The reason why there's no grown up drugs debate

The Wedinos scheme - backed by more than £100,000 in Welsh Government
funding - has prompted criticism from the Welsh Conservatives.
They're probably wrong.
(Pic : BBC)

As you probably know, there's a problem spreading across Europe of so-called "legal highs" – chemicals that produce drug-like effects but aren't legally banned or categorised as such because they're so new.

Last week, it was revealed the Welsh Government had signed off £102,000 towards a joint project with Public Health Wales where people can anonymously send in suspected legal highs, and other drugs, for laboratory analysis. Here's more from BBC Newsbeat.

Called Wedinos (English : "After Dark"), the initiative aims to log and track emerging legal highs and act as an "early warning/intelligence system", so authorities can identify trends and help clampdown on them (where applicable).

It's said to be aimed at health workers and the police, but members of the public can use it as well. All the results appear on the website, displaying the packaging, listed effects and active ingredients.

If someone was given a drug laced with, for argument's sake, rat poison, it would show up in the test and if acted upon quickly could be life-saving.

It's an absolutely brilliant idea, and for £102,000 per year is a snip. The Welsh Government have come under deserved criticism for their management of the health service, but today I tip my hat. Brownie points the Health Minister, Mark Drakeford (Lab, Cardiff West). This is the sort of evidence-based policy I like to see.

Then the Welsh Conservatives barge into view. Andrew Davies might well be "19 stones of pure Welsh beef", but here's 19 tonnes of bovine faeces.

I'm sure the Welsh Conservatives think the The Western Mail are doing them a favour by releasing any and all thoughts, getting everyone hot under the collar and demanding "something be done" as they grumble about profligate Carwyn and chums.

What The Western Mail and Daily Di have done, however, is display to readers some the shaky logic the Welsh Conservatives use sometimes. Hopefully the party can learn something from it and become a truly effective opposition – something they've rarely threatened to do in the Fourth Assembly - but I won't hold my breath. I don't know what's got into them over the last few weeks.

The key claims the Shadow Health Minister, Darren Millar (Con, Clwyd West), made were that :

• Drug dealers are being given access to a "free analytical service to test the quality of their substances".
• The service is diverting cash away from other NHS services, with the obligatory references to cancer patients being denied life-saving drugs.
• By funding the service, the Welsh Government are "confusing the message that drugs are harmful and potentially promoting their use".

Let's deal with the first once. I'm sure most drug dealers don't give a toss about the quality of the stuff they peddle, as shown on this DrugScope page - just as long as someone buys it. Checking for purity implies they're trying to comply with some sort of trading standards for the black market. I realise Conservatives are supposed to support the corner-cutting entrepreneur, but this is taking it to new levels.

Next, the issue of cash diversion. £102,000 is ~0.0017% of the Welsh health and social services budget, just to point that out. There's debate over how much the Welsh Government and LHBs actually spend on, for argument's sake, cancer patients. In 2012, the Conservatives quoted the Rare Cancer Foundation, which said a cancer drug fund – similar to the one that operates in England – could be set up for £3.3million.

Whether Wales needs a drugs fund for rare and costly medicines is open to debate, but putting the £102,000 into that would be just over 3% of the way there. I'm also sure plenty of terminal cancer patients are charged for extra bedrooms so their grandchildren can visit in their final days too, or even evicted.

Last, it's the issue of "promoting drug use", which I just find bizarre.

Wedinos doesn't condone the use of drugs, just tests them and helps identify them. Far from giving up "the fight against drugs", it's a pretty powerful tool in keeping them off the streets, especially if police and other authorities can spot the harmful drugs more easily. Many legal highs look like super sour sweets.

On the one hand, the Welsh Government and Public Health Wales are treating drugs as much as a health issue as one of criminal justice. It's their job to reduce harm and exposure, and a project like Wedinos might do it.

On the other hand, the Welsh Conservatives are out of touch moralists with Ronald Reagan still ringing in their ears, who don't seem to grasp that a scheme like this can aid the fight against drugs on the street and, you know, prevent people becoming seriously ill or dying. That's something the National Health Service is supposed to do, isn't it? Preserve health?

Would they really be happy for children (won't someone think of them!?) to come into contact with unidentified substances just to prove some point about moral decline and make people think the Welsh Government are "soft on drugs"?

The Welsh Government are many things, but their policy on substance misuse could be considered one of their few successes down the years.

I consider this sort of knee-jerk stuff incredibly depressing and think less of AMs and their parties whenever they engage in it.

I am working on a – you guessed it – six-parter on drugs policy where I'll explore things related to this in a bit more detail. I'm about a third of the way through it and hope to finish it for March. I'm considering binning it because if some of our betters aren't mature enough to have these sorts of discussions, the rest of us probably aren't either.