Britain is on the brink of an opioid crisis. Punishing addicts won’t work | Martha Gill

'You only need two sentences to understand British politics," Lord Maurice Saatchi told a recent News Agents podcast . "Conservatives are efficient but cruel. Labour is caring but incompetent." Now, though, as the election approaches: "You have the Conservatives as inefficient but cruel, and that's going to be a complete disaster."

Lots of analysis echoes Saatchi's observation – that these surprising bedfellows, cruelty and inefficiency, have come together only lately, in the dying days of the Conservative party, explaining the magnitude of its coming fall. The Rwanda policy is often cited here. Or the idea of forcing young people to spend weekends doing community service, at great public expense.

But beneath these comments is, I think, an unexamined premise: that the combination is unusual – that ordinarily policies may be harsh, or inept, but are rarely both at once. This assumption is baked into common phrases in our politics – "tough measures", "crackdowns", "harsh truths" – suggesting a natural rule: you take the ruthless course because it is the most expedient.

But the premise isn't right. Cruelty and competence do not, in fact, tend always to go together. Instead, the rule seems to run the other way. The Rwanda policy is just one example among many. The more brutal the policy, the less effective it often seems to be.

Examples are scattered across society. Cutting benefits to the bone does not motivate people into work, but tends to block them out of it , as barriers such as childcare and debt become too large to surmount. Harsher sentencing can lead to more crime, not less : reoffending rates go up when people are sent to prison rather than punished in the community. Stinginess with healthcare leads to an unhealthy population that cannot work at its potential. Fail to deal with homelessness, and you'll have to keep people in expensive emergency housing.

The truth that has not yet been grasped: if you break people beyond a certain point, you'll probably end up having to support them. Past a threshold level of deprivation – if you are ill, grindingly poor, in a loop that shuffles you in and out of prison – you do not respond to carrots and sticks like the rest of us. Threats don't work. You can't just snap out of it. When it comes to policy, real cruelty is – perhaps we could say in essence – inefficient.

If there's a particular parable for this, it is in a coming disaster that few have yet started to grapple with, or even acknowledge. Britain is on the brink of a drugs crisis for which decades of punitive policies have left it singularly unprepared. When it really takes hold, our approach will be exactly the wrong way round. Drug addicts cannot be chivvied into sobriety with threats and penalties – addiction doesn't work like that. But, trapped by social stigma, that is what we will try to do. We will be cruel and inefficient.

Why is this happening now? A boom in synthetic opioids, which are cheap to make and get round pesky things such as crop failure. They may be 50 times stronger than heroin, but are often taken inadvertently when they are used to pack out more expensive stuff. They show up in everything from off-brand painkiller pills to cannabis products to heroin itself. The rate of drug deaths in England and Wales rose 82% between 2012 and 2022, the most recent year for which the Office for National Statistics has data. And things are about to get worse. In 2021, the Taliban announced a ban on opium poppy cultivation, producing a large gap in the market. Synthetic drugs will fill it.

But as this disaster approaches, the UK's severe, moralistic approach to drugs – once declared as a war – is blocking all the escape routes. It is one of the few places in Europe, for example, without overdose prevention centres , in which people can take their own drugs in the presence of healthcare workers and treatments. Drug users in the UK are 13 times more likely to die than their European counterparts. These rooms are cheap to run, and points at which addicts can be directed into treatment. But they are resisted – although one is due in Scotland. Rishi Sunak has said they " condone use of drugs ".

Drug-checking services are crucial, too. The UK's first, the Loop in Bristol , was licensed only this year. Such a service might have prevented the death of 16-year-old David Celino , who died after taking ecstasy in 2022. But the Loop had been fighting government reluctance for years. There should be many more like it.

Then there is safe supply, for example through doctors. This tends to be rejected on principle: why should the public pay for a junkie's free heroin? But it's cheaper by far than the alternative. With safe supply, crime drops, overdoses fall and people get their lives back together and enter treatment. Keeping addicts in prison, on benefits, in and out of emergency rooms or shuffling through the courts is far costlier in the end. Those who inject drugs are vulnerable to long-term illnesses such as hepatitis C. That, too, is expensive to treat.

But the UK has a sort of mental block when it comes to drugs, and what actually works to solve the problem. Harsh policies are inefficient, but that is something we don't want to hear. Instead, this March, we greeted signs of trouble with stern rhetoric and revival of "tough on drugs" policies – making 15 synthetic drugs class A, possession of which can get you seven years in prison.

It's a mental block we need to get over. The urge to punish drug addicts doesn't make them go away. It just entrenches them in their misery, dependent on state provision, unable even to begin to help themselves. Might a new government take a more caring approach? It is the most efficient way.