Prime Minister Boris Johnson was out with cops in Liverpool for an early morning drugs bust - as he vowed to smash thousands of gangs operating across the country.
It comes as the government prepares to set out its 10-year drugs strategy for England and Wales, with a police crackdown to cut off the supply of class A drugs by city-based crime rings to the surrounding county areas.
It will include what ministers say will be the biggest increase in investment and recovery in an attempt to end the cycle of addiction and repeat offending.
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The Home Office said there are 300,000 heroin and crack addicts in England who are responsible for nearly half of acquisitive crime, including burglary and robbery, while drugs drive nearly half of all homicides.
The total cost to society is put at nearly £20bn a year.
Mr Johnson told TV broadcasters: "We’re not going to sit idly by when you have lifestyle users also using Class A drugs, and we’re going to be coming down tougher on them.
"But this is about being very, very tough on county lines gangs, ramping that up – we’ve already rolled up about 1,500 county lines gangs, we want to do 2,000 more."
Pressed on Labour saying there has been £100 million-worth of cuts to drug treatment, along with cuts to police budgets, Boris Johnson replied: "No, we’re putting… since this government came in, we’ve not only put 11,000 more police on the streets as part of our commitment to put another 20,000 more, but we’re also announcing another £300m to tackle county lines gangs.
"Don’t forget that, so far, in just the past couple of years, under Project Adder, all the other county lines projects that we’ve got and operations, we’ve rolled up, wrapped up about 1,500 networks of 5,000 or so, we’re going to do another 2,000, and what we’re doing is taking the kids who were vulnerable, whose lives are being lost on the streets of this country because of the county lines gangs, putting them into care.
"So what this government is saying is, we understand that the drugs gangs are doing major damage to life chances of kids growing up in this country – I think it is a disgusting trade and we need to fight it."
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said a new drug strategy was 'long overdue because we have gone badly backwards'.
She said a combination of a public health response and criminal justice response is necessary.
She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: "What we’ve had over the last 10 years is we’ve had the public health response badly cut. We’ve also had the criminal justice system badly cut – because you’ve had the reduction in policing, the reduction in prosecutions, the reduction in action through the courts and so on.
"So it is possible to combine these two things together. We did have, if you go back 10 years or so, we had much more co-ordination through the courts with drug rehabilitation orders, all of that kind of thing. That’s what we have to be looking for today.
"But they’ve also got to be able to deliver it in practice, because too often you get the headlines, but you don’t actually get the action in practice."
