harms cause by crime coming at the top. The overall ethos of the current drugs strategy is one of law enforcement and crime prevention rather than one concerned at least as much with education, public health, the health of individuals, social support and social cohesion.