My Lords, I support this amendment because of the enormity of the importance of the UNGASS to global drug policy. I will take less than two minutes of the House’s time but I plead with your Lordships to bear with me.
The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform has provided a document which we hope will be of interest to the Government. We worked for about 18 months on the document, called Guidance on Interpreting the UN Drug Conventions. We have worked closely with senior Mexican officials and experts from around the world on the document and we have had discussions with I cannot even say how many country representatives. I spoke at the Vienna CND on it.
As we speak, the President of a very significant Latin American country has his office and Ministers discussing the proposal that he would like to adopt to present the essentials from this guidance document to the UNGASS next year. This week a Latin American ambassador said he very much hoped that the UK Government would support the President’s initiative. The former president of the Organization of American States supports our work. The European Commission wants to work with us on an EU document to go to UNGASS because it is so impressed with our document.
Very briefly, the guidance urges UN member states across the globe to begin a process to develop evidence-based policy. The UN conventions upon which we all base our policies were not developed on the basis of evidence of which policies would achieve the overarching objective of the UN conventions to advance,
“the health and welfare of mankind”.
Rather, global drug policy has been based upon a wrong-headed psychological theory of motivation. Punish everyone involved with drugs and we will achieve a
drug-free world: so said President Nixon all those years ago in 1971. The opposite has of course occurred in the last 50 years.
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We argue that the aim of the UNGASS must be to open up the possibility of trying new drug policies and evaluating them to develop an evidence base about those policies which can and will effectively achieve the objective of the conventions. The amendment suggests that the Bill should be held on ice, awaiting the outcome of the UNGASS and an opportunity for both Houses to debate it. That would of course be a highly rational approach for the Government to take but we are realists. We have never had rational drug policy in this country and we do not expect it today. This is not a party-political point at all. In some sense, I understand why senior politicians do not have rational policy. However, I would be grateful to have an opportunity for the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and I—and maybe one or two others—to meet the Minister, and perhaps other Ministers too, before or possibly after Report, specifically to discuss the UNGASS and the UK Government’s position with respect to it.