Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL]

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, whose experience is of service to the House. I hope that he will take an active interest in the remaining proceedings of this Bill. I concur particularly with his point about the alleged lack of consultation. If that is true—I hope the Minister will find time to reassure us about this—it is seriously worrying. The advisory committee on medicine and drugs has been a well-established, much-respected part of the environment since 1971. If there is any suggestion that they were deliberately body-swerved in order to get a political outcome by resorting to an expert committee, that would leave some of us of a more sceptical disposition more worried than we might need to be. If the Minister could make that clear, it would leave me sleeping slightly easier in bed at night.

Attached to that, the lack of a regulatory impact assessment is also a mistake. In the course of further proceedings in Committee, I hope that we get a chance to explore why there was no regulatory impact assessment. The point was made powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, that these substances are important to research and to industry. This is a vast category of substances and it is a blanket ban, so we need to be really careful about who is and is not affected. I am not sure that we have done enough work, certainly to satisfy me, that that was the right thing to do.

I have two loci in this important subject: I am from Scotland and this Bill applies to Scotland. It is more important now for this House to ensure that anything we do that has a United Kingdom reference takes account of what it is doing in other parts of the devolved legislatures. I have some concerns that can be pursued at a later stage about the way the criminal justice system, which my noble friend expertly explored, will fit with the other criminal justice processes and systems. The culture and approach can be quite different. My noble friend knows a lot more about this than I do, and I hope to talk to him over the course of the Committee stage to see whether I understand this properly, but anything that we do we must do in concert with our colleagues north of the border. The Minister will know that the Scottish Government had their own expert committee and made recommendations that are entirely sensible and that I think work with the grain of his approach, which I will seek to avoid doing in a moment. My point is that whatever we do, we must stay in step with other legislatures.

The other thing that I can plead by way of an interest in this is that I am a non-practising pharmacist, and I would recognise a molecule of ecstasy if the Minister wrote it down in front of me on a bit of paper—or at least I used to be able to in 1970 when I qualified. A pharmacy degree is a complete aversion therapy course against drugs. I spent a long time trying to learn how to get the active ingredient through the substrate. Colleagues need to understand this. This is not just about active ingredients; it is about dosage. Some of these manufactured substances are in pills. You can make 1,000 pills and all the active ingredient is in the last substrate, which is how my attempts ended up in the labs at Heriot-Watt University. It is not an easy thing to do; it is a very skilled thing to do. You need equipment and training.

This does not happen by accident, so people should not think that it is just about getting the molecules identified; it is the dosage within the distribution of the substances that are being taken that is part of the problem. I hope to be able to think about that a little more clearly and bring some of that past experience to bear. Russian roulette is an exact description of what I have just talked about; trying to get the active ingredient evenly distributed through the substrate is certainly Russian roulette—the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, is absolutely right about that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, mentioned at the end of her remarks the important point about alcohol-related deaths. It will come as no surprise to the House that Liberal Democrats are very focused on that issue at the moment, for rather obvious reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, we must think of all victims as we go through this legislation and try to improve the situation in the best way we can. I was also pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, mention the work of Norman Baker. What he achieved in his short time at the Home Office should be recognised.

I echo and cheer on my noble friend Lord Paddick in his approach to the Bill and I will support him absolutely. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, tried to catch my noble friend on the hop, but he failed, and rightly so. I am not the spokesman, but if it was left to me I would vote against the Bill, because the opportunity to look comprehensively at everything that has happened, including the provisions of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, should be taken now. That is why the point about consultation is so important. We do not really know how fast this situation is changing and accelerating. The circumstances that we are facing now are wholly and entirely different from those in 1971, so as a legislature we should be pausing—someone mentioned earlier the need to do this—and take a really good look at them. I would argue, as I think my colleagues on these Benches would argue, for looking at the harm rationale, which is a much better approach to these problems than a blanket prohibition.

It is not easy, and the public hate it because they like language like “war on drugs” and “crackdown on drugs”. It makes them think that the issue is being taken seriously. Actually, much more has to be spent on prevention and research to get beneficial outcomes, and this must be treated as a health issue. I am absolutely all square with my noble friend on that, but it is a harder sell to the public. Those on the other Front Benches who attack us because we are allegedly soft on drugs will fail, because in the long run a health approach along with research and education is the way forward. If we could capture the resources that we are now unleashing—criminal justice will need a lot of extra resource to do this properly—and devote them to health and education, we would have fewer victims. That is my view. I am prepared to look at the evidence, and I hope that we will explore some of it in a little more detail in Committee, but this is my general approach to dealing with all this.

This is not an easy Bill to amend if you come at it with our approach, and the Minister will have to understand that. But I think that there is a majority view in the House for doing something of this kind, and I look forward to joining my colleagues in trying to make the Bill as good as it can be. However, as far as I am concerned, people need to understand that this is the wrong direction of travel. I hope I am wrong, but that is my view at the moment, and I look forward to considering the Bill in greater detail in Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend asserts that the Misuse of Drugs Act has failed. You can of course observe and point to the availability and prevalence of drugs within society and draw some conclusions, but one cannot make a direct comparison because, had the Misuse of Drugs Act not been in place in 1971, perhaps that situation and the situation that we are trying to address might be a whole lot worse.

What can you do in government? You can look at issues. We have parents, including Maryon Stewart, and the Angelus Foundation coming to us and urging us to take action and clamp down on these drugs. We read in our regional and national newspapers of horrendous situations—young lives lost and blighted. We see new drugs come on to the market branded as “plant food” and “not fit for human consumption”, as if that gets the sellers off the hook of their moral responsibility for what they are selling. Are we supposed to say “No, we do not take any action”, simply because there is an availability of drugs in society? Well, the Government do not take that view and nor did the expert panel, the Home Affairs Select Committee or any of the mainstream political parties in their manifestos. I am sure that this debate will go on, and it is good that we do this. I will now try to address some more of the particular points raised.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and my noble friend argued the case and called for a more regulatory approach. As I indicated in my opening remarks, the expert panel considered the regulatory model along with others in operation in different jurisdictions, and concluded that it presented significant practical difficulties. Trying to define what we mean by low-harm substances would be a legislative and scientific minefield. For many substances, the evidence of chronic harm can take years to emerge, as can dependence potential. It is not clear how the harms could be properly assessed to medicine standards without animal and human trials. Do we really want to contemplate further animal testing for these purposes? I also remind the House that there have been no applications for licences in New Zealand—further evidence, if it were needed, of the difficulties of going down the regulatory route.

The question of definition was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, and the noble Lord, Lord Patel. The Bill is designed to capture substances supplied for human consumption that have a psychoactive effect. Its aim is to capture substances that are not currently controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 but that, as with all drugs, carry health risks when misused. Many new psychoactive substances are still legal due to the speed at which they are produced, with manufacturers inventing new substances by tweaking chemical formulas, as I already mentioned.

The point about criminalising young people was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, again from her deep experience in this area. I assure her and other noble Lords that there is no question of criminalising the users of psychoactive substances. As proposed by the expert panel, the Bill is focused on the trade in these substances: those who manufacture, import, distribute or sell new psychoactive substances. The Bill contains no offence in relation to simple possession—a point welcomed by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. As she suggested, for young people tempted to use new psychoactive substances our focus must be on prevention and, where necessary, treatment. I look forward in Committee to setting out in more detail the comments in that expert panel report on the work that will need to go hand in hand with education and health prevention available to people.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, argued in favour of the Irish approach. The Bill is closely modelled on that approach. I will come back to that specific point about the Irish definition.

The impact on research was raised by the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Hollins, the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, and my noble friend Lady Browning. A number of noble Lords sought reassurance about the impact of the Bill on legitimate research. I can indeed offer such reassurance. Research that does not involve the human consumption of a psychoactive substance would not be caught by the provisions of the Bill. Where research has reached the stage of clinical human trials, Schedule 1 to the Bill exempts investigational medicinal products from the scope of a psychoactive substance. This includes active substances being used in such trials. If further latitude for research were needed, the regulation-making power in Clause 10 enables us to exclude specified activities from the ambit of the offences.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, raised the issue of keeping the list of exempted substances under review. He asked about the process for ensuring that the list of exempted substances in Schedule 1 is kept up to date. We believe that the list will be relatively stable. Indeed, Ireland has not needed to amend its equivalent list in the five year since its legislation was enacted. I should add that we are not legislating here for a regulatory regime for new psychoactive substances; there is no provision in the Bill to enable the licensing of so-called low-harm substances, and the regulation-making power in Clause 3 is not designed for that purpose.

The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, and my noble friend Lord Farmer asked about the implementation of the Bill. We are working with the police, the National Crime Agency and the Border Force on implementation, including the development of appropriate guidance, and we will extend those discussions to the Local Government Association—another organisation that is actually being supportive of the Government’s approach here. We are also ready to work with other bodies, such as the Association of Convenience Stores, to provide bespoke guidance for their members. A very good point was made about what we are doing to engage with countries that lead in supplying these things, such as India and China. I do not have an answer to that, but I shall write to noble Lords about that in further correspondence.

I mentioned the cross-European approach. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, asked whether we could be more specific about when the ACMD is due to report. NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency have published advice to clinicians on how to help people to withdraw from medicines to which they are addicted. Public Health England has produced advice to commissioners on how to assess the need in their area for specialist services to help people to withdraw from medicines to which they are addicted.

I am conscious that there are a number of issues that I have not had time properly to address here, and I shall be very happy to write a follow-up letter to begin a discussion with colleagues, and perhaps to arrange, ahead of Committee, meetings between interested Peers and some of the experts from whom we have taken our opinion. I am very happy to give an undertaking to do that. With those assurances—

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

The Minister has been very solicitous in answering the legitimate questions that have been asked. It would help me enormously to prepare mentally for Committee if he could give me some idea of what he would consider success to look like over the next five or 10-year period, should this Bill become an Act.

[Lord Bates]

There is some of that in the impact statement, although I accept that it may not be as much as noble Lords would like. However, I am very happy to see whether we can go back and see what extra we can produce in answer to that very specific question. I shall write or provide further comment in Committee. But in the light of those remarks and those commitments—