Diane Abbott
Main Page: Diane Abbott (Labour - Hackney North and Stoke Newington)Department Debates - View all Diane Abbott's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley). We are both old lags in this debate and were both mentioned in the drugs report of 2002.
I am more optimistic than I have been during the past 27 years in which I have made 28 speeches on this matter in this House. At one time we had an annual debate, which was an amazing ritual. The Government, whoever they were, said how wonderfully and successfully things were going, and the Opposition would say, “Yes, we agree.” One moment I prize was when, about half way through, both Front-Bench speakers had to leave the Chamber for a fix—they were both chain smokers. They saw nothing wrong in denouncing young people and then going off to any of the 16 bars in this place and having a whisky and a cigarette. They would have a couple of paracetamol in their pockets for the headaches they were going to have the next morning. They could not see any contradiction between that and laying down laws for young people.
The hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) talked about the myth that the use of drugs has gone down because of Government action. There is absolutely no correlation. Let us look at the past 43 years. When the Drugs Misuse Act 1971 was passed with the support of all parties—always a worrying thing—there were fewer than 1,000 heroin and cocaine addicts in the whole country. The last figure I saw was 320,000. There has been a steady increase over the years. The reason there has now been a decline in cannabis use and other activities by young people is that they have a new addiction. They have an almost universal addiction to their Tablets and iPhones—that is where their attention is going. It is all to do with fashion. Drug taking might be cool one year and naff the following year. It all depends on that.
The hon. Lady made a point about Portugal, which is a great success story. It changed its policy in 2001. Within a very short time the number of deaths went down by 50%,and it does not have the cost of prosecutions and so on. It has been a continuing success. The change in the Czech Republic is relatively recent and we have yet to see the results, but there are encouraging signs.
I have to apologise to the Minister. I was so ungracious as to believe that he was going to follow the path of all the other Ministers with responsibility for drugs, including some very distinguished ones. I remember when the beloved Mo Mowlam was in charge of drugs. Her letters would comprise the civil service reply and a little note on the top, written by her, saying, “See you in the Strangers Bar to tell you what I really think.” [Laughter.] When the current Minister came before the Home Affairs Committee, I asked him whether he had had the compulsory lobotomy to become a Minister with responsibility for drugs in exchange for his red box. It was not true! The Minister stuck to his views, and here we have the first ever intelligent document on drugs from Government in 43 years—the only one that is evidence-based. We have had evidence-free, prejudice-rich policies for years from politicians who were cowardly. They would not take on the tabloids. Some years ago, the Liberal Democrats decided that they were going to pursue the policy that we are encouraging today and they were denounced by The Sun for going to pot.
There is cowardice because of prejudice, but we know that public opinion is way ahead of us. The public know the stupidity and impotence of our drugs policy. I regularly ask how many prisons in Britain are drug free. I always get the answer that there are none. If we cannot keep hard drugs out of prisons, how on earth can we keep them out of schools, clubs or anywhere else? It is a pretence.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Women go into prisons like Holloway drug-free and come out with a drug habit, such are the difficulties of keeping drugs out of prison.
Paul Flynn
There is a splendid book called “Invisible Women” about Holloway prison, which I commend to everyone. It tells the terrible story of what is going on there.
Another point about prison is that one medicine that was given to young women who had been badly treated and were mutilating themselves was largactil. There was a name for them in prison: they were called muppets. This was a drug for those who had serious mental health problems. The whole sorry story of drugs in prison is one of abuse by many medicinal drugs. A blind eye was turned to cannabis use because it kept a lid on things. If prisoners were on alcohol they were aggressive, but if they were on cannabis they would give everyone a hug. That is how the prisons liked it. The prison policies pursued by all parties are completely hypocritical and they illustrate the futility of prohibition.
I received a call before I came to the House from someone talking about the use of medicinal cannabis, which I have supported for a very long time. It is not that I want to use it. I have never used any illegal drug and I have no plans to use cannabis. The point is the irrationality of the Government’s stand. Cannabis in its natural form is one of the oldest drugs in the world. It has been used on all continents for 5,000 years. Now, because we are nervous and it is an illegal drug, we allow people to have only little bits of cannabis. Dronabinol, nabilone or TAC are available, but they contain only a small number of ingredients from the hundreds in any natural substance.
Dr Huppert
The hon. Lady is absolutely right, as I said in an intervention. Politicians are behind, at least in what they are prepared to say. Another survey two years ago—I cannot remember which paper ran it—showed that 77% of MPs thought we should have reform, as long as they knew they would not be named in the survey and asked to introduce it. Politicians should have the courage of their convictions, and the public’s convictions, and take action.
I shall pick up the point made by the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who chairs the Health Committee. We have indeed seen a reduction in the raw numbers—she is absolutely right—but I think that is largely because people are taking new psychoactive substances. We are seeing a huge increase in people taking legal alternatives, rather than illegal substances. The perversity of that is that we have pushed people to take substances whose safety we know less about. We know less about the harms and we are probably increasing the risk to those people very substantially. We should also look at the system. Smoking tobacco is more harmful than chewing khat, but why would we make the dangerous one legal and the not-so-dangerous one illegal? It seems like a very strange thing to do.
As a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I was delighted that the Chair, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is sadly not in his place, agreed when I kept insisting that we should have a look at this issue. We undertook a detailed study and we heard from experts around the world. We concluded, on a cross-party basis, a key objective:
“The principal aim of Government drugs policy should be first and foremost to minimise the damage caused to the victims of drug-related crime, drug users and others.”
That is a call to completely rethink how we do drugs policy: to focus on reducing the harm, not on how many people do things that we badge as illegal.
The Home Secretary of course rejected the report’s findings and just carried on with business as usual, but we had one key victory. We secured agreement for an international comparators study, which has been worked on by my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne) and, now, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Prevention. That is what has come out today, and although there is a serious gap where some of the conclusions ought to be—one feels that one is being led towards something, only to find a missing paragraph saying what one should do—it is very clear. The fundamental point is that sounding tough does not matter. The rhetoric does not make any difference; it is about outcomes. The study says:
“Looking across different countries, there is no apparent correlation between the ‘toughness’ of a country's approach and the prevalence of…drug use.”
That is key. If being tough actually reduced drug use around the world, we would have to look again, but it simply does not work. It creates extra harms, so the argument falls down.
What does work? There have been lots of academic studies. The thing that most reduces drug use is having a more equal society. Solving that may be beyond the scope of this debate, and certainly beyond my scope in the time I have left, but that is what will work—not tough laws, but a more equal society. Yet we continue with the tough approach. Every year we spend millions of pounds jailing something like 1,000 people for no offence other than possession. We are not talking about people who have burgled; we are talking about simple possession offences. They are not dealers; they are not doing worse things. Jailing them does not help them to deal with their addiction; if anything, it makes things worse for them and takes money that we could spend helping them instead of punishing them.
It is therefore really good progress that we now see acceptance from the Government that a tough drugs policy does not reduce usage. Contrary to what the Home Secretary said to the Home Affairs Committee, the Government have finally accepted that in Portugal decriminalisation and a focus on treatment have not led to more drug use.
We have the Minister on board, but we need to get the Home Secretary to agree to go ahead. We spend vast amounts of money on a drugs policy. Estimates vary between £3 billion and £10 billion a year, depending on which costs are included. Times are tight, so we should spend that money effectively. We should use police resources effectively, too. If police are kept busy dealing with simple possession offences, that is time and effort that they cannot use to settle violent or acquisitive crime, or indeed the gang crime that our war on drugs is fuelling. That is why so many police officers have spoken out.
The chief constable of Durham, Mike Barton, has argued for the decriminalisation of class A drugs, highlighting the fact that prohibition has put billions of pounds into the hands of the criminals he is supposed to be fighting. Many others say the same, including Chief Constable Tom Lloyd, my own former chief constable:
“Drug dealers all over the world are laughing at law enforcement…I want the end of prohibition and the start of control and regulation so we don’t have dealers on the street.”
He has also highlighted the harm done to young people, because for a huge proportion of them, their first contact with the law comes from being stopped and searched for drugs offences. When someone is convicted, according to Tom Lloyd:
“It seems hypocritical to saddle a young person with a criminal conviction that could blight their lives”.
Such people often have problems getting jobs and travelling in the future. This causes huge problems. Because of our criminalised system, we have no control over what drugs are cut with—and these cutting agents are often worse than the drugs themselves.
We also have huge problems with discrimination. For black and minority ethnic groups, the use of harder drugs is lower, but arrests are higher and they are twice as likely to proceed to court than white people. That is not right; we should not be doing that. With more than half of stop and searches being for possession, even the Home Secretary has acknowledged the problems that can result from that.
We need a new system, focusing on treatment, education and rehabilitation and dealing with the harms caused by drugs. How we pay for that is a challenge. The answer is to take money from the criminal justice system. We need to divert the money from spending on policing and prison towards spending on helping people to break their addiction. My party has called for exactly that, continuing to spearhead those calls. At our party conference in October this year, we had a new crime policy paper, which picked up on this issue. It called for a transfer of powers from the Home Office to the Department of Health, saying that drug addiction is a health problem and should be seen as such. We should make sure that people are not sent to prison for personal possession; we should move towards decriminalisation. We propose having a royal commission to take an overall view of what we do and to keep an eye on what is happening with cannabis in the US and Uruguay. I agree with the hon. Member for Totnes that it is too early to be certain about the outcomes; we need to keep an eye open.
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.
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.
Ms Abbott
I stand corrected on that. Certainly Ministers in the two major parties have been increasingly behind the opinion of their constituents, who, after all, could be eminently respectable figures but might just possibly in their youth have been in a room with someone who was smoking cannabis. They will know that young people growing up in London today cannot lead a life where they never come across, never see or never hear of people smoking cannabis. Our constituents may be more realistic about these issues than some Ministers have been able to be in the past and even now.
This has been a difficult issue for MPs and Ministers, but speaking as someone who represents a constituency that sees the very worst of drug harms, and on the basis of the evidence, past reports and today’s Home Office report, there is an unanswerable case for a review of UK drugs policy.
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.
Ms Abbott
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, for whom I have the utmost respect, but when she says that the status quo is not failing, I do not understand what world she is living in. It is failing young people in London. I think that her faith in the statistics on access to treatment is misplaced, because young people in the east end of London have great difficulty accessing treatment. The status quo is failing. Young people of all classes—not just the underclass—are continuing to suffer from drug harm because Members of this House are too frightened to look at the recent evidence.
Diana Johnson
I am not frightened to look at the evidence, but we need to look at what is happening today in the round; we must not cherry-pick. I have the same concerns as my hon. Friend about treatment now, because of the Government’s misguided reforms of the NHS. There is fragmentation in the treatment services across the country, which is something that many people are genuinely concerned about. [Interruption.]