Don't know if the drugs war is being won or lost?

Neither does the government. So it has brought in David Pyle to assess the progress. He spoke to Karen Gold.

The government's war on drugs will soon enter its third year. Its main targets - a 25 per cent reduction in young people's access to and use of hard drugs; 25 per cent fewer offences by drug-using criminals; and 25 per cent more addicts in treatment - are to be met by 2005. But how much progress has the campaign made?

Despite a recent row over whether or not these goals are attainable, their true fragility has not been exposed.

The problem with the war is that it was declared before the generals - drugs tsar Keith Hellawell and home secretary Jack Straw - had any intelligence or communications with the front line. No one has any real idea how many people in England and Wales use drugs or how many users are in treatment. No one knows which treatment works best, or what kind of intervention in the drugs supply chain is most efficient or cost-effective.

The generals' targets have been set without any baselines - and that is why the Home Office has coaxed David Pyle, 53, out of the comfort of Leicester University's department of economics to lead its new drugs research unit.

Despite the unit's £5 million research budget, Pyle worries about what he can achieve. "One of the concerns I have is whether the capacity to do drugs research exists out there. There is a limited number of academics in drugs research, and we are a bit worried that as we expand we cannot find enough people. One of the things we want to do is encourage more people into the drugs research field."

For the Home Office, that field is largely but not wholly defined by the unit's main tasks: to establish baselines from which the progress of the drugs war can be measured, and then to evaluate that progress. Its portfolio of projects includes finding new ways to measure the number of people using drugs and gaining insights about the links between drugs and crime.

Before 1998, the entire Home Office drugs research effort comprised one person analysing local drugs markets, Pyle says. Now it has a staff of 15 and plans to expand. It runs more than 60 embryonic projects: 60 per cent is contracted out, and the remainder is run in-house. Its main success so far has been the New-Adam project, in which people under arrest volunteer for drugs tests and interviews. Since 1999, it has run in 16 pilot areas.

The first set of New-Adam findings give weight to a long-suspected but never-proven link between drugs and crime. In some areas, almost 70 per cent of arrestees tested positive for heroin or cocaine, or both. The unit now needs to explore the causality of that link, Pyle says. Do people commit crimes to fund drug habits or take up drugs because ill-gotten gains mean they can afford to?

New drugs-testing court orders contained in the Criminal Justice Bill expected to pass through Parliament in April will shed some light on that question and on the effectiveness of treatment in reducing addiction and drugs-related property crime. The orders will allow offenders and early-release prisoners to agree to regular drugs tests to avoid harsher punishment. The unit will monitor whether the orders keep people from taking drugs.

But the need for much more basic information remains. Questions about drugs in household surveys miss many in the groups most likely to be using drugs: the homeless, adolescents, people who do not respond to surveys. Only a fraction of 16 to 24-year-olds - about 3,400 - are included in the British Crime Survey, the other main source of information on drug use.

To get more reliable figures, the unit wants to conduct surveys among people who work with vulnerable groups and to increase the proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds in the British Crime Survey. Pyle also hopes to run small-scale longitudinal studies to find out whether soft drugs lead to hard drugs and whether addicts respond temporarily or permanently to treatment.

"Once we know how many people use drugs - and it will take several years - we can begin to measure how effectively or ineffectively we are fighting the drugs war," Pyle says. "At the moment, we have a 'balanced portfolio' of anti-trafficking measures." Pyle pauses and raises an eyebrow. He seems to be saying that we are haphazardly doing everything we can think of. It is hard to tell, given that a Home Office minder is present through the interview.

Despite having spent almost his entire working life at Leicester - first as lecturer, finally as dean of social science and professor of applied economics - Pyle has worked in the Home Office before. In 1975, as a young economist, Pyle was seconded for a year to work on urban renewal schemes. On his arrival, a project on resource allocation in criminal justice began, and he was asked to join it. It launched him on a career-long interest in economics and crime.

He wants to create a supply-and-demand model for drugs: what happens if the supply is interrupted by customs seizures or if the police arrest small dealers? Does the price rise and consumption fall? Do more people seek treatment? Does property crime increase? Research into chemical markers that will pinpoint the origin of a particular drugs haul will make it easier to identify intervention that works.

All this will take time. Because of incompatible health statistics, we will not know until 2002 how many drug users are in treatment. Meanwhile, the unit's research proposals snake through the bureaucracy: from an interdepartmental research and information group to a strategic planning board, a ministerial steering group and, finally, ministers.

Pyle seems untroubled by the potential awkwardness of running research projects in a building shared with people who need results urgently and have a vested interest in seeing their policies proved right. He admits that there is pressure to get results. "They want to know the answers now, and it is quite difficult to tell them they have to wait two years. But I am not aware of cutting corners."

Nor does he fear suppression of results. "If our review says part of the strategy does not work, we tell the drugs tsar and ministers and they decide what to do. If the research says something is not working, they need to know about it. My problem is to commission research and to see that the research is good."

Such detachment seems a long way not only from the dirty world of politics, but from the even dirtier world of syringes on the street. Does Pyle feel connected to that in the way that, say, Hellawell so obviously does? "I probably would not be much use on the street," he says. "But I have certain skills in terms of analysing markets and being able to do economic evaluations, which may help in setting strategies and overall policies. I do not suppose I have ever wanted to do the thing out on the street. I am probably not a people person in terms of that kind of thing."