Lord Mackinlay of Richborough
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Fentanyl: Sentencing
Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. It is very good to support my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). I led a Westminster Hall debate on 22 November last year on the human and financial costs of drug addiction. The real trigger for that debate was the rise in fentanyl. My hon. Friend gave the figure of 20,000 deaths in the US, but the figures that I found suggest that to be more in the region of 50,000 to 60,000 in 2016. Fentanyl is becoming a real killer drug in the US. As we are very aware, it is a man-made opioid mimic. To put that figure into context, 60,000 deaths represents the entire rate of attrition and death of the entire 20 years of the Vietnam war, but that is happening each and every year in the US.
Ohio has had a particular problem, where deaths rose 33% in 2016 alone, with a death rate of 4,050. That is people across the whole social spectrum out of a population of 12 million in Ohio. To put that in relation to the size of the UK, that would represent 22,000 deaths. Thankfully, we are nowhere near that, at about 2,500 drug deaths in the UK.
My worry is that what starts in the US often crosses the Atlantic to us. I do not want to see what happened to Michelle and Robert happen again. Rehabilitation is important, because for every £1 that we invest in rehabilitation, £2.50 is saved. In that debate of 22 November, I called for fentanyl to become a category AA drug, with a higher sentence to go with it. Current sentencing guidelines are that 5 kg or more of a class A drug would bear a maximum of only 16 years in prison, whereas attempted murder, which is what supplying fentanyl actually is, carries up to 35 years. I am very pleased to support my hon. Friend and the family in every way that I can.