here - United Kingdom Parliament

273WH
Drugs
6 JUNE 2013
Drugs
274WH
positive things, and the full Government response was
rather more positive than the initial comment that came
out from the Home Office.
The Chair of our Committee described the Government
response as supporting about half of our recommendations.
In a number of cases, the suggestion from the Government
was that what we were recommending was already
being done. We could argue about the extent to which
that is true, but my summary is that the Government
response was largely saying no to most of our new
suggestions.
However, I strongly welcome two things in the
Government response to our report, because I think
that they will make the difference. Again, I strongly
commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for his
work to get them into the Government response. One of
them is set out at the top of page 15, where an interesting
sentence says:
“High quality drug treatment is the most effective way of
reducing drug misuse and reducing drug related mortality.”
I agree completely with that. To start off by putting
treatment as the principal aim rather than the criminal
justice focus is exactly what many of us have been
arguing for. We now need the Government to follow
through on their own statement that we need to focus
on the “high quality drug treatment” and not on the
policing or the criminal justice. That fits with our
recommendation that we need to get the Department of
Health far more involved.
With the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the
Drugs Minister, having a Drugs Minister based in the
Home Office means that the starting point will always
be the criminal justice-led approach. There is co-operation
and working with the Department of Health, but many
other countries have the lead for drugs policy based in
their departments of health—or their equivalent—because
the focus needs to be on treatment, as the Government
here have now accepted.
The other key thing that came out of the Government
response was the international comparators study. I was
very pleased to see that. During our evidence sessions, it
was clear that although there was a stated commitment,
in the words of the Drugs Strategy 2010,
“to review new evidence on what works in other countries and
what we can learn from it”,
that commitment was being honoured—certainly at
ministerial level—in a slightly more relaxed way than
perhaps some of us might have liked. It is absolutely
right that we should proactively look at other countries
to see what they achieve.
My hon. Friend the Minister has been to Portugal
already, and I am sure that he will talk a bit later about
what he saw there. When our Committee went to Portugal,
we saw a few things that were really striking. The
Portuguese model is often misdescribed. In Portugal, it
is still an offence to possess large amounts of any drug
and it is still a criminal offence to supply drugs. The key
difference is that possession of a relatively small amount
of any drug—up to 10 days’ personal supply, and there
are estimated figures for what that amount is—is treated
outside the criminal justice system. There are dissuasion
commissions that deal with those cases in a non-judicial
way; there is no criminal sanction and the focus is on
treatment. The aim is to have individualised care, to
make sure that people can get out of using drugs.
We were impressed by how fast people could be set up
with treatment in Portugal. There are often delays in the
UK in trying to find appropriate treatment facilities. In
Portugal, people said that it was very frustrating that
sometimes they would have to wait for two days, which
would be amazingly fast for many of the people in my
constituency who I have spoken to. So Portugal has this
process whereby people who are addicts are pushed
towards treatment. There are other ways that they can
be dealt with, but none of them involves dealing with
the criminal justice process and none of them affects
people’s ability to work, except in a very few special
circumstances.
The Portuguese approach was controversial when it
was established but it seems to have worked, and there
are a number of ways to look at it. According to the
official Portuguese figures, the number of long-term
addicts has declined from more than 100,000 people
before the new policy was enacted, which was about
10 years ago, to half that number today. The Portuguese
have also found less drug use in prison.
What was striking when we went to Portugal and
spoke to politicians from across the political range—from
the Christian democrats on the right to the communists
on the far left—was that none of them disagreed with
the policy. With the Christian democrats, we had an
interesting meeting with a very impressive woman from
the party who had opposed the policy when it was
introduced. The Christian democrats had made all sorts
of dire predictions about what would happen—the sort
of thing that we can read in The Daily Mail—but they
said, “We were wrong. We didn’t see increased drug use,
which we were concerned about; we didn’t see drug
tourism; we didn’t see any of the problems.”
The live debate in Portugal around drugs policy is
whether treatment should be funded on a national or
regional basis.
That was the debate across the political spectrum. Nobody
was questioning whether the decriminalisation of possession
of small amounts was the right thing or wrong thing to
do. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison),
who was leading us on that occasion, made a point of
asking everybody whether they agreed in principle with
the policy. Not a single person disagreed; we could not
find anybody who did so. We spoke to the police, who
had originally opposed it, and they said, “Actually, this
has been better for us for policing. We don’t have to
spend so much time on people who are addicts, who are
small users. Instead, they can help us to deal with the
people who are dealing, who are causing the higher-level
problems with gangs and organised crime.” Nobody
opposed the policy.
We met a gentleman who leads a non-governmental
organisation that is staunchly anti liberalising the drugs
policy—it was the closest we came to meeting somebody
who disagreed—and he said that 10 days’ supply was
too much and that it should be more like two or three
days’ supply. I explained that that would be seen as
phenomenally liberal in this country, and he was shocked.
They all agree that that is not the right way to go. I hope
the Minister found things much the same in Portugal—I
am sure he will speak for himself—and that there was a
strong sense that the policy worked well.
The principle of focusing on not criminalising people
in possession has already been accepted by the Government
in a different context: temporary class drug orders,