Drugs

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my new noble friend Lady Manzoor on her excellent maiden speech. I was grateful to her for sharing with us her experiences in the health service over so many years and for her strong support for moving drugs policy and government efforts from the Home Office to the health department. It is that sort of experience that supports my gut feeling that that is the right thing to do.

I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, not just on introducing the debate today but on all her hard work over recent months and indeed years over this issue. I know that she has tirelessly visited many different countries, not only all the EU countries but a great number of South American ones. She has put before us a lot of evidence and reports on this issue that have really helped to inform us. I shall refer slightly later to one of those in particular. I am extremely grateful to her. I think that she has really encouraged us in this House to address the issue in a far more in-depth way.

If we look at the 2010 drugs strategy and the government response to the Home Affairs Select Committee report, we can see that the Government are still hoping against hope that the “war on drugs” posture will continue to be credible. However, as we have heard from so many speakers, it simply is not. Many speakers, although I shall not repeat what they have said, have given examples of how it is not helping those on harder drugs to deal with their health problem or indeed helping young people wend their precarious way through the world of recreational drugs.

I particularly want to home in on the failure of the current posture of the Government as a world leader. We like to think of the UK engaging in international dialogue and acting as a world power in a responsible way. Unfortunately, the Government’s 2010 drugs strategy states:

“We must make the UK an unattractive destination for drug traffickers”.

On the face of it, that is a reasonable statement, but where does the UK suggest would be a better destination? On to which of our friends and allies are we wishing the problem? It is a global problem, and even if we could make the UK so unattractive that no hard drug crossed our borders, the rest of the world would still be suffering from serious, ruthless criminals who have an easy route to vast profits. We would not be immune to the effects of that, so let us not make that sort of statement.

I want to talk for a moment about the visit that I was privileged to make to Colombia with the IPU and about one of the insights that gave me. It has since been underpinned by the excellent report on the coca leaf by Sophia Ostler of the UK IPU. In Colombia, I saw first hand some of the realities for the police in trying to deal with narco trafficking and I saw the UK supporting them in that. I think we still have 40 officers out there helping, and the Colombians are very grateful for that effort. One of the unforeseen effects of that support is the shift of the coca-growing effort to Peru and Bolivia. The question is: what else can small-scale peasant farmers high in the mountains grow and are there alternatives to that or to the coca leaf? That is where the report is so valuable. It shows all the current alternatives, from Coca-Cola to Red Bull. It states that companies are extremely reticent about where their coca leaf comes from and that a helpful start would be more openness and accountability from international companies already engaged in legitimate trade in the coca leaf. There are lots of other uses. It is depressing that countries in the Andean region have had to suppress their cultural use of coca tea and so on because of the UN’s attitude to their traditional use. Everything I have said about coca and the Andean region could be said about Afghanistan and opium growing.