Psychoactive Substances

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Mann]

I would have hoped that the hon. Gentleman was listening.

For two days, I got together young people, the police and the health service in my area, along with my expert panel which 10 years ago looked at the problem of heroin and this time looked at legal highs, among other problems. We analysed more than 400 submissions to find out exactly what was happening. We went out and asked the users of the illegal drugs what was happening with the legal highs. I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman would like to be informed about this, because his close coalition ally the Minister, and the Minister’s predecessor, have not got a clue what is going on with legal highs in this country. Some of the chief constables are increasingly saying, “Let’s legalise drugs; let’s not go any further with legal highs, so that we can get crime down.”

The European Union is heading in exactly the same direction. That is why the Czech Republic has just backed the same approach as Portugal has taken. The European monitoring body’s research is nonsense, but it is quoted by the Minister and others in the Government all the time as the factual basis for what is happening around Europe. But the statistics on this—as on so many other things—that are compiled around Europe simply do not compare with what is going on here. They do not compare at all.

In this country, we have a growing problem with legal highs. The problem is that people are taking cheap pills instead of spending money on alcohol, and the real problem with that is that they do not know what the pills are. People are taking things that give them a stimulus when they go out, but the compounds could contain anything, and on rare occasions there are tragic consequences. The bigger problem is that this is building up an atmosphere of semi-legality. People are taking things that ought to be illegal because they are dangerous, and they have no idea what they contain. They take them presuming and hoping that they are fine, and the Government are not prepared to put a system in place to deal with—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I am struggling to understand how the hon. Gentleman is going to relate all this to subsidiarity. [Interruption.] Thank you; I do not need prompting. We are not having a general debate here. He has referred to Europe, and I hope that he is going to refer to the question of subsidiarity mentioned in the reasoned opinion.

[John Mann]

Thank you for your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am constructing an argument to demonstrate precisely how the European Union has got itself into this absurd situation of what might be called a caterpillar race between the European Commission and the British Government over who can be the slowest to deal with the problem of legal highs. Frankly, my constituents’ problem is that this Government are doing nothing—