UK Drugs Policy

Debate between Diane Abbott and Crispin Blunt

Thursday 30th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Ms Abbott]

The hon. Gentleman referred to the international context. Does he agree that it is significant that at least one American state—Colorado—has decriminalised marijuana? Is that not a sign that the tide is turning in regard to the efficacy of the war on drugs?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.