Drugs

Debate between Clive Betts and Jeremy Browne

Thursday 6th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Browne]

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to the United States of America and I am visiting both Colorado and Washington state, which are the two states that have voted to legalise cannabis. I was in Denmark last week and the mayor of Copenhagen is keen to legalise cannabis, but the pretty liberal Danish Government are keen to remind the mayor that it is not within his power to legalise cannabis and that it is not a policy that they want to pursue.

The point is that the public policy debate around cannabis is evolving. The potential health harms caused by cannabis are greater than when it was a much less powerful drug. People sometimes talk about cannabis as being the softer end of the drugs market and say that cannabis could be legalised while everything else is kept illegal as if it were a benign drug and all others harmful. If that were once the case, it is less the case now. Cannabis does have cause to concern people.

I move finally on to psychoactive substances, which is a whole new area that is evolving a lot. It is good that we see significant reductions in people consuming heroin and crack cocaine, which are very harmful drugs, but new psychoactive substances are a fast-evolving threat to many people. In the most tragic cases, some people have died after taking such drugs. People sometimes assume—this is interesting for public policy—that because something is legal it is safe. People have quite paternalistic assumptions about the state even when they are not necessarily minded to believe the Government in other areas of public policy. Just because something is legal, that does not mean that it is safe to consume.

Some such drugs get under the barrier by claiming not to be for human consumption and serious harm has been caused to people by consuming so-called novel psychoactive substances. We have tried to adapt how we respond to such substances to take account of their fast-moving nature. As has been mentioned, we have introduced temporary class drug orders and just this week the Government laid such an order in my name that will take effect from 10 June for two groups of NPSs known as NBOMe and Benzo Fury. We are discussing families of drugs, because, as has been said, these chemical compounds can be manipulated and form whole categories of drugs. We therefore do not just ban street names or individual drugs; we ban groupings of drugs to try to stop people breaking the spirit of the law but staying within the letter of the law. The problem, however, is constantly mutating and we want to maintain the academic rigour that enables the ACMD to consider such matters at length while also having the speed to deal with evolving threats more quickly than it otherwise could. That is why we have the temporary orders lasting 12 months and a more considered process following on from that. I do not pretend that this is an area in which any country does not have public policy challenges to consider. How such drugs are couriered and supplied is also a potential new cause for concern, because people order them on the internet and the drug smuggling does not take the familiar, conventional form.

This is a big area of public policy and there are some causes for cautious optimism. Some drug consumption trends in this country are positive. If they were going in the opposite direction, I suggest that there would be far more Members at this debate and a bigger clamour to ask the Government what they were doing about increases in heroin or crack cocaine consumption. We should momentarily reflect on the good news and progress, where it is being made.

However, this is an area of public policy that never stops evolving, and many new drugs are becoming available. The patterns of drug consumption are evolving. It is subject to fashion and trends, and we must be alive to the harms, educate people about them, try to persuade people not to take drugs, look at where we can restrict supply to benefit public health and help people to recover. All of those are part of our strategy. I welcome the contributions of hon. and right hon. Members and I remind open-minded as to how to ensure that we can work as intelligently as possible to reduce the harm to the British public.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee on Home Affairs briefly to wind up.