BRIGHTON AND HOVE markets itself as a tolerant and diverse city – artistic and open-minded.

It’s a partial, highly-sanitised view of the city, promoted for decades by city leaders.

Together (with a few honourable exceptions) most have conspired to ignore the ugly reality that the city’s glamorous “louche” reputation depends, to a great extent, on easy access to and excessive use of alcohol and other legal and illegal drugs.

Leaders refuse to consider the possibility that – coupled with disastrous Government decisions to de-regulate alcohol supply – it is their planning, licensing, education, housing and community safety decisions that have helped flood the city with alcohol and other drugs.

This has subsequently led to an increase in drug deaths and alcohol and drug-fuelled rape and violence.

In this city, simple possession has been de facto decriminalised for years, so it’s nonsense to suggest that formal decriminalisation will improve matters or that dealers will “still” be prosecuted.

Low-level street dealing is carried out openly without attracting police action. Inaction is part of the problem.

The “harm minimisation” strategy of providing medication to addicts is not a new and radical idea. This discredited policy has reduced the number of burglaries, but has flooded the market with methadone and other prescribed drugs and left many addicts who wish to be abstinent with nowhere to go to achieve this.

The NHS cannot afford to supply everyone so poor addicts will continue to commit crime.

Formal decriminalisation and legal heroin prescription will simply increase the supply of prescribed medication on to the illegal market and therefore the number of addicts, while securing profits for drug companies and the comfort of anxiety-free recreational drug use for the affluent.

Our leaders must reduce and regulate the city’s supply of alcohol and drugs, seeking Government support, and increase the availability of detoxification and longer term abstinence-based treatment.

They must stop promoting the city as a place where “anything goes”, and instead place the safety and wellbeing of its people above profit and fashion.

Jean Calder, address supplied

MARTIN BARNES from DrugScope and Roger Howard of the UK Drug Policy Commission inadvertently make my point regarding the need for far greater ambition regarding drug treatment (Letters, July 8).

They say methadone prescribing has been shown to reduce reliance on street drugs and lower offending rates while people are trying to overcome drug dependency. But, equally, Martin and Roger will know that those on maintenance remain in active addiction, usually “topping up” with street drugs and still offending.

The “choice” approach is one that keeps too many people dependant for too long.

As one client, now happily abstinent, said to me: “It doesn’t take a genius to see that, when offered the choice between abstinence and the supply of free drugs, most addicts choose to be given free drugs.”

Maintenance prescribing should be seen as a means to an end, not a lifestyle choice.

Martin and Roger’s letter lacks ambition. I would hope they could say, without qualification, that the desired outcome of interventions is abstinence and that we should be actively promoting it at every opportunity.

Recovery from addiction is possible for every addict.

Andy Winter, chief executive, Brighton Housing Trust