Draft Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Amendment) Order 2021
(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)
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The Chair
Before we begin, I remind Members to observe social distancing and to sit only in the assigned places with a tick—as everyone is doing, I think. I remind Members that Mr Speaker has deemed that masks should be worn in Committee—apart from by me, because I might need to speak at any second. Our Hansard colleagues will be most grateful if Members send their speaking notes to hansardnotes@parliament.uk.
The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Amendment) Order 2021.
It is a great pleasure to appear under your chairmanship, Dr Huq.
The draft order was laid before the House on 25 March. I thank the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for its advice, which has helped to inform the order before the Committee for consideration. To that end, the proposed amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 follows the ACMD’s advice, published on 29 April last year, about three benzodiazepines.
The three benzodiazepines under consideration are flualprazolam, flunitrazolam and norfludiazepam. The ACMD recommended controlling all three substances under class C of the 1971 Act, owing to their potential harm and the evidence for the prevalence of the drugs in the UK. This will be the first additional control of benzodiazepines under the Act since the control of 16 benzos in May 2017; those are also controlled under class C of the 1971 Act.
Benzodiazepine medicines with specific uses may be prescribed by clinicians, but the matter before us today is the consideration of illicit benzodiazepines, with no known medicinal benefits in this country. High dependency is often associated with benzodiazepine use, together with severe withdrawal symptoms for even short-term use. When combined with other “recreational” drugs, most particularly opioids and other central nervous depressants, there is an increased risk of mortality, which has contributed to a significant number of drug-related deaths each year.
Data from the national programme on substance abuse deaths showed that there were 5,740 benzodiazepine-related deaths in England between 2006 and 2015. Just under 4% of those recorded benzodiazepines as the only compounds implicated in the cause of death, which suggests the frequency with which they are associated with poly drug use.
I thought it might help the Committee if I explained a bit more about the specific details related to each of the three benzodiazepines—in particular their prevalence in the UK, which has a significant effect on the consideration of harm. Beginning with flualprazolam, the ACMD’s report states that, as of March 2020, as recorded by regional statistical agencies, there have been 12 flualprazolam-associated deaths in the UK. The ACMD report also cites the report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction on flualprazolam in March 2019, which outlines deaths with confirmed exposure to the compound in 24 reported cases in Sweden and two in Finland. In eight of those cases, flualprazolam was cited as a contributory or possibly contributory factor.
On flunitrazolam, the ACMD’s report states that it is likely that the potency of the compound is greater than that of flunitrazepam, otherwise known as Rohypnol, which is highly potent and controlled as a class C drug under the 1971 Act. The report goes on to confirm that between 2014 and October 2019, a small number of seizures have been made at the UK border and that small-scale seizures of a mixture of tablets and powder have been identified in Germany in 2016 and Denmark in 2017.
Norfludiazepam has been identified twice in the UK. Both occasions took place in 2017, once from a police seizure and once by TICTAC, a drug identification provider. Further afield, there were small-scale seizures in Germany in 2016, Sweden in 2017 and Norway in 2018. PostScript360, an organisation providing treatment for those undergoing withdrawal from benzodiazepines highlighted anecdotal reporting of the use or purchase of norfludiazepam.
The ACMD report recommended not only the control of these three drugs under class C of the 1971 Act, but that they be placed in schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 and part 1, schedule 1 to the Misuse of Drugs (Designation) (England, Wales and Scotland) Order 2015, given that the drugs have no known medicinal benefits in the UK.
Should this order be approved, the Government intend that a further statutory instrument, subject to the negative resolution procedure, come into force at the same time as this order. That would be 28 days after the date when the Order in Council is made. That further instrument would make the necessary amendments for the 2001 regulations and the 2015 order. The approval by Parliament of that order would make it unlawful to possess, supply, produce, import or export these drugs, except under a Home Office licence for research. The maximum sentence for possession of a class C drug is two years in prison and unlimited fine or both, while for supply it is up to 14 years in prison, an unlimited fine or both.
We all know the destructive effects that illegal drugs have on not only the lives of those who take them, but their families and wider societies. The ACMD’s advice makes clear that these benzodiazepines are harmful, and I trust that I have made a clear case for their control today.
I give a real-life example. You will remember, Dr Huq, that early last year the National Crime Agency undertook an operation called Venetic, which revealed a variety of information about organised criminal gangs producing and importing drugs into the UK. As part of that operation, the NCA managed to bust open a factory in Kent, where they discovered 27 million street benzo tablets, which had been manufactured and were specifically targeted at Scotland—27 million is quite a lot of tablets for each and every Scot. The impact of the drugs, particularly north of the border, is very significant and I hope that the order today will contribute to their control.
Kit Malthouse
The hon. Member for Croydon Central is nothing if not persistent in her desire to look backwards rather than forwards. As she knows, we have been very assertive in our approach to drugs over the past two years. We are having some success, particularly on county lines and in other areas, and she will have seen that in the last spending round we secured significant amounts of extra money for drug treatment. I am very pleased that she mentioned the ADDER projects as the progenitor: those were broadly my idea, along with Blair Gibbs, who was No. 10’s crime and justice advisor at the time. It is a model of operation that we hope in time to take to other parts of the country, but we first need to prove that we can shift those appalling numbers in those parts of the country.
As you will know, Dr Huq, we will have an entire Backbench Business debate tomorrow on exactly this subject—the Misuse of Drugs Act—so I do not propose to rehearse some of the issues that the hon. Lady has raised in her response. I will just say that I am grateful for the support of the ACMD in outlawing these benzodiazepines. It looked at 10 other compounds, but did not find evidence that substantiated their being made illegal, although they will of course be covered by the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which was passed by this House just a few years ago.
Finally, given the devastating impact of street benzos—as they are called—in Scotland in particular, I am disappointed that no representative from the Scottish National party is here today. Drug deaths in Scotland are off the scale—easily the worst in western Europe, if not the developed world. The legislative control of drugs remains an important measure in the fight against this societal evil, and I am grateful to the Committee for supporting it.
Question put and agreed to.