The Labour Party’s approach to drug policy has long been a source of disappointment and despair for anti-prohibition activists. It has a dismal record that spans successive leaders; from drug testing in schools and abstinence orders during the Blair years to calls to outlaw nitrous oxide canisters in recent months. It has hardly stood on the side of fairness or reason, submitting instead to law, order and ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric.

Fortunately, the party may finally be turning its back on the approach responsible for so much harm. On Wednesday, the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform (LCDPR) published a report in a bid to drag it away from the moral panic-indued position. The report, which was the culmination of an eighteen-month long grassroots campaign rooted in public participation and open discussion, outlines recommendations to transform the party’s less than progressive approach into one that is fairer, more equal and more compassionate.

From Gorseinon to Grimsby, Liverpool to Portsmouth, the recommendations speak to the experiences of over 700 attendees from 12 regions across the UK. With the aim to be representative in both geographical scope and focus, they are exclusive to neither the concerns of the ‘metropolitan elite’ nor inhabitants of the ‘Red Wall.’ As an ambassador for the LCDPR, I want to explain what those recommendations are and why they are so important.

Let me start with the headline: “We have to accept to that we can no longer treat the millions of UK citizens who use drugs as criminals.” Though sections of Westminster remain somewhat engulfed by the false assumption that tough drug talk sells, a punishment-based approach has few beneficiaries. A case study in the report speaks to this reality far better than I ever could:

My son would be alive if he had not been criminalised so readily as a young adult if there has been a safe space for him to go to inject and if the stigma of illegality had not forced him to hide his growing problem over many years. Kevin was intelligent, funny, held down a skilled job and had a lot to offer to society. But one day he hid himself in a locked toilet to inject and his life gradually ebbed away when it could so easily have been saved.

Believe it or not, the UK was once a “world leader in harm reduction strategies.” That broke down in the Blair years, giving way to the ludicrous quest for a “drug-free society” and, as Lord Falconer admits in a self-reproaching article, the institutionalisation of prohibition. The report sets out ways to repair the damage.

Responding to soaring drug-induced mortality rates (a total of 5,546 people died in 2018, and that’s only those on record) and the concurrent decay of and disinvestment in life-saving services, it calls upon the party to expand harm reduction measures that reduce the risk of overdose and infection. It recommends tried and tested methods including heroin-assisted therapy, drug consumption rooms and the expansion of the availability of wonder drug, naloxone.

The report also outlines the need for investment in treatment services. To be frank harm reduction can save lives, but alone, they will do little to change them. With the crisis as bad as it is, a holistic approach is critical. The report calls upon the party to stimulate peer-led recovery networks and develop both accommodation support schemes and training schemes for those with a history of problematic drug use.

Public health is not the only focus: it cannot be emphasised enough that the drug issue is also a class and race issue. Attempts to drag drug policy into the ever-erupting culture wars cannot obscure the fact that the most marginalised communities have suffered the most from prohibition.

The Tories’ London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey might want to shift the focus to middle-class coke habits, but it is no coincidence that the North East – the most deprived region of England – is also that which registers the highest number of drug-related deaths. As Lord Falconer admits, the drug war is “in effect, an attack on the working class.”

To anybody familiar with the US-inspired drug war, it is also an attack on black and minority ethnic communities who suffer disproportionately at the hands of the not-so-effective and oh-so-discriminative use of stop and search. As the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy tells Tribune, “the burden of criminalisation and harassment falls heaviest on low-income and BAME communities,” who are “the disproportionate victims of drug-related crime, death and addiction.”

And racial discrimination also transposes into courts, whereby black and ethnic minority offenders are 1.5 times more likely to go to prison for drug offences than their counterparts. The report keenly acknowledges the prejudice and discrimination inherent in our criminal justice system; it’s clear that there is “one rule for the powerful and another for the rest” and Labour must end the criminalisation of people who use drugs. Decriminalisation is not the catch-all answer to racial injustice or class-based inequalities, but it’s a start.

The first port of call though is diversion schemes. Some have queried this decision, but in the current context – with a 2024 general election a long way off – the schemes effectively offer a way to push through decriminalisation now, giving Labour mayors, as well as police and crime commissioners, the power to divert people from the criminal justice system and out of a criminal record. Possession shouldn’t be a mark on a person’s life, and this achievable policy will make sure it isn’t.

Crime does briefly feature, but the take-home message is simple: society is sick and, it shows. The illegal drug market thrives on social dislocation and deprivation. Its allure is often rooted in a lack of stability and opportunity. To tackle the crisis, we need to address the structural causes that are manifest across the UK. The report doesn’t hold the key to that, but it’s an important point that requires this acknowledgement.

Like many other issues that existed in the pre-pandemic world, the ensuing Covid crisis will only make things worse. With youth unemployment bubbling up to one million, the increased use of stop and search occasioned by the strengthening of police powers and national mental health on downwards slope, the conditions for drug use, abuse and enterprise have never been better.

It figures that this has to be a turning point for Labour. The party has a responsibility to acknowledge its role in the consolidation of the drug war and stand for something better. It has to push against the climate of prohibition-supporting opinion that it helped to create and stand with those set to suffer under Conservative inertia.

If taken onboard, these recommendations will push party policy much further than Corbyn’s Labour would go, but they are neither particularly radical nor controversial. Supported by a coalition of MPs from Ribeiro-Addy to Alex Sobel, they are a pre-packaged leap in the right direction that Keir Starmer would do well to take. A failure to do so – to borrow his term – would be nothing short of gross incompetence.