I had the distressing experience of hearing the evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, particularly that of the mother who founded the Angelus Foundation, and heard the terrible experience she had with a young, beautiful, ambitious, gifted daughter whose life was taken away from her by the use of a legal high. Quite rightly, we all empathise with that. We all want to stop that. We all want to reduce the harm caused by drugs, but we should stop falling into this lazy thinking that leads us to believe that a ban on drugs means a reduction in use and a reduction in harm.
We are sent here to legislate and the least we can do is to avoid doing harm. Drug legislation for the past 45 years in this country has done more harm than good. At the time of the 1971 Act there was hardly any cannabis use in Britain. There were 1,000 cocaine and heroin addicts. After 44 years of the strictest prohibition in Europe, there are now 320,000 addicts. Recently we banned mephedrone. Everyone agreed with that. Very few voices were raised in the House against the ban. The assumption, which was naive and evidence-free, was that if we banned mephedrone, harm would go down. It did not; it went from 16% use in the population to 42%. We know what happened in Ireland. Use and harm have increased, rather than being reduced.
It is a widely believed myth in this country that bans work. But prohibition does not work. Look at the prisons. In a recent parliamentary question I asked how many prisons in this country are drug-free. They have walls around them, they have guards, they have rules, they have searches, but how many are drug-free? The answer that I received was that 81 prisons were drug-free for a month last year. Next question: how many prisons were drug-free for a year? The answer that came back was that one prison had reported no drug use last year. How many prisoners were in that prison? The answer came back: none, because it was closed down. That is the defensive attitude of Government. They had solved the problem of drug use in prison not by taking the drugs out of the prison, but by taking the prisoners out of prison. It is the kind of self-deception that goes on in Governments of all parties.
I attended a debate here once when the Opposition spokesman and the Minister had to leave the Chamber during a three-hour debate because they needed a fix. They were both addicts to tobacco, and they could not see the contradiction between their own addition to a deadly killer drug and the way they were restricting the use of drugs by young people.
The Bill is impossible. There is no way of tackling the issue sensibly. There is an almost infinite number of combinations of chemicals in the drugs that are being produced. The chemistry is ferociously complicated. It can never be proved in vitro that a drug is psychoactive. The test tube shows no emotion. The drug can be tested only on human beings, which is impossible. The challenge throughout the world is one that cannot be solved sensibly and legally by testing for the drug and proving that it is psychoactive.
So what do we do? Well, we are politicians. Dogs bark, babies cry, and politicians legislate. When we cannot think of anything sensible or intelligent to do, we pass a Bill. People will feel good as they think, “We did something about that. We passed a Bill.” This Bill, like most of the other Bills that have gone through this place introducing bans, will probably do more harm than good. There will be more tragedies as a result of this, not fewer. Khat was banned. The idea was that the authorities were going to get rid of khat, but of course they have not got rid of it. Instead, they have pushed a wedge between the Somali and Yemeni communities and the police. They have driven a legal market into being an illegal market. The price has gone up sky high, and the criminals who are now running it are making bigger profits. That has been the story throughout the world.
I ask Members to consider the possibility that they are wrong, and that all parties have been wrong on our drug laws for 45 years. The best thing we can do is to throw out this piece of legislative garbage that disgraces the House and will be treated with derision by future generations.
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