here - United Kingdom Parliament

271WH
Drugs
6 JUNE 2013
Drugs
272WH
[Dr Julian Huppert]
huge amount of concern in some parts of the press. I
also congratulate him on his leadership and on his
speech, which took much of the content out of what I
was planning to say, so I will only focus on a few key
issues. There is a huge amount in this very thick and
detailed report, and I support it completely.
I want to begin with the basic principles of how we
start to work. First and fairly obviously, drugs are
harmful. They are harmful whether they are legal or
illegal; whether they are cocaine, marijuana, paracetamol
or one of the new legal highs. They all have harms, and
many of them also have benefits. As we say in one of the
key parts of the report, the question is how we deal with
those harms. Paragraph 14 of the report states:
“Drug use can lead to harm in a variety of ways: to the
individual who is consuming the drug; to other people who are
close to the user; through acquisitive and organised crime, and
wider harm to society at large. The drugs trade is the most
lucrative form of crime, affecting most countries, if not every
country in the world.”
The principal aim of the Government drugs policy
should be first and foremost to minimise those harms,
but how do we go about doing that? How do we reduce
the harms from alcohol and heroin and the harms from
prescription drugs, which can be abused? For more than
40 years now, the answer has principally been to separate
drugs into a category of legal or illegal—I use the term
loosely of course because the drug itself cannot be legal
or illegal, but possession can be. For the illegal ones, we
have focused principally on the criminal justice approach—
policing, courts, prisons and all the sanctions of the
Home Office.
When the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was passed—
interestingly, it has never been reviewed since 1971—the
debate was all about how it would lead to the end of the
use of illegal drugs. That was the Act’s aim. It certainly
has not worked in that respect. If we were in a world
now where no one had any of the drugs for which
possession was illegal, we would be having a very different
debate.
The Act simply has not worked, and that has been
very expensive. The European Monitoring Centre for
Drugs and Drug Addiction has estimated that 0.48% of
the UK’s GDP is spent on our overall drugs strategy. I
think that that is the highest rate of expenditure in
Europe, and yet for many drugs, we have among the
highest rates of use in Europe. We are spending lots of
money, but there is lots of drug use—the Act is just not
working.
In the process, we have hit many people’s lives. We
have left people to languish in jail for a long time. Also,
we have made people who possess small amounts of
drugs go to jail, and many of them suffer problems
trying to live and work afterwards. Even a caution for
the most minor offences can still affect people’s ability
to live and work. So we need to change things.
I have heard it said—there is some basis for saying
it—that drug use is currently down. However, that is
only true when looking at the drugs that we have made
illegal. What we know—as the Chair of the Select
Committee highlighted—is that there are now many
other new psychoactive substances that people are moving
to because of the pressure that we are putting on for
legal reasons. We have no idea whether encouraging
people to stop taking marijuana and to start taking one
of the new things that they can find legally online
somewhere is better or worse for them. We have no idea
whether the harms caused by the other drugs will be
better or worse. So we may well be pushing people to
things that are far worse than the things that we are
trying to clamp down on.
We also have to look at this issue in the round. We
have to look at the pressures of alcohol. I asked one of
the police officers who gave evidence if his officers
would rather face, at the end of an evening, a group of
four men who were drunk or a group of four men who
were stoned. Most police officers would far rather deal
with the people who had used marijuana. We have to
look at the impacts of some of these other issues.
As the Chairman of the Select Committee quite
rightly said, one of the key things that we say is that we
need to look again at this issue. These days, we do not
allow legislation to sit by for 40 years without looking
at it; we try to have post-legislative scrutiny to see
whether a law is working and doing what it is supposed
to do. That is why the Select Committee has called for a
royal commission to look at the Misuse of Drugs Act
1971. That is what our report says, and we are not the
only people saying it by any stretch of the imagination.
The UK Drug Policy Consortium has done six years
of work on the issue and it has called for many of the
same things that we have called for; I commend all its
detailed publications. Huge numbers of organisations
say what our report says; I could mention many of
them, such as Transform and Release. Also, we are
increasingly getting senior people who have had experience
of this fight, including senior people from MI5, MI6
and the police, who say, “No. We’re not doing it the
right way. We have to change.” In Cambridgeshire, Tom
Lloyd, the former chief constable, who has huge experience
of dealing with the criminal justice approach to drugs,
is very clear—indeed, categorical—that we need to change.
Our Committee has not gone as far as some suggest.
The Chair of our Committee referred to the article in
The Mail on Sunday, which suggested that we support
full legalisation, but that is not what we recommended.
However, we supported a proposal that was made more
than 10 years ago by the Home Affairs Committee and
supported by the Prime Minister, as he is now. That
proposal was very clear, and the Prime Minister voted
in favour of a proposal that we also endorse. It is that
“we recommend that the Government initiate a discussion within
the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including
the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global
drugs dilemma.”
That is what the Prime Minister said 10 years ago. The
key thing in that recommendation is that not only
legalisation should at least be considered; we also have
to regulate. That may or may not be the right answer,
which is why we need a royal commission.
Our Committee called for a royal commission and we
published this detailed, thick report. I was impressed
that, within only an hour or so of its being published,
the Home Secretary was able to say no, nothing in the
report was new and that people did not need to learn
from it. That was an impressively fast response. I commend
my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for the work that he
has been doing on this issue. There have been some