Drugs

Debate between Hugh Bayley and Keith Vaz

Thursday 6th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, in this important debate. I am pleased to see the Minister here, as well as the colleagues from the Select Committee on Home Affairs who said that they would come. I pay tribute to those Committee members who participated in drafting and agreeing the report: the hon. Members for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) and for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook), my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) and the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). In particular, I commend the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and our colleague the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, who first pressed for the inquiry. The hon. Member for Cambridge is in his place. Like me, he is torn between two debates in the House on home affairs. We are occupying the time of Home Office Ministers in both Westminster Hall and the main Chamber: gladly, not the same Minister. I am also grateful to Committee staff, particularly the specialist Ellie Scarnell, for all their hard work.

The Committee’s report, published on 3 December 2012, is entitled “Breaking the Cycle”. It is our first report on drugs for more than a decade; the last time we considered the issue, in 2002, a young Member of the House, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), was on the Committee, which should give other Committee members heart that they have a great political future ahead of them. We spent a year looking in depth at drug education, prevention and treatment for drug addiction, at reducing the supply of drugs in both the United Kingdom and abroad and at the evidence on which drugs policy was based. We visited two countries: Colombia, where we travelled into the jungle to see where cocaine is produced, and Portugal, to examine the drug laws there. We had nearly 200 evidence submissions and 48 conclusions and recommendations. We heard views from people as diverse as Sir Richard Branson, Russell Brand and Peter Oborne. The ex-president of Switzerland, Ruth Dreifuss, also gave evidence to the Committee.

This debate, for which we canvassed so many people’s support, is current. Just today, there was a letter in The Times calling for an independent review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, signed by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) as the former leader of the Green party, Professor David Nutt, Sting and many others, including the hon. Member for Cambridge and myself. Public response to the report has been overwhelming. Society cares deeply about the issue, because it affects us all and the costs are borne by each and every one of us. In the United Kingdom alone, drug addicts commit between one third and one half of all acquisitive crime, and drugs cost our health and justice system £15.3 billion a year.

The debate following the report’s publication caused great excitement in the press. The Mail on Sunday front page read:

“MPs pave way to legalise drugs”.

The front page of the more sober Guardian said that MPs were calling for

“a royal commission on failing drugs laws”.

It has become a feature of reports by the Home Affairs Committee and other Committees that we do not just make recommendations; we also monitor them to see whether they have been implemented. I call it our traffic light report. Each recommendation is awarded a colour: red when the Government have done nothing about it, yellow when they are moving in the right direction and green if the recommendation has been accepted. After all—you will know this, Mr Bayley, from your distinguished service on Select Committees —there is no point in having a Select Committee inquiry, going into a subject in depth and providing recommendations if nobody wants to implement them.

I am pleased to say that the Government have accepted or partially accepted just under 50% of the conclusions and recommendations in our drugs report. That is not as much as in other reports, but they are moving in the right direction. It was, however, disappointing that they rejected our main recommendation calling for a royal commission, although I warmly welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s support for it.

I am delighted that the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), who is here today, is following our recommendations and considering drugs policies abroad, visiting countries such as Denmark and Sweden. In particular, I am glad that he is considering visiting Portugal, or may have done so already; we will hear his travel plans and where he has been in his speech. We visited Portugal, as I have said, and saw at first hand what the Portuguese are doing. I hope that when he went to Portugal he met, or that if he goes to Portugal he will meet, Dr Fernando Leal da Costa, the Portuguese Health Minister, who was kind enough to attend our drugs conference in September and give the 200-plus attendees a fascinating insight into the impact of their policies.

We decided to call our report “Breaking the Cycle” because we identified a number of critical intervention points where, if the right action is taken, the devastating cycle of drug addiction can be broken. The first critical intervention point is during childhood. Prevention is better than cure, and the education system has a vital role to play in ensuring that children and young people resist peer pressure and understand the risks involved in taking drugs. We found that drugs education provision was patchy. The Department for Education noted that most primary and secondary schools provide it once a year at most. A number of our witnesses were highly critical of the quality of awareness provided in the education system. In some cases, they believed that it was likely to inspire children to take drugs rather than the opposite.

The Government have now told us that education will be their focus in the third year of the drugs strategy. In our view, we cannot wait three years for a resolution to the issue. This is the earliest possible chance to break the cycle of drug addiction, and we cannot squander it. Local authorities are being left to decide and fund the most appropriate way of educating children about the dangers of drugs. As focus rightly moves from enforcement for possession to tackling supply and demand, it is vital that our children are aware that there are more risks to drug taking than just being arrested.

Another critical intervention point is recovery from addiction. In 2011-12, some 96,070 people were given a prescription for a substitute drug as a method of treatment. Another 30,000 people were given a prescription and some sort of counselling. Only 1,100 people were in residential rehabilitation.

If the Government are serious about their policy of recovery, they must improve the quality and range of treatments available. There is an over-reliance on prescription treatment, and no recognition of the importance of also treating the psychological symptoms of addiction. Each individual needs a treatment plan tailored to their needs. Intensive treatment is more expensive in the short term, but if it breaks the cycle of drug addiction, the long-term benefits to society are enormous and the cost to society is greatly reduced.

Treatments that we know work, such as residential rehabilitation and buprenorphine as an alternative to methadone, are under-utilised. In 2011, more than 400 deaths were related to methadone. Treatment must also be supplemented by housing, training and employment support, if required, because the end goal of recovery is integration into society. A league table of treatment centre performance should be established so that patients do not waste time and money on care that is not up to scratch. The Department of Health and the Home Office should lead jointly on drugs to ensure that the focus on recovery is maintained. If we reduce demand, we automatically reduce supply.

Many groups are working hard to bring such matters to the Government’s attention, and we met some of them during our inquiry. I want to commend the work being done by Mitch Winehouse, and the living memorial that he has set up to his daughter Amy. He has been one of the most vocal and articulate voices about the provision of rehabilitation support to so many people.

Prison is another critical intervention point. Tackling drug addiction, as the Secretary of State for Justice has said, is vital to the prevention of costly reoffending. Some 29% of prisoners reported having a drug problem when they arrived in prison, 6% developed a drug problem after having arrived and 24% reported that it was easy or very easy to get drugs there. Last year, Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick, reported an increase in the number of people in prison with prescription drug addiction.

The Committee visited Her Majesty’s Prisons Brixton and Holloway, and we were impressed by their voluntary testing schemes, which were having a real impact on addiction. I want to thank the governors of Brixton, Edmond Tullett, and of Holloway, Julia Killick, for helping to make that happen. We were, however, concerned that funding for such schemes was under threat.

I welcome the Justice Secretary’s commitment to a rehabilitation revolution, with inmates being met at the prison gates to be given support. To identify those who need rehabilitation, we need compulsory testing on entry to and exit from prison, including for the use of prescription drugs. We must also ensure that the voluntary sector, with its valuable experience, has a chance to win rehabilitation contracts against large procurement companies such as G4S that are cheaper but, frankly, just do not have the expertise.

The Committee’s visit to Miami alerted us to the epidemic scale of prescription drug addiction in the United States. More than half of American drug addicts are prescription drug addicts. It is difficult to measure the exact scale of the problem in the UK, because treatment is by general practitioners and is not treated as drug addiction. However, valuable reports by newspapers such as The Times highlight that it is a ticking time bomb in British society that we are doing very little to address. It is a problem not just in our prisons, but right across the country.

I was pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who has responsibility for public health, highlighted her concerns about the abuse of prescription medication several months ago. I hope that the Government will heed the Committee’s warning and push the issue up their agenda as a matter of urgency. In Miami, we heard about the first prosecution of a doctor for giving out multiple prescription drugs. People sometimes say that if we look at America, we see what might very well happen in Europe: it is on an epidemic scale, and I urge the Government to consider that very carefully.

If prescription drugs are a powder keg awaiting a spark, legal highs have already exploded. In 2012, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction identified 73 new drugs in Europe, which is 10 times the number of new substances identified in 2006. A survey on the drug use of 15 to 24-year-olds found that 8% of them had taken a legal high.

The drugs market is changing, and as well as warning our children of the dangers of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, we need to worry about the creation of a culture in which people can order so many legal highs for next-day delivery through the internet. The Government have introduced temporary banning orders, but just last month Maryon Stewart, who gave evidence to our inquiry, found legal highs on sale on Amazon. There are 200 different substances that are not covered by our drug laws, and we do not know the dangers of those psychoactive substances because, clearly, we have not tried them. Temporary banning orders work, and once a substance has been banned it can no longer be used, but what are the Government doing about the five substances that are created for every one that is banned?

New Zealand is introducing a law to regulate such substances, under which the requirement to prove that the drugs are safe is a duty on the manufacturer. I do not want to extend the Minister’s travel plans, because I know how much he likes staying in his constituency, having been a Foreign Office Minister and gone all over the world, as he did so assiduously, but we should look at what New Zealand is doing. I am suggesting not that he needs to go there, but that he engage with what New Zealand Ministers have done, because we should adopt such good practice in future. I urge the Government to follow our recommendation to make retailers liable for the harms caused by untested psychoactive substances that they have sold. Just as a garage would be responsible for a crash involving a faulty car, legal high sellers should be accountable for the effects of their products.

The cost of ineffective drugs policy reaches far wider than the United Kingdom. During the Committee’s visit to Colombia, we witnessed how the devastating impact of drugs extends far beyond the addict. In 2010, coca was cultivated on 149,100 hectares in Andean countries—an area roughly one and a half times the size of Hong Kong—that cannot afford to fight the drugs war on their own. The value of the global cocaine market is £543 billion, while Bolivia’s national budget, for example, is just £1.69 billion. Despite damage to their land, farmers receive only 1% of the revenue from global cocaine sales. When the Committee met the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, he asked us why his policemen, his judges and his citizens should die in the war on drugs when members of the British public were the ones who wanted to use those drugs. The responsibility lies with us.

I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to President Santos and his soldiers and police officers who, day after day, die protecting us from the scourge of cocaine. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I shall be meeting him this afternoon as he is in London and I will again convey the thanks of our country. I also want to thank the Colombian ambassador to the United Kingdom, His Excellency Ambassador Rodriguez, for his assistance with our visit to Colombia and for keeping us informed with a regular dialogue.

Some 85% of profits are earned by distributors of drugs in the United States or Europe, and the United Nations estimates that global drugs profits stand at £380 billion, the vast majority of which ends up in our financial system. Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said:

“I cannot think of one bank in the world that has not been penetrated by mafia money.”

Banks with British bases, such as Coutts and HSBC, have been found guilty of laundering drugs money, yet there have been no individual prosecutions, just fines, which are basically a drop in the ocean for multinational banks. Those companies need to hear the rattling of handcuffs in their boardrooms. We must bring forward new legislation to extend the personal criminal liability of those who hold senior positions in our banks and who have been found wanting for not dealing with money laundering.

The Financial Services Authority did not come up to scratch on that issue, as it ignored almost $380 billion of money laundered by the drug cartels and dealers. I hope—I look to the Minister for assurance on this matter—that the new Financial Conduct Authority will be much tougher than the FSA, because we were not overly convinced by the FSA’s work.

After a year scrutinising UK drugs policy, it was clear to the Committee that many aspects of our current drugs policy were simply not working and needed to be reviewed. When the then Lord Chancellor, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), gave evidence to the Committee, he told us that the war on drugs had failed. The Prison Governors Association also recently said that we needed to rethink our approach to drugs. We are not dealing with the dealers or focusing on the users. Drugs still cost thousands of lives and billions of pounds each year.

People are already describing Guinea-Bissau as the world’s first narco-state. That is why we felt that, even after a year’s inquiry, the visits that we made and the evidence that we took, it was vital that the Government established a royal commission. We felt that the best way forward was to bring all the people with great expertise, including those who have been affected by drugs, before a royal commission headed by a High Court judge so that we can study in huge depth this subject that even we, after a year, have not got to the bottom of.

I urge the Minister to reconsider our proposal on a royal commission. I think that he supports the idea of one, but the problem is with other parts of the coalition Government. It is the policy of his party and his leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, to support a royal commission, and it is a policy that has been advocated by the hon. Member for Cambridge. I cannot remember the quote of the Deputy Prime Minister, but he once lavishly praised the hon. Gentleman, saying that as far as he was concerned, on certain aspects of policy, what the hon. Member for Cambridge said went. I hope very much that the royal commission can be established and that the Government will look at all aspects of drugs policy, so that there is a proper debate. We do not want a situation in which politicians run away as soon as the word “drugs” is mentioned and everyone hides under the table. We want a proper and open discussion, as I had in Leicester. I asked the Leicester Mercury to conduct a citizens’ poll to tell me what the people felt about the matter. I pay tribute to the Leicester Mercury and all the other local papers that were part of that debate. Let the people decide; let them put forward their views to a royal commission. I believe that that is the proper way forward.

To those who say that a royal commission could last forever, let me say that we thought about that, which is why we suggested that it should have an end date of 2015—that magic year in the history of our country when all things will change and all things will become visible. This matter is a great challenge for us and for our generation of politicians and I hope that we will rise to it.

[Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)]

I think that the Chamber should hear from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert).