Drug Policy

Baroness Warnock Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Warnock (CB)]

My Lords, I join others in expressing my extreme admiration for my noble friend Lady Meacher for bringing this debate. As has been said already, it is a tiny taster of the enormous debate we will have later. She has worked at an international level and has interested herself in the problem we are facing today in the United Kingdom and in a coherent government strategy which will lead to a revolutionary change of view.

I wish to say a little about the entrenched view that drugs are a matter of criminality. People of my age and of up to 15 years younger than me need to go back and think about the 1960s, which was when drugs hit the general consciousness. It was a time of student revolt and the introduction of the pill. At the time, I was the headmistress of a girls’ school, and we were completely ignorant of the drugs scene and absolutely terrified. We had the most terrible problems in Oxford with undergraduates occupying the Examination Schools and smoking cannabis just for fun. We knew where the cannabis came from. There was a kind of route that started in Birmingham and came down to Oxford and then London, and round and round it went. What I remember most about that time was the fear—the absolute terror that we felt and all parents felt.

If I had any success as a headmistress it was entirely because I had teenage children myself and therefore nothing shocked me. I had one son who still does me a great deal of good, but he did me great good then by being expelled from his public school for cannabis use. The school did not admit that but I knew it. This meant that parents realised that I was not going to be surprised or overreact or anything.

At that time, I must say, I was thankful that the use and possession of drugs was a criminal offence. The reason I was thankful was that I could threaten my pupils that if they were caught with possessing drugs or sharing drugs, if any drugs were found on school premises, I would hand them over to the police because they would have committed a criminal offence. This did restrain them. I felt at the time that the only way of preventing what started as recreational use but could so easily have become addiction—we did not know—was threatening criminal action. So I started off from that point in the 1960s, and I was very slow to change my mind. I did not think about it very much; it just seemed self-evident that it was the using of the drugs which had to be picked on and not the trafficking of them. We hardly thought about trafficking and where the drugs came from and the criminality that goes with drug trafficking. It vaguely passed our minds but it was not what we concentrated on; it was the use. I think that what we now need, and what my noble friend has done so much to get us to think about, is a complete change of attitude towards the use of drugs compared with the trafficking of drugs. This, of course, has the wide international consequences with which she has been and is so greatly involved.

The first thing that made me change my mind was that I had a very good former pupil who later became a victim of MS; she wrote to me, saying that she spent hours of her life trying to negotiate with all her friends to get hold of cannabis because cannabis-related drugs were the only thing that gave her any relief. That seemed to me such an appalling, inhumane attitude towards cannabis that from that moment on I started to think that drugs with a medicinal use, at least, must be treated in a different way.

The other thing is that I have family connections with Portugal, so I know quite a lot about what happens in Portugal, and how it works. I am simply defeated in trying to answer the question of why the Government do not give more attention to following what is in fact a strikingly successful model.

The final thing is, of course, you only have to look at the prison population to see that the so-called war on drugs just does not work and, therefore, it is inevitable that we must change our minds. So I beseech the Government to take a strong and revolutionary look at where we are and make some policy which is coherent, consistent and well understood.