Drug Policy

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to the amazing and valuable work of my noble friend Lady Meacher on making drugs policy more effective and relevant in today’s national and global situation. She has been indefatigable, and I admire her persistence.

I had been interested in drugs policy for many years before I met the noble Baroness, but I find myself very much in tune with her views. In 2001, I was asked to chair a Liberal Democrat policy working party on drugs policy. It was then that I first met my noble friend Lord Paddick, who at that time was a senior Metropolitan Police officer and was taking the lead in doing exactly what the noble Baroness has recommended—having his officers focus on the dealers rather than the users—and getting a lot of stick for it.

The thrust of our report was that the use of illegal drugs should be treated as a health matter rather than as a criminal matter. Even at that time we had evidence that the UK’s punitive regime was not working. Our objectives then, as now, were to reduce harm, address the crimes of those who destroy people’s lives by peddling drugs to them, and get the big drug money out of organised crime. We were aware then, as we are now, that whole families are destroyed by drug use and that addiction can be a major tragedy for families, especially when there are children in the household. So to say that the Liberal Democrats are soft on drugs is, and always has been, untrue: we have simply identified that the war on drugs has failed many of our citizens and we need to find a more effective strategy.

We were aware even then that a major barrier to a more imaginative approach was the usual narrow interpretation of the UN convention. Our report committed us to work with other countries to arrive at a consensus about how to move forward within the convention. So the UN Secretary-General’s statement of 26 June last year was particularly welcome to me, and it should be regarded as an open invitation to all countries to consider all options. That is why I am so pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has worked with the leaders of many other countries who have courageously spoken out and said that we need new approaches. We should not be frightened that the international community will condemn us if we do things differently.

The recent publication by my right honourable friend Norman Baker MP of a research paper called Drugs: International Comparators was particularly welcome. As he has said, we must look at the evidence without prejudice and consider carefully whether some of these new ideas might work for us in this country. Of course, different cultures and circumstances apply in different countries, and you can rarely transplant ideas lock, stock and barrel. However, there is often a germ of an idea that can be useful. It was clear from the report that there is no correlation at all between reduction in drug use and a punitive criminal justice approach. Indeed, pragmatism and a health-based approach are showing great results all over the world, and that is how we should approach it here.

I was surprised to read that there is little evidence that the special drug courts are reducing reoffending. I had the opportunity to question Norman Baker about that at a meeting yesterday. It seems that here is a good idea which has not produced the results for which it had the potential, merely because of the lack of treatment and diversion services that are needed to sit alongside a drug court system. It is a great shame that the resources were not made available, since many of the judiciary were very enthusiastic about this approach. I believe it could have worked, given the availability of the appropriate services. It has the potential, in particular, for helping addicted women to address their drug habit and keep their children.

I was also interested in the pragmatic idea of providing clean needles in prisons, which is done in some other countries. Apparently the law prevents this here. However, the law is currently failing abysmally to keep drugs out of prison. Indeed, the saddest thing is that some offenders go into prison clean and come out as drug users. Of all the things that would encourage them to go back to offending, that is it. I believe that we should find a way to provide clean needles under the auspices of providing medical services.

My main objective is to discourage young people from taking up the use of drugs at all through information and education. So-called legal highs, which are no such thing, have become very widespread, and this is worrying. I support a blanket ban, but at the same time I believe that a health and diversionary approach to users—not dealers—is the right approach, for these as well as the more traditional illegal drugs. I also support the pilot schemes for last-resort use of opiates for hard-core heroin users for whom other methods have failed. I hope that the Government will seriously consider a rollout of the pilots that have been successful.

Under this Government we have continued to try many innovative ways to discourage drug use and address its harms. However, the mood music is still punitive and the responsibility is still within the Home Office. I, like the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, would like to see a change in the tone of government rhetoric on drugs and a wholesale shift of responsibility for users to the Department of Health, so that the criminal justice system can be freed up to deal with the real villains, the dealers. I also hope that this and future Governments will become more open-minded about talking to other countries about new approaches within the convention and new interpretations of our international obligation, so that we can really start to fight drugs more effectively in the international community. This is what the Secretary-General wanted to see resulting from his statement.