Drug Consumption Rooms

Dan Poulter Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Ryan. Thank you for understanding that I am unable to stay until the end of the debate and still calling me to speak.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate, but I must say from the outset that I am against the introduction of these facilities. The problem with support for drug consumption rooms is that it is based on a faulty assumption that the issue with class A drugs is the circumstances in which they are consumed. It is true that many users of class A drugs are killed, injured or exposed to infection by particularly unsafe means of consumption, such as dirty needles. However, the answer is not to create state-sanctioned drug consumption rooms, but to address the real issue: the consumption itself. Our efforts must be focused on getting people off these drugs. Diversions such as drug control rooms only serve to distract from that purpose, or even make matters worse.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on introducing the debate. My hon. Friend makes a point about helping people to get off drugs. Surely the first step is engaging those people with medical services? The purpose of drug consumption rooms is to do exactly that, and to help people to engage in a safe way. That can be the first step to getting them off the drugs.

[Douglas Ross]

I agree that engagement is important; I disagree that the only place in which that engagement can take place is in these drug rooms. I stick by what I said earlier. We really have to ensure that we do not go down this route, because there is ultimately no safe way to take class A drugs—that is why they are classified as such.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.