Drug Use and Possession: Royal Commission

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy]

My Lords, I am tempted to say that I agree with everybody else and just sit down, but I have four minutes and I am going to make the best of them.

I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, for this opportunity to press for a serious review of drug misuse policy. I am not usually supportive of royal commissions because they tend to kick matters into the long grass. However, we are already in the long grass on this matter. We are saddled with a policy that we all agree has largely failed. Small bits of it may have been successful, but it has largely failed. We are rather frightened to focus on the alternative harm reduction policies for reasons that we have amply aired.

On the question of evidence-based policy and the research to support it, although we have plenty of evidence about the failure of current policies, I fear that we have surprisingly little evidence on which a royal commission could base its positive recommendations for future policies. As an academic, I am always pressing people to say, “Stop calling for more research and just get on with what we know”. However, there is an extraordinary lack of social research. After all, drug use is a social activity with social impacts.

To my mind, it is strange what large and fundamental gaps remain in our understanding. For example, we have not tackled the dramatic changes in cannabis use that have occurred over the past 20 years and we know very little about enforcement of the drug laws. Following the second reclassification of cannabis back to a class B drug, there is a pressing need to evaluate how this change is impacting on policing, for example. We lack a good understanding of the routes both into and out of problematic drug use and the long-term impact of drug use on families. For example, social workers are making difficult decisions every day about the placement of children and are placing them back with families in which there is profound drug addiction, yet the evidence that they have on which to make those decisions is very poor indeed. I could mention many other pressing topics. This is merely a short list of examples of the gaps in research.

Until recently, neither the Economic and Social Research Council nor the Medical Research Council had funded major programmes of work in this area, although in the charitable sector the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published some admirable research with modest funding. The majority of government money devoted to drug research has been spent on usage surveys, monitoring and evaluation—quite properly, since that is the Government’s job—rather than on exploratory research designed to fill the gaps.

There have been positive developments. Early in 2009, the MRC launched its addiction and substance misuse research strategy and it has now launched a new programme. However, the ESRC seems to have spent a total of just £3,000 in the last year and has given no grants either in programme grants or responsive mode funding. I think that that is extraordinary for one of the major problems that society has developed over the last 40 years.

The major research centres are mostly focused in clinical or epidemiological centres. Senior academics are from medical disciplines. I do not want to detract from the importance of this work, but I think that we have to get the balance of government research funding right. It is not heartening for researchers to know that, if they get good evidence, it will not be implemented. We have already had some evidence of that.

Finally, drugs are a highly emotive topic, which generates hyperbole, controversy and political vacillation, but it is crucial that we invest in proper social research to advise any independent inquiry on the way forward. Will the Minister say what plans the Government have to invest in the social scientific research that we need to take forward evidence-based policies?