Boris Johnson is pledging to break up 2,000 “county lines” drugs gangs in a £300 million drive to rid the country’s streets of illegal narcotics.
The Government is to set out its 10-year drugs strategy for England and Wales, with a police crackdown to cut off the supply of class A drugs by city-based crime rings to the surrounding county areas.
At the same time it will include what ministers say will be the biggest increase in investment and recovery in an attempt to end the cycle of addiction and repeat offending.
The Home Office said there are 300,000 heroin and crack addicts in England who are responsible for nearly half of acquisitive crime, including burglary and robbery, while drugs drive nearly half of all homicides.
The total cost to society is put at nearly £20 billion a year.
Among the measures in the strategy is an expansion of drug testing on arrest, with police encouraged to direct individuals who test positive towards treatment or other relevant interventions.
This could include attendance at drug awareness courses with criminal sanctions for those who continue to use.
Judges will be given the power to order drugs tests on offenders serving community sentences for drugs-related crimes, with the prospect of jail if they test positive.
When dealers are arrested, police will be able to seize their mobile phones and use them to send messages to their clients to discourage drug use and direct them to support.
The measure is designed to remove the feeling of anonymity when people purchase illegal drugs by making them aware the police know what is going on.
A behaviour change campaign will be piloted on university campuses to help understand which messages work in discouraging drug misuse at an early stage.
The deterrent and preventative measures will run alongside an aggressive campaign aimed at the drugs gangs, with a commitment to dismantle over 2,000 county lines over the next three years involving thousands more arrests.
Police will carry out 6,400 “disruptions” against the activities of organised criminals, targeting the road and rail networks they use while protecting vulnerable young people exploited by the gangs to run drugs for them.
In an interview with The Sun On Sunday, Mr Johnson said it could include removing the passports and driving licences of offenders.
The paper also reported there would be extra cash for 50 local authorities with the worst drug problems, including Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Liverpool, Hull and coastal towns in the North East and Yorkshire.
But the PM may want to look at issues closer to home than that after it was announced that sniffer dogs could soon be deployed in parliament to crackdown on drugs use.
The Speaker has vowed to call in the police amid evidence that cocaine and other illegal substances are being used on the parliamentary estate.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle said he would investigate Westminster’s drug culture after traces of cocaine were found in a number of places accessible only to people with parliamentary passes.
Charles Walker, a Tory MP who chairs the administration committee, told the Sunday Times that the issue would be discussed by a House of Commons commission next week.
“The House of Commons has a long history of using sniffer dogs to detect explosives,” he said. “It may be that we now need to broaden the range of sniffer dogs . . . to include those which can detect drugs.”
Commons staffers were reportedly alerted last month to the smell of cannabis in the space between Portcullis House and 1 Parliament Street, after it emerged that two drug dealers were arrested – and 13 people detained for possession on the estate – in the space of a year.
The newspaper reports that casual cocaine use is common among a group of MPs. Detection wipes found evidence of the drug in 11 out of 12 locations tested in the building.
Cocaine was discovered in the toilets next to the private offices of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, as well as in an accessible lavatory next to the office of Nick Thomas-Symonds, the former shadow home secretary.
Hoyle said: “It’s not just drink we’ve got to catch out, there is a drug problem.”
One source told the Sunday Times: “I have seen an MP openly snorting cocaine at a party. There were journalists present and I warned them that what they were doing was extremely dangerous and they could be exposed but they seemed to get off on the power trip.”
Another source added: “MPs tend to be more careful than staff and will go back to their office to do it rather than doing it in any of the public spaces, but I have heard of one staffer who walked in on their MP doing a late-night line at their desk.”
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