I don't know which story broke first and the former may simply be an attempt to combat the latter, but they really do seem to be out of ideas if they're shouting about resurrecting the war on drugs.
It may also be an attempt to distract from the whole Christmas party thing, which a few notable journalists are also rumoured to have attended.
It's hard to know exactly what they think they're trying to do. There's not really a way to know most of the time unless you're actually one of the people involved in figuring out the political communications strategy of the government, I don't think any of those people are on dissensus, I mean I think they'd benefit from it but they're probably not.
So obviously I don't know exactly how they're doing it. And weirdly I've never seen a book or anything which describes what political parties do at this kind of tactical level. I would imagine though that at some level they do use social science stuff, by which I mean interviews and focus groups, and other kinds of research based on going to chat to people, to come up with the idea that they can achieve something by raising an issue like middle-class drug users.
At a guess with this one, they are either aware that it plays well with the small and elderly demographic that they are honing in on to hold onto their seats in the next election (which is information you can get by doing the aforementioned chatting), or they think that it will provoke a load of people and organizations to need to say in the media that they are actually in support of people taking drugs, in support of legalization, and so on. The idea being that it makes people that the conservatives want to vote for them notice that there is a big difference in opinion between themselves and these the people who support taking drugs etc.
this is a surprisingly long post for something that i don't give a shit about. but I am pretty interested in the general communications tactics, and also quite surprised that there isn't much public awareness of these tactics. there's not even much of a vocabulary among fancy people like us is there? 'dead cat'. that's the only one isn't it, and that's quite recent.