Crispin Blunt
Main Page: Crispin Blunt (Independent - Reigate)Department Debates - View all Crispin Blunt's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Paul Flynn
Indeed, and I would like to get on to that. We have just been involved in a war, which I mentioned at business questions. We went into Helmand province five years after we went into Afghanistan. We had lost only two soldiers by that time, but our main purpose in going in—hon. Members should read the speeches from 2006; I have just put them on the website—was all about stopping heroin being grown and ending the drug crop. In 2006, 90% of our heroin came from Afghanistan; yet here we are, years later, and 90% of our heroin still comes from Afghanistan. There is a difference, however: now it is cheaper because there is more of it. The efforts to control it were utterly futile, yet there is a shortage of morphine throughout the world—another issue that we have not addressed.
I come back to the point that we should look at the chemistry. Nobody knows what the effect of the various ingredients of natural cannabis is. It might well be that ingredient No. 36 neutralises ingredient No. 428. We do not know, and by stopping people having a natural drug that has proved to be beneficial, we are imposing torment on many who have serious problems, such as multiple sclerosis and other diseases that we know can be cured. It is prejudice that has driven our policies for all these years. I am heartened today by the Minister, by his courage and by the report, which is the only report—I repeat: we have waited 43 years for this—that is based on the truth and the evidence. Marvellous things are happening in other countries throughout the world, and there is a recognition that prohibition has been a curse.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
In the litany of good signs that the hon. Gentleman is seeing, I am quite certain that he will have read the article by Sir William Patey, who was our ambassador in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2012. He says:
“For the sake of both Afghans and British citizens, senior politicians must take responsibility for the failings of global prohibition, and take control of the drug trade through legal regulation.”
When someone like him says that, it is another reason to sit up and take notice.
Paul Flynn
That is absolutely right. We are following what happened with the prohibition of alcohol in America, where the deaths came from the use of distilled spirit. The content could not be controlled, and it was poisonous. We now have people taking drugs—often in the most concentrated form and in the most dangerous way—that are produced by people who are irresponsible. I believe that if we did not have prohibition, people would be using heroin beer and other things by now. In Amsterdam, they take their cannabis without smoking, because the danger—as with tobacco, where it is not the nicotine—is in smoking the substance. The best way would be if we relaxed about this and if people could have their drugs of choice—all dangerous and to be avoided if at all possible, but we cannot stop people seeking relaxation and comfort from drugs; that will go on. The way to do it is to end prohibition and for a courageous Government to reform our laws.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw. He made a compelling speech, in which he rightly identified an immense problem that goes to the heart of the issue with which our drugs policy must deal.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing the debate. I recall having a conversation with one of her co-signatories, the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), when I was the criminal justice Minister responsible for the prison and probation services. The right hon. Gentleman, having at one time been the Minister responsible for drugs policy in the Home Office, is yet another convert to the more enlightened and intelligent policy that is proposed in the motion and implicitly recommended in the study report that the Government have just published.
On that occasion, the right hon. Gentleman and I, as Minister, cooked up a plan for him to ask me a question so that we could begin to arrive at some estimate of the actual cost of our drugs policy to the criminal justice system. However, even as the Minister answering the question, I found it impossible to beat out of the Department information that would have enabled me to give a proper answer to the right hon. Gentleman, and eventually, having tried to do so several times, I gave up.
This is the central point that I want to make. Given the number of global leaders who have had responsibility for policy in this area—Kofi Annan, the former Presidents of Brazil, Switzerland, Colombia, Portugal, Mexico and Chile, George Papandreou; the list goes on and on, and includes, of course, the right hon. Member for Coventry North East—we ought to start drawing some conclusions. Members who know that they will not get the political kicking that our current Administration plainly feel they will get if they begin to open up an intelligent policy discussion of this issue should now collectively begin to push harder and harder. I share the optimism of the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), who for many decades has occasionally been a lone and vilified voice. His courage is an object lesson to us all.
Crispin Blunt
I agree with the hon. Lady. There are examples all over the world of much more enlightened policies on drugs. Portugal and the Czech Republic have already been cited, and a number of American states have changed their policies on cannabis.
This is what I find modestly depressing. A bright young new Member of Parliament is elected in 2001, and is appointed to the Home Affairs Committee. He is then party to a report which invites another really good report from the Home Affairs Committee, whose members, as Members of Parliament, sit down and consider the issues properly. He is then party to a recommendation in 2002. He is holding to that position even in 2005, when he is competing for the Conservative party leadership. And here we are now. I found myself becoming one of his Ministers in 2010.
I shall now do what I should not do, and reveal a collective internal political discussion between Ministers who had some responsibility for justice and those from the Home Office. Of course, we did not dare to raise this issue. I pushed as hard as I could for us at least to get to where we are today, and I congratulate the Minister and his predecessor on having pushed so hard to secure the report that has just been published. It is a big step forward for us to persuade the Government even to specify the international comparators. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) was right to point out that the conclusions appear to be missing from the report. Joking apart, however, we all need to understand the political difficulty of carrying this debate with us. We have been frightened of the tabloid press, and we have seen what they did to the Liberal Democrat party as a result of some of its policies in this area.
The Home Affairs Select Committee’s recommendation in 2012 for a royal commission was absolutely right. That will get the matter out of the political space, so that the work on international comparators that has been put into the report can be considered. The royal commission will then be able to put forward the kind of difficult and far-reaching conclusions that I believe would be appropriate to take us in the direction of regulation and away from the utterly disastrous policy of prohibition.
Stephen Phillips
My hon. Friend talks about political courage. In the debate earlier this week on the Recall of MPs Bill, he made a brave speech on restoring the reputation of Parliament. One way of doing that would be for us to take the lead on this matter and tell the truth about the fact that the existing drugs policy has not worked. Should we not simply take on the tabloids—and damn the consequences—by putting in place a policy that works and that is best for the people of this country?
Crispin Blunt
I wholly agree with my hon. and learned Friend. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), he has seen at first hand the horrifying consequences of the failure of our policy in the prison system. I visited 70-odd prisons during my time as prisons Minister, and the most depressing part of those visits was seeing the methadone queue. The prisoners queuing up to be prescribed their methadone were sallow, emaciated and plainly ill, and they had almost no prospect of getting better, given the treatment that they were getting.
We worked hard to start to join up the different parts of the criminal justice system in relation to addiction. We wanted to divert addicts from the criminal justice system and into the health system right at the beginning of the process, so that they could get proper treatment. One of the aims of the probation service reforms is to incentivise the service in regard to the successful rehabilitation of offenders. About 46% of acquisitive crime is drug related, as a result of people trying to feed their habit. If we are to rehabilitate such people successfully, we need to address their addiction. We ran eight pilots in the health service to try to identify the best ways of incentivising the health system to address addiction. All those measures are just baby steps, however, given the way in which the drugs industry has been criminalised. According to a Library note, Home Office figures show that the cost of the problem to the criminal justice system is about £13.9 billion.
Legalisation would create a risk of adverse health consequences. We might see an explosion in drug use, just as we have in the use of another drug, called alcohol, which is omnipresent in our society. Linked to that could be the kind of consequences that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood described, relating to tranquillisers. There could be a significant increase in health problems if we legalised and regulated the supply of drugs that are currently illegal. However, the lessons from Portugal suggest that that would not happen.
Getting the supply of drugs out of the hands of criminals would create the benefits that other hon. Members have mentioned. We would know what was in the drugs, that they were clean and that they had been obtained on the basis of sensible advice about their use. We would then have a society in which people took responsibility for their actions. If someone drove under the influence of drugs, for example, they would have to take the consequences, just as they would today if they drove under the influence of alcohol.
Given the scale of this issue, it is a pity that this debate has had to take place on a Back-Bench motion. The tide of opinion expressed by those who have taken part has so far gone entirely in one direction. I know from my experience as a Minister that, when we first looked at this matter, the Government spent about £900 million on trying to address addiction. The general assessment from Ministers at the time was that that was achieving absolutely nothing. It was felt that the rate at which people were getting better would probably have been exactly the same if that money had not been spent. We were making serious efforts, and the Government are to be commended for their efforts, particularly in the criminal justice system, to join up the management of addicted offenders, but this could all happen much faster and be much more effective if we grasped the root of the problem—namely, the consequences of prohibition.
In the end, drugs are drugs. Alcohol is a drug. We have heard about the example of prohibition in the United States, and of its war on drugs. Both those policies have been utter calamities, and they should present a lesson to the world. I sincerely hope that we in this House will be able to force Her Majesty’s Government to have the courage to address this serious issue in a way that could be of immense benefit to many of our citizens.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
Finding myself simultaneously in agreement with the hon. Members for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), for Newport West (Paul Flynn) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) is a first since I entered this place in 2010. When I came down to the Chamber this morning and I was thinking about the speech I was going to make and the notes I had made, I thought I was going to be committing political suicide. However, it is apparent from the contributions made by Members from across the House today that there is unanimity of view within the House: the current position, enshrined in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, can no longer prevail. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Newport West, who, as he rightly reminded the House, has been speaking, with one voice, on this issue for the past four decades. I have to tell him that the end is in sight and he is going to win in due course.
I wish to start my observations by setting out three startlingly simple propositions, with which this Minister would agree. The first is that the so-called “war on drugs” has been lost. My right hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt)—
Stephen Phillips
Just honourable—that is a great shame.
My hon. Friend made reference to all the political leaders from across the world who have, in effect, made that point since they have left public office. He is no longer on the Front Bench and feels able, as I do, from the Back Benches to make the point that the war on drugs has been lost. That is a strong indication that we are getting policies completely wrong.
The second proposition is that existing drugs policy, focusing principally on criminalisation, is detrimental to health outcomes for individuals and damages society as a whole. The third proposition can now be made with confidence, given the report published by the Government this morning—I will come back to the issue of whether or not it contains any conclusions—but the report on comparative experience in other jurisdictions makes it clear, especially in relation to Portugal although the evidence from a number of other jurisdictions is the same, that decriminalisation not only leads to better outcomes for individuals but lessens the bill for the criminal justice system and provides greater benefits for society as a whole. One of those benefits, which I mentioned when I intervened on the hon. Member for Cambridge, is that it leads to respect for the criminal law.
One problem we have at the moment is that a large number of young people who are using psychoactive substances do not regard that as a crime. For them to be criminalised by the laws of this country leads to a general disrespect on their part for the criminal law and for this place. The hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made an important point in her earlier intervention: we are, or we are perceived by many of our constituents, to be behind the curve on this issue. We are perceived not to be in touch and not to be living in 2014. That is because successive Governments, of all colours, have been held back from doing the right thing, and I want to congratulate this Minister on having, for the first time, what my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate describes as an “intelligent debate”. This is the first time I have heard the House discuss this issue in an intelligent debate.
I intend to return to my three propositions, but it may be of assistance if I say that I come at this matter not only as an MP but as someone with experience of the criminal justice system, not really from practice but from having been a Crown court recorder. Any criminal justice professional in this country we speak to, be they a judge, a police officer or someone working in the probation service, will tell us the same thing: not only is our current approach to the use of illegal drugs in this country not the right one, but it is not based on evidence. Furthermore, it is detrimental to individuals and to society as a whole.
Nobody has been speaking for young people on this issue. They regard us in this House as dinosaurs when we consider the use of recreational drugs. They consider us to be living in a different age, one in which they are no longer living. They have no respect either for the criminal law or for this House, as a result. We have to move on. We have to recognise that times have changed. We must recognise the broad array of recreational psychoactive substances that are now available to young people and have an intelligent policy that does not just say, “You are a criminal if you use those substances.” Instead, we should say, “There are very significant risks to your health and very significant costs potentially to society. Although it is a matter for you whether you use those drugs, there will be consequences, but they will be consequences that we will principally deal with through the health system rather than through the criminal justice system.”
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on bringing forward the debate, and thank the Backbench Business Committee for making it possible. I was a Member of the House before that Committee came into existence and I cannot stress enough to Members who arrived in 2010 how much it has done in making this sort of debate possible—debates that perhaps neither Front-Bench team wanted to happen, but on issues that the public want debated.
I agree about the importance of having a thoroughgoing review on UK drugs policy. First, we must put this in its international context. Most of the leaders of some of the countries that have been at the heart of the international war on drugs would say now that it is not working. More people are taking drugs than before. The harms caused by drugs in some countries—in South America, the Caribbean, Afghanistan—have got worse, so there is an international context, in which people are recognising that an essentially punitive and criminalising approach to drugs is not working. As I said in an intervention, individual American states are moving towards decriminalisation, notably Colorado. Given that the decriminalisation in Colorado has boosted its tourism trade, I put it to the House that it will not be the only US state that goes down that road.
On the question of decriminalisation, I am by nature a libertarian, but I have always taken seriously the arguments of good friends and people with whom I work in Hackney. Their argument has always been that the skunk that young people smoke nowadays is a much more serious matter than the marijuana that some of us may have come across when we were young, and that it is one thing for a fully grown adult, such as a student, to smoke a spliff at a party at a weekend, but when pre-pubescent children smoke skunk, hour after hour when they are out of school, it must, of necessity, have an effect on their growth, educational development and so forth. There was also some concerning research about the links between marijuana and schizophrenia. Therefore, although I have had libertarian instincts since I was a student, as in inner-city MP I take seriously some of the arguments about the possible harm, even of smoking marijuana, and the signal that is sent by decriminalising it.
The fact remains, however, that if we are about anything in the House, we should be about evidence-based policy. This latest report, which the Government have belatedly released, shows that there does not appear to be evidence internationally that a more punitive, criminalised response brings down levels of consumption. On this issue, Members of Parliament have been unduly timid in the past. I can remember my own Home Secretary, a wonderful man, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), who sacked his adviser because they told him something that he did not want to hear: that alcohol was a much more harmful drug than cannabis, not only physically but in terms of the social disorder, domestic violence and so on that it promotes. I am sorry to say that my right hon. Friend’s response was not to say, “Gosh, isn’t that interesting. I must look into these facts,” but to sack the man concerned. Members of Parliament have been timid and have not taken an evidence-based approach. It may well be that Members are behind the opinion of our constituents—
Crispin Blunt
The hon. Lady should distinguish between Members of Parliament and Ministers, who have responsibility for the positions of their party. I think she will find that when Members of Parliament have looked at this properly, as the Home Affairs Committee has done repeatedly, they have been properly courageous.
Diana Johnson
I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee. What worries me about the idea that a royal commission will solve the problem for us is that there are issues that we need to tackle now—for example, legal highs. I am pleased, as I said at the outset, that we now have a plan from the Government for legislation in relation to legal highs. I am not discounting a royal commission, but we need to keep abreast of the issues that are developing now. We need to put in place ways of tackling legal highs and other issues.
It is important to remember that access to treatment is a key issue. In 2001 it took nine weeks to access treatment; in 2011 it took five days. We should be mindful that that was because of the investment in health services. Once people are in treatment, it is important to make sure that they complete it. In 2005-06, 35,000 people dropped out and only 11,000 completed treatment, whereas in 2011-12, 17,000 dropped out but 29,000 completed treatment. We should be aware of such evidence when we debate the drugs situation.
Crispin Blunt
I acknowledge that, as the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Lady is in a difficult position. She is calling for evidence. Whatever her comments on the early part of the motion, it concludes by calling
“on the Government to conduct an authoritative and independent cost-benefit analysis and impact assessment of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and to publish the results of those studies within the next 12 months.”
It would be of immense help if the Opposition proposed such a motion on an Opposition day so that it could be voted on in the House. It would then carry greater authority and they would achieve exactly what she wants—to get the evidence out there.
Diana Johnson
I recognise that it is important for the House to have these debates, and it is good that the Backbench Business Committee granted this one, but I think that the hon. Gentleman is right and that the Government perhaps need to ensure that such issues are debated in Government time, with clear options for what they feel should be taken forward.