Drugs and Crime

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I add my voice to those of others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for her untiring efforts to change UN drugs policy. The UN thinks that she can change the world, and I have to tell your Lordships that, after many years’ experience, it is wholly right.

The past 10 years has seen some modest reduction in harms. I pay tribute to the work of the National Treatment Agency in getting so many more people into treatment and care, but there is no doubt that our current emphasis on the criminalisation policy, which we have pursued here and abroad with minimal accompanying strategies on prevention and care, has been unhelpful. At the moment, we spend less than 7 per cent of the drugs budget on healthcare and less than 0.5 per cent on research into effective prevention and treatment strategies. There are no formal figures on how much is spent on education. Those figures alone must make us pause and rethink in the way that the noble Baroness advocated today.

I return briefly to the differences between decriminalisation and legalisation, which are seriously different strategies. Around the world, we know now, especially from studies in the United States, in different states' policies, and in Australia, that eliminating criminal penalties for possession of small quantities of drugs has no effect on the prevalence of drug use. That is true for marijuana and it is probably true for hard drugs as well, although I have to say that only Spain and Italy among major industrialised countries have tried it, and they do not collect outcome statistics that are in any way meaningful, so there is a serious problem there.

I love the story of the American academic researcher MacCoun, who works at Berkeley in California. He asked his undergraduate students whether they would be in favour of California removing penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana. About two-thirds said yes, and the rest were opposed. Almost none knew that it had occurred 25 years ago.

Decriminalisation is not the same as legalisation, which allows some form of regulated sales or distribution, and of which there is only one contemporary example: the well known Dutch model of de facto legalisation which began in 1976. There is no instance of legal commercial access to cocaine or heroin in a modern, industrialised nation. Switzerland has probably come nearer than most and has concentrated significantly on improving health and reducing criminality among participants in its heroin prescription programme but, again, more rigorous research is needed.

Nevertheless, we can blame prohibition for much of the crime and violence around the illicit drug markets, for a large fraction of drug overdoses and drug-related illnesses and for corruption and the violation of civil liberties. However, other harms are due to the drugs themselves and the influence they have on the user’s health and behaviour. Legalisation would eliminate the harms caused by prohibition, but it would not eliminate the harms caused by drug use. Thus, there is a trade off. If average harm went down under legalisation without an increase in use, we would clearly be better off than we are today, but if legalisation produced a significantly large increase in total use, total drug harm would go up, even if each incident of use became somewhat safer. Total harm can rise, even if average harm goes down. It is true to say that at present there is no firm basis for projecting the relative magnitudes of these effects.

What we need to do is perhaps to have some decriminalisation, but to refocus on the prevention and treatment strategy. President Obama’s adviser, Thomas McClellan, has given many talks in this country and has described very well the new prevention strategy focusing predominantly on school and adolescent education, the re-engagement of parents, constant police monitoring and the involvement of all community organisations that come across young people. They are all pushing a specific message. I should remind noble Lords that drug addiction and misuse start between the ages of 10 and 21. Practically no one becomes an addict after that point. It is therefore very clear where we can focus our prevention strategies.

Overcoming addiction is very difficult. We know that compulsory coercion in the criminal justice system and compulsory treatment do not work. However, there are good forms of coercion. People need to take an active part in the choices that they make. That is part of the NHS commitment to all patients. They need to make active choices, and there are good forms of negotiation and coercion that can get people happily into treatment as a voluntary act. We should use coercion in the good sense of negotiating with individuals and asking what we can do to help them in their lives to make it sensible for them to come in and stick with the treatment. It is a long, hard graft and covers all the other issues that the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, so eloquently described, but it is well worth it for the good outcomes that we can achieve.