My Lords, we are agreed on all sides of the House that, with new psychoactive substances, we are presented with a seriously dangerous situation. Noble Lords have mentioned the numbers of deaths that have been recorded; we have no statistics—we cannot obtain them—on the amount of long-term damage to mental health and on other health damages that may be caused by the use of those substances. Very frequently, we read stories in the media about tragic outcomes for young people who have taken a new psychoactive substance of one sort or another. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, spoke eloquently about the anxieties of parents and the responsibilities that government has to support parents and families, and he was quite right on that point.
It is a simple thing for a moderately competent organic chemist to tweak the molecular structure of an existing, controlled substance to create a new substance which, as the law stands, is uncontrolled. The development of the internet has transformed the marketing and distribution of drugs, so that we face this hideously dangerous combination of the facility with which new substances can be created, distributed and obtained.
The latest annual report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction talks in some detail about how web sales are developing. It is an unfortunate fact that Britons appear to be exceptionally reckless, prone to bingeing and poly-drug usage and relaxed about buying their drugs from sources about whom they know little or nothing. The new toxicology is terrifying. Mephedrone is effective at a 10th of the dose of ecstasy, and a gram of a new hallucinogen may contain enough to provide 5,000 doses. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, talked about the importance of dosage in this situation. People who consume new psychoactive substances are doing so on the basis of no information about the composition, safety or toxicity of the substances that they are ingesting. It can be only a question of time before a new psychoactive substance that has widely lethal consequences is launched on a market of ignorant and gullible consumers.
Clearly, action is necessary and the Government are right to seek to address this problem. However, there is no clear solution, as I think we all agree. What we certainly need is a rational discussion, and I am very pleased that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, chaired so ably by my noble friend Lady Meacher—I call her “my noble friend” because I regard her as a great friend—initiated this process. I add to the praise that has been given to Norman Baker for the work that he did as a Minister in the Home Office in the coalition Government, and for the establishment of the expert group, which indeed contains some very real experts—among them people who were witnesses to the all-party group’s inquiry. Similar processes have been undertaken in Scotland and Wales, leading to broadly similar conclusions.
However, I believe that the impulse to slap into manifestos a commitment to ban was all too typical of the way that politics works and that we would have done better to go more slowly. Is it really true that the Government omitted to consult the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs as they drafted this legislation—or at least not until the very last stage when the Bill was already written and just before it was tabled in Parliament? Did they ask the council for its advice on the relatively narrow, though very important, aspect of the legislation, which is how on earth people are to discover what is a psychoactive drug and what is not? As my noble friend Lord Patel noted, the ACMD has a statutory duty to act as the Government’s adviser in this field. I hope that if they failed to seek the ACMD’s advice earlier, it was not because Home Office Ministers have all too often not liked the advice that they have received from the ACMD, whether it is about the classification of cannabis or about khat, or indeed about how to deal with nitrous oxide, which it recommended should not be banned but will be caught by the Bill. The ACMD should not be sidelined.
Noble Lords will have seen a very powerful critique of the legislation from Transform and Release, which reached me only yesterday. If noble Lords on the Front Benches have not yet had an opportunity to study that critique, I hope that they will do so. The briefing from Transform and Release raises a whole number of questions about police powers, the legal and scientific complexities associated with the Government’s proposals, the impacts on research and the thinness of the impact assessment. All those matters we can examine more closely in Committee.
The problem that we have to deal with is not that people use psychoactive substances. They always have, whether for stimulus, for insight, for relaxation, for pleasure, for oblivion, for the thrill of risk or for the thrill of challenging authority. The question is not whether we should seek to ban all psychoactive substances; the Government are not proposing to do that. Who are we, as politicians, to tell people what psychoactive substances they may use or what their recreational practices should be? At least I am pleased that the Government have not sought to criminalise use. However, I fear that this decriminalisation is more apparent than real, because they will criminalise social use in the sense that a group of people might share a substance, and they will of course criminalise the importation of psychoactive substances. The problem that we need to
address is the risks and dangers that consumers are undergoing. We need to ask how we can protect them as well as we can from the dangers that many noble Lords have described. The object in drugs policy should be to minimise these dangers and the harms that drugs cause.
All the evidence we have about the history of prohibition, as my noble friend Lady Bakewell reminded us, shows not only that it does not work but that it is counterproductive. During our recent era of prohibitionist orthodoxy—since the 1960s with the UN conventions and the passage of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in this country—we have seen, generation by generation, an increase in drug usage. I understand that it is now the case that about one quarter of people in their 50s and 60s have used drugs, one third of those in their 40s have used drugs, and more than half of those in their 20s and 30s have used drugs. Even during the period of prohibition, there has been a cultural normalisation of drug usage. There have been many unfortunate consequences of this—among them, I contend, an alienation from politics. Such large numbers of people as regularly use recreational drugs, and, certainly in their own belief, come to no harm, consider that the politicians who seek to ban their pleasures are authoritarian, ignorant and irrelevant and do not understand them. This is one factor that has tended to undermine people’s respect for the political class.
As the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, reminded us, the costs are absolutely huge. The impact assessment is extraordinarily optimistic. It seems highly likely that one consequence of this legislation will be a misallocation of rapidly declining police resources that need to be harboured and used for top priorities in ways that will really be effective. Prohibition creates a free market in crime—it is a gift to international organised crime—and of course causes immense misery and human waste. I see no reason why this new extension of prohibition will not have the same effects.
The expert panel identified arguments on both sides. It identified merits in the course that the Government are pursuing, but it also identified a number of problems. Among the problems is the confusion that the legislation will cause. For example, there will be inconsistency between the regime created by the Misuse of Drugs Act and the regime created by this legislation. Why decriminalisation under one piece of legislation and for one range of drugs but not another?
Critics of the Bill will be tempted to accuse the Government of hypocrisy and irrationality when they look at Schedule 1, which exempts tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco is so lethal and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, reminded us, the number of deaths caused by alcohol is vastly greater than the number of deaths caused by controlled drugs. However, while the Government ban new psychoactive substances, they refuse to introduce minimum pricing for alcohol. What about sugar? I do not know whether sugar could be a psychoactive substance, but food is exempt and so presumably sugar is exempt. We have all heard of a sugar rush. Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, described the habitual use of such quantities of sugar in the national diet as a “slow burn of poison”, and yet I do not think that any action is being
taken on that. People will see the policy as arbitrary and see introducing a blanket ban as evidence that policymaking on the basis of evidence is being abandoned.
The Bill will be impractical. How on earth are people to know what a psychoactive substance is? The definition is very broad. In practice, we are going to be faced with the difficulty that very inadequate resources are available for forensic testing. The ACMD has belatedly been asked what its views are on this. There will be big costs to the criminal justice system as test cases are brought and the attempt is made to establish legally watertight definitions in this field.
Above all, though, the Bill will not work. Yes, head shops will be closed down and that will be pleasing to the Local Government Association—one understands its worries about anti-social behaviour on the part of some numbers of young people gathered round some head shops and the difficulties for overstretched trading standards officers. But the Government are missing the opportunity, if they would choose to take it, to mobilise head shop proprietors as useful advisers—people who might actually seek to help young people. That may seem an improbable notion to some noble Lords, but it would not have been beyond the bounds of possibility.
With the closing of head shops, we will no doubt see, as in Ireland, Poland and perhaps Romania, a temporary fall in the consumption of new psychoactive substances. But the experience, as noble Lords have said, of Ireland and Poland is certainly that subsequently, as consumers turn to online sources, consumption rose. My understanding is that young people in Ireland are now the heaviest consumers of new psychoactive substances in Europe. Those experiments that took place in Ireland and Poland were laboratory experiments from which the Government might have learnt. Evidently, they were an own goal, as my noble friend Lady Meacher told us the President of Poland admits. Instead of seeing that, the Government are copying that legislation.
The culture of this country has changed so far. I understand that it is now widespread in universities, particularly in academically elite universities, to use so-called smart drugs to improve people’s performance. In highly competitive situations such as in universities or the City, modafinil, Ritalin or varieties of amphetamines are routinely bought by significant numbers of people online. We may well see that chemical cognitive enhancement becomes almost as much a familiar practice as cosmetic surgery.
People will turn to buy their drugs online. They may go to China. Have the Government had discussions with the authorities in China about how they might seek to work with them to prevent our fears being realised? When mephedrone was banned, they had discussions with the authorities in China—production was immediately transferred to India, the quality deteriorated and consumption rose. Official corruption is widely pervasive in the countries from which these substances come. It will be impossible to inspect all the packages that come through, and I fear that we shall end up worse off than we have been.
I see that I have talked for too long, as I too often do. I will conclude by saying that I do not think that legislation in one country can work. There will be an
opportunity to develop international collaboration on a constructive basis. Next year, the United Nations General Assembly will hold a special session on drugs. There is a tide of change, as other noble Lords have noted, away from criminalisation and towards treating drug abuse as a health issue and social issue rather than a criminal issue. Yet between 2009 and 2013 in the United Kingdom, 60,000 young people aged 20 and under were criminalised for possession of drugs. At the same time, the Home Office’s international comparative study, on which I congratulate it, concluded in 2014:
“Looking across different countries, there is no apparent correlation between the ‘toughness’ of a country’s approach and the prevalence of adult drug use”.
The Home Office was tiptoeing towards decriminalisation but then, come an election, the default position was to resort to a ban.
All of us need to think hard about this. The Government need to think again and I hope that in Committee we can assist the Government to think again and find useful ways to advise the elected House by way of amendments to this legislation.
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