Misuse of Drugs Act

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con) [V]]

I draw the House’s attention to my unremunerated interest as chair of the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group Ltd.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith), my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group on drug policy reform, on securing this debate. I commiserate with him on his promotion from Whip to spokesman on local government. It has been a real pleasure working with a decent and humane colleague with a very different career background from mine. I hope this can continue despite his new Opposition policy responsibilities. I appreciate his leadership in delivering today’s debate.

Fifty years ago, this House passed the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Its laudable aim was to deter unlawful controlled drug use and stifle supply. This followed what happened in 1961 when the United States persuaded UN members to sign up to a global narcotics ban. Had the House then seen through the clouds of both excitement and worry about the Woodstock generation—magnified by a popular press which then, as now, was prone to more than a modest amount of exaggeration—to the evidence of the extraordinary success of what was then known as the British system in addressing problematic drug use, by comparison with the American system, it would surely have thought twice. It perhaps also should have paused at the American invitation to follow the same principle towards all other drugs that the USA had deployed, with such disastrous consequences, towards the drug alcohol in 1919. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the global disaster that has now overtaken us.

If the House had known then what we know now, passing that Act would have been an appalling betrayal of its duty to the public interest. In the UK we have invested countless billions in the approach put into law by the MDA, with what success? Illegal drugs are today cheaper, and more available, potent and widely used, than ever. Most of all, victims of drug policy-related crimes are off the scale. They range from exploited children, to young, usually black men knifed on our streets, to half—half!—of acquisitive crimes in the UK. As the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington said, we have seen a 40-fold increase in drug deaths in this period.

This is a policy choice we have made. In 2001, Portugal implemented a policy that has the key aspects of the British system from the 1960s. Portugal has dropped its drug deaths, in some years, by up to 90% as a consequence. We listen with proper attention to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) when she reads out the list of names of women killed by men each year: 125 in 2016; 113 last year. If I did that in respect of women, men and children dead as a consequence of the way in which successive Governments have implemented this Act, I would need to read out an equivalent list of names—killed by law and policy, accountable to this House—every single week that this Parliament sits, and still that would not be enough.

In the late 1960s, about 1% of adults had used drugs at some point in their lives. Now it is 34%. In 1971, heroin use was below 10,000 people. It is now more than a quarter of a million. In 1971, less than half a million people used cannabis. It is now more than 2.5 million people, and users of cannabis supplied by criminal gangs today also consume a much more potent drug, which is of real danger to growing young minds.

There are those who say that we just have not implemented the powers in this Act hard enough. One of those people is Peter Hitchens. To his credit, he is prepared to debate, but to my astonishment the last time that I debated with him, he referenced a collection of relevant newspaper headlines. Does he have no idea of the harm that his industry has done through these lurid, fear-mongering headlines that so mislead about the pathetic lives put beyond rescue by this Act that creates the innocent victims of our policy? Rather more academic research and experience take us to a much more reliable conclusion.

Last year, part 1 of Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs stated that, even if enforcement agencies

“were sufficiently resourced it is not clear that they would be able to bring about a sustained reduction in drug supply”.

She went further, stating that

“enforcement activity can sometimes have unintended consequences, such as increasing levels of drug-related violence and the negative effects are involving individuals in the criminal justice system.”

As soon as I can, I want to ask Dame Carol whether she could also have said “almost always” or simply “always” instead of “can sometimes”, as I am unaware of any evidence to the contrary—ever, anywhere.

Thirty-four per cent. of UK adults admit to having consumed an illegal drug at some point in their life. Having debated this with the then chief constable of Durham, Mike Barton—the most authoritative operational police chief on the issue—when 80% of an audience of hundreds of fresher students make the same admission in front of a serving police officer, I rather expect that proportion is growing fast. Our policy has a third of the British population potentially facing a two to seven-year sentence, including senior members of the Government. I am now convinced that this is precisely why so few colleagues are really prepared to engage in this debate; it is personally politically dangerous—ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

We represent the population in this matter as much as anyone else, and I would be surprised if most Members of this House had not enjoyed what a former Prime Minister dismissed as the “normal university experience”. The Leader of the Opposition implied as much about himself, but even he was not prepared to be candid. This issue is far, far too important for colleagues to take a pass on. We have a duty to engage and personal experience should not be used to drive colleagues out of considering the wider evidence about the success or failure of this policy. My advice to colleagues is, do not answer the personal question; you have a wider duty to the public, so that all parliamentarians can contribute to the consideration of what is in reality an appalling policy failure, with 50 years of evidence to draw on.

We wait for the publication of part 2 of Dame Carol’s report. Dare I hope that the Government have run into someone prepared to state the inconvenient truth? Only yesterday she reported at a meeting of the Criminal Justice Alliance her shock at finding so little research and science to underpin policy making, commissioning and practice in the UK. The Government might point to the role of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, yet its members are overworked, unremunerated and supported by a very limited secretariat. They are also appointed on the basis of political vetting, which inevitably compromises their necessary objectivity, and of course they have the example of Professor David Nutt’s inconvenient truth in 2008, which had him sacked.

The damage done by this Act to public health and its devouring of the criminal justice system is only half the story. What opportunities have we also missed? The powers to schedule drugs under regulation derived from the 1971 Act. Those 2001 regulations should allow for the lawful possession and supply of controlled drugs for legitimate purposes such as research and medicinal use. Yet our drug scheduling plainly lacks scientific validation and has not been subject to analysis or any recent official analysis of harm. The Home Office has no plans to commission a comprehensive review of the relative harms of the drugs that have been put in schedule 1. This evidence-free approach must change.

Cannabis-based products for medicinal use were rescheduled only because the mother of one child with a severe form of epilepsy was prepared to challenge the system for confiscating her son’s medicine, which had been prescribed overseas. Billy Caldwell duly became seriously ill, and to his credit the then Home Secretary returned the confiscated medicine to Billy under special licence and asked the chief medical officer if there was any evidence for this medicine’s efficacy. In two weeks, which is a record-breaking time in medicine assessment, she confirmed that there was. There is rather a lot, in fact—it appears to go back about three millennia. It should hardly have been a surprise to the House—a House of Lords Committee had recommended it 20 years earlier—but the system is still broken today for patients to get access to medicine from cannabis. Only yesterday, we witnessed a wretched plea to the Prime Minister from a sick child’s brother for his medical cannabis. That should never have had to be the case.

We are not just talking about cannabis, where our approach has denied us 50 years of research into, among other conditions, multiple sclerosis, pain control and, it seems, all too probably a significant advance in cancer treatments, because evidence is emerging of a number of substances that find themselves in schedule 1 that also have great potential. The current scheduling of substances such as psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and DMT now appears to have prevented a probable step change in more effective mental health interventions for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, addiction and depression. We continue to hinder medical research at a time when there have been no new pharmacological treatments for depression since the advance of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors 30 years ago. With a mental health crisis in waiting following this pandemic, we must immediately remove barriers to research.

If we want an example of why we should do that, we should look no further than the experience of our recently active service veterans, 7,500 of whom have returned from active service in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. The charity Supporting Wounded Veterans believes that 2,400 of them are beyond available current treatment. So many of them turn to alcohol and street drugs to manage their service-inflicted pain—destroyed, in our estimation, from military hero to alcoholic and junkie because we have not enabled the research that would break their spiral down to death by their own hand or otherwise.

Finally, given what she said yesterday, Carol Black will ask for accountability and co-ordinated delivery across Government that acknowledges drug dependency to be a chronic condition. Drug policy, owned and led by the Home Office—vainly trying to enforce the provisions of this Act over decades through a criminal justice enforcement approach—must change to a public health, cross-Government approach. We have tried and tested 50 years of policy based on instinct and what now appears to be prejudice towards drug users, whom we have put outside the law. Meanwhile, we knock back our alcohol and smoke our tobacco as drugs inside the law. Prohibition of either would clearly drive drinkers and smokers underground, with all of the accompanying wider cost to the overall public good. We have accommodated their undoubted harms, which are massively greater than those we have criminalised, and we can and are starting to control them to a better degree inside the law, as the recent substantial public health progress over tobacco consumption shows.

The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed. It ended the British system towards drug users of the 1960s. Our oldest ally, Portugal, faced with its own drug crisis of the late 1990s, returned to it in 2001, with conspicuous success over the past two decades. Its politicians climb over each other now to claim responsibility. After 50 years, it is about time we all took up our responsibility to understand the evidence and how we can best mitigate this policy disaster which arises from a law passed 50 years ago here in the United Kingdom.