Drug Consumption Rooms

Crispin Blunt Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and I congratulate him on securing the debate. I recognise that we have a shared interest in the work that we jointly do as officers of the all-party parliamentary group on drug policy reform.

The hon. Gentleman will be unsurprised that I largely agree with his analysis. My hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Douglas Ross) might be a little more surprised about that, but I congratulate him on his speech and on taking part in the debate and representing a view that appears to represent the majority in Parliament. That is an example of the challenge one faces in getting consideration of this issue into the era of evidence and in getting it addressed around the issue of public health.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), who will reply to the debate for the Government, is entirely typical in that in nearly all the nations of the world drugs policy sits in an interior or Home Department where drugs policy sits. That is frankly wrong. It ought to be sitting in Health. We are dealing with a very serious health issue.

It would be very nice if the world’s objective to deliver detox and abstinence, as elucidated by my hon. Friend the Member for Moray, was realistic. The world has been trying to do that collectively for nearly 60 years, and the position continues to get worse and worse. The criminal justice consequences of this policy are utterly appalling, and I speak from experience, having served as the Minister responsible for prisons, probation and criminal justice for two and a half years. That is just in the United Kingdom. Half of acquisitive crime is driven by addiction, and if we cannot do anything about addiction, we should be not remotely surprised that the cost to our country of the criminal justice impact is in the order of £13.5 billion, which I think was the figure given in the Government’s latest drug strategy.

From a criminal justice perspective, I would have traded the massive savings we make in criminal justice to get this issue out of criminal justice and into public health. As I have got into this issue and understood it better, I see that these two things go hand in hand. We would get a significant public health advantage by being more transparent and open about our treatment of addiction. Even if a country was not prepared to go outside the global convention and global policy on the war on drugs—to go as far as Portugal has gone—and simply decriminalised low-level use, it would see a massive improvement in its public health outcomes.

[Dr Poulter]

My hon. Friend is making a characteristically constructive and well-informed speech about a matter he knows well. One of the problems with the current approach is that by punishing people who, through addiction, are medically unwell—that is the way I see it, as a doctor—we are worsening the ability to engage with them effectively in healthcare terms and worsening the spiral of addiction through debt and the criminal justice consequences. Does he agree that that needs to change?

[Crispin Blunt]

I wholly agree. My hon. Friend, with his medical background, speaks with authority on this matter. Drug consumption rooms plainly, on the basis of evidence around the world, ought to be part of our attempt to treat people who find themselves in the wretched position of being addicted to the most difficult and dangerous drugs. It is simply about the evidence. No one has died globally in a properly overseen drug consumption room, and yet in our country, 1,707 people died as a result of illicit heroin use in 2016. The extraordinarily stark contrast between the figures in Portugal and Scotland alone ought to make all of us think very carefully about the implications of our current policy.

[Douglas Ross]

I hope my hon. Friend will agree that while no one has died in a drug consumption room, that does not mean that no one who has used a drug consumption room has died as a result of drug taking. As I said in my speech, we cannot get everyone to go every time. Some go once, and some go every now and then. We cannot force them to go every time.

[Crispin Blunt]

No, of course my hon. Friend is right, but I am not entirely sure what the merits of his point are.

[Douglas Ross]

It does not solve the problem because people still die.

[Crispin Blunt]

The truth is that we will never solve the problem. Humanity has been using drugs in one form or another for thousands of years. My hon. Friend almost certainly uses a drug, unless he is a teetotaller.

[Douglas Ross]

This month I am.

[Crispin Blunt]

Then frankly my hon. Friend is in quite a rare position. The vast majority of people—certainly Members of this House—use a drug perfectly legally, and that drug is called alcohol. It happens to be the drug that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said is probably the most dangerous drug in use in the United Kingdom in terms of its impact. He is a football referee, and having seen football crowds he will know the difficulty of policing crowds under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol is a significant and difficult drug.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and that body has recommended that DCRs are a policy that we should pursue. Would he agree that it is the case that not only have DCRs not been a venue where people have died, but they have been one of the most effective interventions at getting people away from addictions? DCRs are not being complacent about addiction; they are being realistic—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

On resuming—

[Crispin Blunt]

I shall conclude by saying that one should recognise the challenge facing the Minister, given the circumstances she faces. It is difficult enough when our policy and, I believe, global policy are stuck in absolutely the wrong place; we have had 60 years of the policy not working. She then has to deal with the legislative framework that she has to operate within. She then has to try and find a way actually to get drug consumption rooms working, when the overwhelming evidence on the ground is of the benefits they can bring to the communities in which they are placed. They get needles and addicts off the streets, stop people shooting up on the streets, and put addicts on the route to recovery. That is able to happen in an entirely safe place. The public health outcomes need to be a priority for us.

Recognising those difficulties, all I ask of the Minister is that she learns, as I am learning about this issue as I engage with it, and that she and the Government remain open to all the evidence that is coming in from all around the world, through all the different examples. On drug consumption rooms, I very gently suggest that the evidence from around the world is utterly overwhelming about their merits.

[Joan Ryan (in the Chair)]

May I just say that if Back Benchers who wish to speak stick to three minutes each, everybody will get a turn to speak?