By Stuart Lister, Emma Wincup, Toby Seddon, Sam Barrett and Peter Traynor
Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain, a ten-year strategy published in 1998, focused strongly on tackling drug-related crime. The police play important role in combining the curbing of drugs supply with the potentially contradictory role of channeling drug-using offenders into treatment. The authors describe how street policing involves policing personnel having frequent contact with problem drug users for a variety of reasons. They outline ways in which problem drug users could be better managed, including improving relationships between policing agencies and treatment agencies.