Drugs

Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for proposing this debate and particularly for being so encouraging about participating in it. I have two areas of experience that I hope may be relevant. I have been a funder and trustee of several charities that deal with the fall-out from drugs, including Reprieve, IntoUniversity and Storybook Dads. My involvement has also made me think about the impact of the internet on this issue, which, as some noble Lords may know, is my particular interest.

One charity that I know well, Just for Kids Law, provides invaluable support for children and young people, many of whom are in care, looked after or at risk of exclusion from school. As well as legal help, it offers services ranging from securing housing to finding work. The organisation is a vital resource for the most vulnerable in our society. One of the most distressing and relentless aspects of the lives of the children that JFK helps is being stopped and searched by police. We know from police statistics that 50% of all searches are to look for drugs. We also know from police data that the searches take place disproportionately among the BME population. Some JFK clients talk of being stopped more than three times a day. Not only is this hugely destructive to the lives of the children but it is expensive. JFK worked with another not-for-profit organisation, StopWatch, to produce a smartphone app that allowed the kids to register every time they were stopped, whether there was an arrest and how the police treated them. The stop-and-search app allowed young people to get some control over what they felt was persecution. It also showed the high number of searches that did not result in any substances found, data that could be very useful to the police when prioritising work.

It is interesting to reflect on that development. Technology is changing with great speed the relationship between the supposed criminal and the authorities. But could we not be even bolder in thinking about how the internet could inform some of the solutions for the enormity of the challenges facing drugs policymakers? It feels as though those currently illegally controlling the drugs industry certainly already are. Only yesterday on the Radio 4 “Today” programme there was a discussion on the increasingly high level of digital capability. Marc Goodman, an ex-officer who now studies crime and terrorism, said in his TED talk in 2012,

“all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had”,

a cell phone,

“long before any police officer I knew did”.

He also talked about how hard it is for the police to stay ahead of drug cartels. For example, in Mexico there is a national encrypted radio station and telecoms network run by a group of dealers that is completely out of the reach of any state. I think it might be even harder to access remotely than the parliamentary e-mail system.

The internet is rapidly changing consumer behaviour, and this brings me to the Silk Road. This is not the beautiful route stretching through central Asia, well trodden by Marco Polo, but the website of the same name, mentioned earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, sometimes called the Amazon.com of drugs. Launched in 2011, the site was operated on Tor, a “dark web” service that anonymises users, making it much more difficult for them to be tracked. The site allowed users to buy a huge range of semi-legal and illegal substances using the digital currency Bitcoin. The FBI closed it down last month.

Rather than a terrible crime, using Silk Road could be seen as a better approach to drug sales—a more peaceful alternative to the deadly violence that street deals have led to for decades and which, as the APPG report’s notes show, has led to many thousands of deaths at unbelievable cost. As many of commentators have written, the site was credited by its creators and users as mitigating gangs and cartels, providing quality drugs and going some way to breaking dependency cycles. It did this by breaking people’s relationships with dealers on the street and with the police—all objectives of the unsuccessful so-called war on drugs that, as has been documented today, has cost Governments around the world trillions of pounds.

I very much respect the work of the APPG, but in future work might it be possible to take the different but linked experiences of Just for Kids Law and the Silk Road to think boldly about how technology might help facilitate a different, more successful global drugs policy?