Ten-Year Drugs Strategy

John Penrose Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

That is a matter for the Department of Health and Social Care, but, where requests have come to me to facilitate the acquisition of those products for affected families who need them, we have moved heaven and earth to do so as quickly as we could. The hon. Lady might be interested to know that we are reaching the end of a piece of work by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs on barriers to research and medical exploitation of particular compounds. I hope that we will be able to publish that soon and cover some of the regulatory hurdles that she points to.

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I welcome the 10-year strategy’s focus on both prevention and enforcement as well as treatment. I welcome that it pledges to implement, I think, all of Dame Carol Black’s excellent recommendations, but there was one glaring omission in her terms of reference: any attempt to address the underlying legislative structure of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. From that moment, we have seen a burgeoning of the illegal industry, and that is our current drugs problem. Do the Government have any intention to address this underlying, much more difficult and intractable issue?

[Kit Malthouse]

I understand what my hon. Friend said about the implications of the Act. At the moment, we do not have any plans to revise it, but we will bring forward a White Paper in the spring that will lay out, in particular, where we want to go on dealing with the overwhelming volume of drug consumption, which is among those who do not regard themselves as addicted.