The devastating consequences of Greater Manchester's ever-growing illegal drug-trade has become difficult to ignore.

Drug taking across the region is rife - whether it be the horrific effect of spice on the booming homeless community or long-standing addicts failing to access the help they require.

The North-west is now ranked the second worst region in the country for drug-related deaths, with 470 overdose deaths in the last year.

The War on Drugs has been a focal point of government legislation for many years, but now a group of MP's believe it is time to re-think Britain's notoriously rigid stance on Britain's drug trade.

Jeff Smith is the Labour MP for Manchester Withington and Chair of the All-party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform - a cross party group of MP's and Peers campaigning for evidence-based drug policy.

He believed that drug misuse, should be seen as a public health issue and that legalising and regulating some drugs, such as cannabis, could reduce the harm to users and wider society, save taxpayers' money, and cut drug related crime in Greater Manchester and across the country.

Below, Jeff Smith talks about his hand-experience of the devastating consequences of illegal drugs and offers a solution he and other MP's are fighting to see through parliament.

(Image: © Joel Goodman)

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In December 2017, just after his 32nd birthday, Pat’s son Kevin was found dead behind a locked toilet door in Marks & Spencer.

He had overdosed on heroin, suffered a cardiac arrest and medics did not get to him before he suffered fatal brain damage.

Pat doesn’t blame Kevin’s friends, or even the drug dealers for his death - she believes that Kevin died because the drugs he took were illegal.

As a consequence, he was forced into the hands of an unscrupulous black market.

Kevin’s death was one of 3,756 drug-related deaths last year in England and Wales, the highest number since records began.

The North-West was ranked the second worst region in the country, with 470 overdose deaths.

In other circumstances, this number of preventable deaths would be a national scandal.

We know these deaths are entirely preventable because it wasn’t always like this – the UK was once the world leader in pioneering methods to protect drug users, such as needle exchanges and heroin prescription services.

But in 1971, the Government passed the Misuse of Drugs Act and, overnight, users were pushed into prisons rather than clinics, and international criminal cartels gained exclusive control of a lucrative market.

For the next forty years drug use - and drug deaths - skyrocketed, while criminal gangs become more and more violent in their control of the drug supply.

The majority of drug use is recreational - by people who cause no harm to themselves or wider society.

Criminalising these people is a waste of police time and resources, and damages many young people’s futures.

Around 10% of all users in the UK are ‘problematic’, defined as those who require health, social or criminal justice interventions.

These people need help and support, not a criminal record.

Anyone who has walked through Piccadilly Gardens or under the bridges in Castlefield will know that stigma or prosecution isn't going to help problematic users get back on their feet.

There are better ways of dealing with problematic drug use, and we can learn from more progressive approaches that are succeeding abroad.

In the early 2000s, Portugal had the worst heroin problem in Europe, with the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates on the continent.

Instead of criminalising users, the Government stopped prosecuting people for personal use of drugs.

Those caught with small amounts of illegal drugs are kept out of the criminal justice system and sent to appear in front of a ‘dissuasion commission’ made up of doctors, social workers and mental health professionals.

They have seen HIV infection rates fall from over 100 cases per million in 2000, to just 4 in 2015.

Seventy-eight Drug Consumption Rooms, in which addicts can safely inject heroin and other drugs, are now in operation in Denmark, Norway, Germany and four other European countries.

(Image: PA)

There hasn’t been a single overdose death in any of these facilities since they opened, and the evidence says they reduce drug-related crime in the area and save the taxpayer money.

This year, Canada became the first G7 country to legalise and regulate cannabis, with the explicit aims of preventing children from buying it and of destroying the black market.

Ten US states and Uruguay have done the same. People can buy cannabis in the same way as they buy alchol; from licensed premises which sell regulated, safer products.

In 2016, the United Nations make a landmark call for change - for a public-health centred approach to drug policy, reversing the prohibitionist mantra of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs which banned the production, sale and use of all drugs outside of medical and scientific research.

Here in the UK, the debate is shifting too. The British Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, the Royal Society of Public Health and the Royal College of Physicians have all made the public health case for reform of our drug laws.

The Police and Crime Commissioner for Durham, Ron Hogg, has implemented a diversion system pushing low-level offenders away from prosecution towards voluntary work, restorative justice and interventions from support services.

His work has been backed up by the Police Federation, representing 120,000 officers, who have declared current drug policy a failure.

We will never be able to stop people taking drugs, so we should look at ways to make drug use safer.

The Government should back drug consumption rooms and drug safety testing to prevent accidental overdoses and give users access to as much information as possible on the risks.

A legal, regulated cannabis market would protect us from harm in the same way as alcohol licensing prevents us from purchasing 80% proof moonshine or toxic tobacco.

(Image: PA)

Last year 2.1 million people used cannabis, bought from dealers with little regard for the safety of their product.

Regulation could prevent particularly harmful forms of cannabis, such as the high-strength skunk proliferating in the black market, from reaching our streets and bring in an estimated £1bn per year in tax revenue.

That money could be spent on healthcare or policing, instead of going into the pockets of criminal gangs.

Fundamentally, problematic drug use should be seen as a health problem, not a criminal justice issue.

While the Government pursues a fantasy of a drug-free world, people like Kevin are dying every day.

Pat’s painful personal experience led her to speak out against the war on drugs, and for a more sensible approach that would stop other mothers having to go through what she suffered.

It’s time the Government listened to her and we, as a society, we were brave enough to look at a new approach.