The overall objective of the new drug policy agenda is to develop and enhance the pathways between the criminal justice system and drug treatment services, so as to ensure that those who produce the bulk of drug-related harms are identified and placed in treatment, and thus reduce their drug-driven offending. The body of this paper is structured around a five-stage argument. First, it is suggested that the contemporary British drug situation is characterized by two new ‘social facts’: certain kinds of ‘recreational’ drug use have become significantly more widespread than was previously the case; and ‘problematic’ drug use has also grown and become enmeshed with localized concentration of multiple socioeconomic deprivation. A second stage of the argument is that these two new ‘social facts’ about drugs in Britain are due to and shaped by the wider structural and cultural changes of the last three decades. Third, it is argued that together this trend in drug experience has presented a new drug policy predicament. Fourth, it is suggested that the ‘criminalization’ of drug policy is partly an adaptation of response to this predicament. Fifth, it is argued that the form this adaptation has taken has, in turn, been shaped and structured by the shift in cultural drug patterns, leading to a framing of both problem and solution that share some of the distinctive features of contemporary modes of control, that is, criminal justice intervention for problematic, harmful drug use, leading to mandatory treatment intervention. 97 references