abstract: This article examines the consequences of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act of 2011, wherein police commissioners -responsible for the oversight of policing in police authorities across England and Wales - became subject to electoral accountability. We firstly establish that policing changes as a result of this institutional reform: drug-related arrests are found to significantly fall in more left-wing police authorities following this event. We then ask whether this in turn affects drug-use in the population. Using an instrumental variable approach softer policing is estimated to lead to small but significant increases in drug-related deaths. This finding appears to be robust to different definitions of political preferences, lag specifications, dependent and independent variables.