Drugs

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, and to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, especially after his kind words. I am not sure that they were entirely accurate. I think that he was referring to the draft Communications Data Bill, which he and I and various others have discussed in the past.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee on having the courage to ensure that the Committee considered this issue, because it is so sensitive and can lead to a huge amount of concern in some parts of the press. I also congratulate him on his leadership and on his speech, which took much of the content out of what I was planning to say, so I will only focus on a few key issues. There is a huge amount in this very thick and detailed report, and I support it completely.

I want to begin with the basic principles of how we start to work. First and fairly obviously, drugs are harmful. They are harmful whether they are legal or illegal; whether they are cocaine, marijuana, paracetamol or one of the new legal highs. They all have harms, and many of them also have benefits. As we say in one of the key parts of the report, the question is how we deal with those harms. Paragraph 14 of the report states:

“Drug use can lead to harm in a variety of ways: to the individual who is consuming the drug; to other people who are close to the user; through acquisitive and organised crime, and wider harm to society at large. The drugs trade is the most lucrative form of crime, affecting most countries, if not every country in the world.”

The principal aim of the Government drugs policy should be first and foremost to minimise those harms, but how do we go about doing that? How do we reduce the harms from alcohol and heroin and the harms from prescription drugs, which can be abused? For more than 40 years now, the answer has principally been to separate drugs into a category of legal or illegal—I use the term loosely of course because the drug itself cannot be legal or illegal, but possession can be. For the illegal ones, we have focused principally on the criminal justice approach—policing, courts, prisons and all the sanctions of the Home Office.

When the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was passed—interestingly, it has never been reviewed since 1971—the debate was all about how it would lead to the end of the use of illegal drugs. That was the Act’s aim. It certainly has not worked in that respect. If we were in a world now where no one had any of the drugs for which possession was illegal, we would be having a very different debate.

The Act simply has not worked, and that has been very expensive. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has estimated that 0.48% of the UK’s GDP is spent on our overall drugs strategy. I think that that is the highest rate of expenditure in Europe, and yet for many drugs, we have among the highest rates of use in Europe. We are spending lots of money, but there is lots of drug use—the Act is just not working.

In the process, we have hit many people’s lives. We have left people to languish in jail for a long time. Also, we have made people who possess small amounts of drugs go to jail, and many of them suffer problems trying to live and work afterwards. Even a caution for the most minor offences can still affect people’s ability to live and work. So we need to change things.

I have heard it said—there is some basis for saying it—that drug use is currently down. However, that is only true when looking at the drugs that we have made illegal. What we know—as the Chair of the Select Committee highlighted—is that there are now many other new psychoactive substances that people are moving to because of the pressure that we are putting on for legal reasons. We have no idea whether encouraging people to stop taking marijuana and to start taking one of the new things that they can find legally online somewhere is better or worse for them. We have no idea whether the harms caused by the other drugs will be better or worse. So we may well be pushing people to things that are far worse than the things that we are trying to clamp down on.

We also have to look at this issue in the round. We have to look at the pressures of alcohol. I asked one of the police officers who gave evidence if his officers would rather face, at the end of an evening, a group of four men who were drunk or a group of four men who were stoned. Most police officers would far rather deal with the people who had used marijuana. We have to look at the impacts of some of these other issues.

As the Chairman of the Select Committee quite rightly said, one of the key things that we say is that we need to look again at this issue. These days, we do not allow legislation to sit by for 40 years without looking at it; we try to have post-legislative scrutiny to see whether a law is working and doing what it is supposed to do. That is why the Select Committee has called for a royal commission to look at the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That is what our report says, and we are not the only people saying it by any stretch of the imagination.

The UK Drug Policy Consortium has done six years of work on the issue and it has called for many of the same things that we have called for; I commend all its detailed publications. Huge numbers of organisations say what our report says; I could mention many of them, such as Transform and Release. Also, we are increasingly getting senior people who have had experience of this fight, including senior people from MI5, MI6 and the police, who say, “No. We’re not doing it the right way. We have to change.” In Cambridgeshire, Tom Lloyd, the former chief constable, who has huge experience of dealing with the criminal justice approach to drugs, is very clear—indeed, categorical—that we need to change.

Our Committee has not gone as far as some suggest. The Chair of our Committee referred to the article in The Mail on Sunday, which suggested that we support full legalisation, but that is not what we recommended. However, we supported a proposal that was made more than 10 years ago by the Home Affairs Committee and supported by the Prime Minister, as he is now. That proposal was very clear, and the Prime Minister voted in favour of a proposal that we also endorse. It is that

“we recommend that the Government initiate a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma.”

That is what the Prime Minister said 10 years ago. The key thing in that recommendation is that not only legalisation should at least be considered; we also have to regulate. That may or may not be the right answer, which is why we need a royal commission.

Our Committee called for a royal commission and we published this detailed, thick report. I was impressed that, within only an hour or so of its being published, the Home Secretary was able to say no, nothing in the report was new and that people did not need to learn from it. That was an impressively fast response. I commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for the work that he has been doing on this issue. There have been some positive things, and the full Government response was rather more positive than the initial comment that came out from the Home Office.

The Chair of our Committee described the Government response as supporting about half of our recommendations. In a number of cases, the suggestion from the Government was that what we were recommending was already being done. We could argue about the extent to which that is true, but my summary is that the Government response was largely saying no to most of our new suggestions.

However, I strongly welcome two things in the Government response to our report, because I think that they will make the difference. Again, I strongly commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for his work to get them into the Government response. One of them is set out at the top of page 15, where an interesting sentence says:

“High quality drug treatment is the most effective way of reducing drug misuse and reducing drug related mortality.”

I agree completely with that. To start off by putting treatment as the principal aim rather than the criminal justice focus is exactly what many of us have been arguing for. We now need the Government to follow through on their own statement that we need to focus on the “high quality drug treatment” and not on the policing or the criminal justice. That fits with our recommendation that we need to get the Department of Health far more involved.

With the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister, having a Drugs Minister based in the Home Office means that the starting point will always be the criminal justice-led approach. There is co-operation and working with the Department of Health, but many other countries have the lead for drugs policy based in their departments of health—or their equivalent—because the focus needs to be on treatment, as the Government here have now accepted.

The other key thing that came out of the Government response was the international comparators study. I was very pleased to see that. During our evidence sessions, it was clear that although there was a stated commitment, in the words of the Drugs Strategy 2010,

“to review new evidence on what works in other countries and what we can learn from it”,

that commitment was being honoured—certainly at ministerial level—in a slightly more relaxed way than perhaps some of us might have liked. It is absolutely right that we should proactively look at other countries to see what they achieve.

My hon. Friend the Minister has been to Portugal already, and I am sure that he will talk a bit later about what he saw there. When our Committee went to Portugal, we saw a few things that were really striking. The Portuguese model is often misdescribed. In Portugal, it is still an offence to possess large amounts of any drug and it is still a criminal offence to supply drugs. The key difference is that possession of a relatively small amount of any drug—up to 10 days’ personal supply, and there are estimated figures for what that amount is—is treated outside the criminal justice system. There are dissuasion commissions that deal with those cases in a non-judicial way; there is no criminal sanction and the focus is on treatment. The aim is to have individualised care, to make sure that people can get out of using drugs.

We were impressed by how fast people could be set up with treatment in Portugal. There are often delays in the UK in trying to find appropriate treatment facilities. In Portugal, people said that it was very frustrating that sometimes they would have to wait for two days, which would be amazingly fast for many of the people in my constituency who I have spoken to. So Portugal has this process whereby people who are addicts are pushed towards treatment. There are other ways that they can be dealt with, but none of them involves dealing with the criminal justice process and none of them affects people’s ability to work, except in a very few special circumstances.

The Portuguese approach was controversial when it was established but it seems to have worked, and there are a number of ways to look at it. According to the official Portuguese figures, the number of long-term addicts has declined from more than 100,000 people before the new policy was enacted, which was about 10 years ago, to half that number today. The Portuguese have also found less drug use in prison.

What was striking when we went to Portugal and spoke to politicians from across the political range—from the Christian democrats on the right to the communists on the far left—was that none of them disagreed with the policy. With the Christian democrats, we had an interesting meeting with a very impressive woman from the party who had opposed the policy when it was introduced. The Christian democrats had made all sorts of dire predictions about what would happen—the sort of thing that we can read in The Daily Mail—but they said, “We were wrong. We didn’t see increased drug use, which we were concerned about; we didn’t see drug tourism; we didn’t see any of the problems.”

The live debate in Portugal around drugs policy is whether treatment should be funded on a national or regional basis. That was the debate across the political spectrum. Nobody was questioning whether the decriminalisation of possession of small amounts was the right thing or wrong thing to do. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), who was leading us on that occasion, made a point of asking everybody whether they agreed in principle with the policy. Not a single person disagreed; we could not find anybody who did so. We spoke to the police, who had originally opposed it, and they said, “Actually, this has been better for us for policing. We don’t have to spend so much time on people who are addicts, who are small users. Instead, they can help us to deal with the people who are dealing, who are causing the higher-level problems with gangs and organised crime.” Nobody opposed the policy.

We met a gentleman who leads a non-governmental organisation that is staunchly anti liberalising the drugs policy—it was the closest we came to meeting somebody who disagreed—and he said that 10 days’ supply was too much and that it should be more like two or three days’ supply. I explained that that would be seen as phenomenally liberal in this country, and he was shocked. They all agree that that is not the right way to go. I hope the Minister found things much the same in Portugal—I am sure he will speak for himself—and that there was a strong sense that the policy worked well.

The principle of focusing on not criminalising people in possession has already been accepted by the Government in a different context: temporary class drug orders, brought in a couple of years ago to allow the temporary ban on drugs while we are trying to find all the evidence. The Government have made it an offence to supply large amounts of such drugs, but not an offence to possess small amounts. All I am suggesting is that we apply the same principle to other drugs, because it has been found to work in Portugal, to be publicly accepted and to have good outcomes.

I am keen on an evidence base. There is a fantastic piece of evidence from the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic used to have no criminal sanction on possession of small amounts, but in 2001 it changed the law and criminalised possession, and there was a big debate. The sort of arguments were made that might be expected, with people saying that if possession were criminalised fewer people would use drugs, people would be healthier and better, and there would be less drug use—all of that sort of thing. The Government there did something that Governments rarely do and set out their hypotheses, worked out how to measure and test them, and published a proper impact analysis, internationally verified, of their predictions. They found that they did not get what they expected from criminalising possession.

The implementation of a penalty for possession of illicit drugs for personal use did not meet any of the tested objectives, was loss-making from an economic point of view and brought about avoidable social costs. It was found that criminalisation made things worse. That suggests that decriminalisation—not an absolute parallel, but as close as one can get—would not be likely to make things bad.

The summary of results in the Czech impact analysis states that

“from the perspective of social costs, enforcement of penalizing of possession of illicit drugs for personal use is disadvantageous”.

The hypothesis that availability of illicit drugs would decrease was rejected, as was the one suggesting that the number of illicit drug users would decrease; and rather than the number of new cases of illicit drug use decreasing after criminalisation, incidence in the general population increased. Rather than finding no negative health indicators relating to illicit drug use, there were more fatal overdoses from illicit drugs after criminalisation, and the hypothesis that social costs would not increase was rejected. Having done this study, the Czech Republic went back and decriminalised possession, because it found that it was better for its society and was cheaper and more effective at dealing with drugs. We can do this in this country.

Of course, no country is a perfect model, but we know that in Portugal decriminalisation of possession of small amounts works and has societal benefits and is well accepted, and that in the Czech Republic it is better to decriminalise possession than not to. We can try that here. We would need a royal commission to work out the exact details of how to do the work here. We can make a difference.

Although I would love to talk about other domestic issues, I do not have time to go through them in perfect detail. The focus on treatment is right. I am alarmed that there is a push to suggest that abstinence is the only form of treatment that really counts. Where people are having treatment, we want to move them from high usage to lower usage. For some people that will mean abstinence and for others it will mean maintenance. We want to offer them the choice of whatever will get them to the lowest level we can. The Chair of our Committee was right in what he said about prisons and the need to get smaller providers involved in drugs treatment.

I want to pick up on an issue, drug-driving, that plays into Home Office discussions. It is right to have a criminal offence for drug-driving, just as there is for drink-driving, and the threshold for harm should be the same. We allow drivers to drink up to 0.08 mg per ml, and we should allow the same equivalent harm from drug use. For someone whose drug use has taken them to that risk level, that should be the key test. We make that recommendation in our report in paragraph 2:

“the equivalent effect on safety as the legal alcohol limit, currently 0.08 mg/ml.”

We must ensure that we get health further involved.

Let me finish by mentioning supply, because drugs are not just a UK problem but a huge international problem. Although we have had 50 years of criminalisation, illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil. That is incredibly damaging. We tracked the routes for cocaine, as our Committee Chair said. We went to Colombia to see where it was grown; to Florida, where we saw how the US military tried to combat it; and we saw the customs’ efforts to try to stop it flooding into the US. I spoke to parliamentarians from west Africa, looking at that stage of the process. In Portugal, cocaine is coming into Europe. The message at every stage was clear: supply cannot be stopped. It can be squeezed in various ways. For example, massive military efforts can be made in Colombia to reduce the amount of coca plantation, but it moves to a neighbouring country. Interdiction can used and the navy can block one side of central America, but it goes to the other side or takes an air route.

It was astonishing to see the mini-submarines now being created by the Colombian drugs lords, which cost about $1 million and have a range that allows them to reach London. The cocaine loaded on to those can be sold for about $500,000. The US navy was clear: with the best will in the world, it cannot spot a small submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. Supply cannot be controlled.

[Keith Vaz]

It is more astonishing that it was cost-effective for the drugs barons to sink the submarine when it arrived in Africa, because their profits were so enormous that they could just buy another one.

[Dr Huppert]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. I was flabbergasted to find out just how much money was involved. I was even more surprised to discover that, in Portugal, where there has been a problem for a while with people flying drugs in from west Africa—they have tried to combat that—drugs are now being flown back from Portugal into west Africa. On asking, we were told, “We think it is because the drugs are returned to the sender if they are not of good enough quality.” If people think it is safe enough to transfer drugs internationally that they can have a returns policy, we are nowhere near stopping supply, and in the process we are losing control of country after country to the drugs cartels. The profits are huge, and criminal gangs and cartels across the world thrive on them. The banks have a huge part to play, as the right hon. Gentleman was right to highlight. This is wrecking many countries. We did not look at the situation with heroin and marijuana, but the same damaging effects apply in different countries.

President Santos has been taking a strong stance, saying that his country will try to control this problem; but we cannot expect countries to be torn apart for ever in an effort to control a problem that cannot be controlled. I am delighted that, in 2016, the United Nations General Assembly will have a special session to look again at its international drugs policy. I hope that, whatever flavour of Government we have then, we will be working with people like President Santos and with the reformers to try to solve this global problem.

We have worked for 40 years with a criminalisation process that has not delivered what we said it should deliver in 1971. It has not worked for the users of drugs, for society at large or for the Treasury. There are much better ways.

--- Later in debate ---

[Diana Johnson]

The Chair of the Select Committee makes a powerful argument for having data that allow us to understand the number of people affected and therefore how to treat them. I am sure the Opposition would want to consider that, recognising that the issue has been raised by the Committee, which sees it as an important part of tackling some of the problems in prison.

Will the Minister also address an issue that has arisen since the report was published, which is the use of the private sector in the probation services provided to people leaving prison? What thought has been given to ensuring that appropriate drug treatment and support is available through the new providers?

At the start of this Parliament, there was a lot of political rhetoric from Government Members about what constituted recovery, to which the hon. Member for Cambridge referred. The view at first appeared to be based on ideology and not on looking at the individual needs of each person. For some people a life of abstinence would be appropriate; for others, a life supported by methadone or another drug. When people want to move to abstinence, it is important that they have the necessary support to do so, and that a range of programmes are available to support them.

The Committee’s report highlights the large variations in the success of different programmes, which is of concern, because we want to ensure good value for money and that we get the right outcomes. An average success level of 41% could obviously be improved upon. Payment by results should help to improve standards, but I echo the concerns expressed by the Committee, and this afternoon by its Chair, about how that method of funding might hamper small providers. It is also important that support is given to a range of commissioning bodies to enable them to sort through the data on what is effective. Given the multitude of different commissioners, can the Minister explain what role Public Health England will play in guiding commissioners?

Of course, we all want to see fewer people taking drugs in the first place, and I will concentrate for a few moments on the need to have more effort directed at prevention. I agree with the Committee that drugs prevention and education are the strands of the drugs strategy to have had least work and least interest. In the review of the drugs strategy, the Government could identify just two areas of progress: they had relaunched the FRANK website, and they were reviewing the curriculum for schools. Since then, the curriculum review has finished, but my understanding is that there will now be even less drugs education in the science curriculum. That cannot be seen as progress. At the same time, the Government have abandoned Labour’s plans to make personal, social, health and economic education a statutory requirement for schools and have closed the drugs education forum.

Figures from Mentor, the drug and alcohol charity, show that at present 60% of schools deliver drug and alcohol education once a year or less. That education is often poor, incomplete or totally irrelevant; pupils aged 16 seem to get the same lessons as pupils aged 11. An example given was of sixth-form students being required to colour in pictures of ecstasy tablets as part of their drugs education. Earlier this year, Mentor told me:

“Drug and alcohol education should not be disregarded as a trivial add-on. It should be fundamental to pupils’ education. The links between early drug and alcohol use and both short and long term harms are clear, and there is compelling evidence showing longer term public health impacts of evidence based programmes. The cost benefit ratios are significant, ranging from 1:8 to 1:12.”

The Committee’s report is clear:

“The evidence suggests that early intervention should be an integral part of any policy which is to be effective in breaking the cycle of drug dependency. We recommend that the next version of the Drugs Strategy contain a clear commitment to an effective drugs education and prevention programme, including behaviour-based interventions.”

I wholeheartedly support that, and I repeat Labour’s commitment to bringing in statutory PSHE to achieve it, which I tried to do recently myself by introducing a ten-minute rule Bill in the previous Session.

For the interim, the Committee recommends

“that Public Health England commit centralised funding for preventative interventions when pilots are proven to be effective.”

Again, that is something I support. The Department for Education has a set of programmes that have been approved and are listed on the Centre for the Analysis of Youth Transitions database. A wide range of programmes, they are all evidence-based and have been tested and proved to be effective. They are life-skills programmes that not only tell children no, but empower them to resist peer pressure and to make informed decisions about alcohol and drugs. Furthermore, they dispel myths such as those going around suggesting legal highs are safe. What is unfortunately lacking at the moment, however, is the political leadership to get those lessons into schools.

I mentioned earlier my attempts to see the minutes of the inter-ministerial group on drugs. I never managed to get the minutes of the meetings, but I did get the agendas, which showed that in the first 18 months of this Government drugs education and drugs prevention were never discussed. Can the Minister tell us whether he has put either drugs education or drug prevention on the agenda of the group in the nine months that he has been chair? If not, perhaps he can promise to put something on the agenda of the next meeting. Previously, when there was a problem with prioritising drug treatment within the NHS, Ministers came together to form the National Treatment Agency. There now appears to be a problem with prioritising prevention work in schools and education and in public health, so perhaps the Minister can show a similar initiative and work with his colleagues to set up a cross-departmental body to tackle the issue.

Finally, I want to discuss the problem of the new psychoactive substances. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction is now monitoring 280 new substances throughout Europe; 73 new substances came on to the British market last year, and they are now freely available from 690 online shops. In addition, the Angelus Foundation, which has already been mentioned, reports that there might be up to 300 “head shops” selling those substances on the UK high street. The figures are truly shocking and will terrify every parent in the country, but even those figures do not quite show how readily available the drugs are through peer-to-peer selling in schools. As the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee mentioned, even Amazon was recently selling the drugs, and some online sellers are sending out free samples to children once a new compound arrives from China. Our understanding of the dangers of legal highs has been greatly enhanced by the work of the Angelus Foundation, and I pay particular tribute to Maryon Stewart who founded the foundation after tragically losing her daughter, Hester Stewart, a medical student, from the legal high GBL in 2009.

As we heard, the Government have introduced temporary banning orders to make such drugs easier to prohibit. The Home Secretary promised that they would allow for swift and effective action. In two years, however, one temporary banning order has been used, during a period when more than 100 new legal highs have emerged on the market. I understand from the press that two more temporary banning orders are in the pipeline, which I will come on to.

The first thing we need to do to get better understanding of the harms of such drugs is, as the Select Committee said in its report, to improve data collection on drugs. Nowhere is that more pressing than with the new psychoactive substances. First, we need better information about their prevalence. I am very concerned that those drugs are not being properly recorded in the Mixmag drug survey or the British crime survey.

Secondly, we need to understand the harm they cause. I have heard from front-line practitioners in addiction services and A and E that they are encountering more and more people who have taken legal highs, but that is anecdotal and we need proper data collection. If someone presents to A and E having taken a legal high, that should be properly recorded.

Thirdly, we need the major databases to work together. For the last year, I have tried to ascertain how the EMCDDA database liaises with the Home Office’s much-touted early warning system. Last year, I asked why it was monitoring 13 substances when the EMCDDA had 47 on its list, but I have still not received a satisfactory explanation. I would also like to know how the Home Office’s system is informed by the TICTAC database of toxins, which is run by the NHS, and the National Poisons Information Service’s TOXBASE. In the past, work on collecting data was done by the Forensic Science Service, but it has been disbanded. I hope that the Minister will explain who is doing that work now.

This week, the Government announced that they will finally ban Benzo Fury. It is clear from the letter that the Home Secretary received from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that there are real concerns that the system that has been set up is failing. The drug has been putting people in hospital since 2009, when it was first reported to TOXBASE, and since then there have been 65 more referrals. Will the Minister explain the point of a temporary banning order if it takes four years from the first hospital admissions to a ban on the sale of the drug on the high street? No deaths from this drug have been reported in the UK, but deaths have been reported in other countries. Professor Les Iversen, chair of the ACMD, said:

“Sooner or later we will get unexpected and serious harm emerging with one of these compounds and then we will blame ourselves for allowing them to be sold without the usual safety data.

That’s why I think this is a serious problem, it's not just a nice set of party drugs that we can let people get on with, it's a set of chemicals that are potentially very dangerous.”

I hope the Minister will respond to that comment.

The Committee’s report recommends that more advice and support be given to allow trading standards to take action against sellers, and that recommendation was also made by the UK Drug Policy Commission. What has the Minister done to investigate implementation of those two recommendations? Several recent attempts to take action through the courts have failed, and trading standards are already exceptionally stretched because of the massive cuts in local government. I hope the Minister will review that, and look at who is responsible for tackling online sellers.

I have highlighted a few of the key issues in the report, but there are many others. I again congratulate the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee—

[Dr Huppert]

The hon. Lady has highlighted some issues and talked about a failing system. Will she clarify her position on the suggestion of a royal commission to examine the matter and to try to fix the whole system, and on the concept of decriminalisation? Where does she stand on those two issues?

[Diana Johnson]

Perhaps I may correct the record. When I talked about a failing system, I meant the legal highs and the temporary banning orders that have been put in place. I am not sure that they are delivering what the Government intended them to do swiftly and efficiently.

On the other point raised by the hon. Gentleman, it is certainly important to look at what happened in Portugal, which I am pleased the Minister visited. I am particularly interested in what is happening in New Zealand with legal highs, and I hope the Government will look at the New Zealand Government’s experience. I think that President Santos is doing important work in Colombia. But today I wanted to concentrate on the issues in the report which the Government have an opportunity to respond to and to do something about. I am particularly concerned about the lack of action on education, and that has been my main focus.

I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee on a well-reasoned and thoughtful report. I am pleased that we have had the opportunity to discuss it this afternoon, albeit with a small number of Members. The quality of debate has been high.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Browne]

I am very attracted by the right hon. Gentleman’s suggestion. My intention at the moment is not to go to New Zealand, in part because I am mindful of the cost of doing so and I think we should spend public money cautiously. However, I will be speaking by video conference call to New Zealand officials next month—it is quite hard to get a suitable time to speak by conference call to New Zealand, because the time difference is so big, but I will do that. When suitable New Zealand officials or Ministers are here in London—they tend to pass through on a fairly routine basis—I also hope to take the opportunity to draw on their expertise.

I am attracted by the idea of whether people should be made more accountable for the drugs that they produce or sell in this space, but even that is not straightforward, because the issue often arises about who has produced the drugs, and they are often sold as not suitable for human consumption. All kinds of legal problems make what appears, on first inspection, to be a very seductive idea slightly less straightforward in practice than I would wish, but I am open-minded to what more we can do in that area, because it is worth exploring.

[Dr Huppert]

The Minister is making a very good case about there being lots of different types of harm and no single obviously right answer. He is absolutely right to say all that, and to say how complicated it is. He talked about it not being straightforward, so does he not think that he is making a very good argument for a royal commission? It is precisely because it is not straightforward and there is not one clear answer that we need that level of inquiry.

[Mr Browne]

I think that that is a good argument for elected politicians, including those who have participated in the debate this afternoon, to devote more time to thinking seriously about the subject. The point I was making about a royal commission was that we can put together an expert body of men and women who are full of integrity, knowledge and decency, and they could spend a long time thinking about the issue, but they would not produce “the right answer”, because I fear that the right answer does not exist in that form. They would produce a series of interesting observations and recommendations, which may match, to a high degree, the series of interesting observations and recommendations that the Committee made in its report. We would then have a debate along the lines of the one we are having this afternoon. As I said, although a royal commission would be a good opportunity for stimulating debate, I do not think that it would in itself necessarily reach the outcomes that we seek, because I am not sure that the outcomes are ever fully attainable.

A number of other issues have come up. The Government’s strategy has three prongs: reducing demand, restricting supply and building recovery. In addition, we have always said that we are open to learning from best practice in other countries. I have had the opportunity to travel, as recommended by the Committee, to Portugal, and last week I spent 24 hours in Denmark and 24 hours in Sweden. During the remainder of the year, my plan is to visit South Korea, Japan, the United States, Canada, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. We should be open-minded to the ideas that such other countries have come up with, because they are broadly equivalent to us in their economic and social development, and they are confronted by the same problems as us in terms of drugs policy. There is no reason to believe that every good idea in the world originates in this country, and they may well have ideas that we can learn from.

Going to Portugal was interesting—my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge dwelt particularly on that country. I will write a report when I conclude the process, so I will not do a running commentary on a weekly basis. I thought Portugal was interesting, but I was perhaps slightly less bowled over by it than I might have expected to be, because in some ways, the Portuguese codify what, in practice, happens to a large degree in this country anyway. People might think that that is quite interesting in itself. The fact that Portugal has made that formal codification is a significant step, but, in practice, there are very few people in Britain who are in prison merely for the possession of drugs for personal consumption. People are in prison because they have stolen money to buy drugs, or because they have supplied drugs to others, but most people in Britain who present with a severe heroin addiction, for example, are treated. We try and find ways of enabling them to address their addiction and, in time, recover from it, rather than treating them straightforwardly as criminals. Therefore, the gap between what happens in Portugal and what happens in practice in the United Kingdom is perhaps not as great as some might say.

It was interesting, for example, to talk to the Portuguese about the impact of changes in their laws on infection and blood-borne illnesses caused by the injection of drugs. They had a very big rise in instances of HIV infection in intravenous drug users, and when they changed the laws, there was a dramatic fall. It is a striking graph—like a mountain, it goes up and then comes down, and there is a clear correlation. The only thing I would say is that their starting point was higher than the United Kingdom’s. They then went to a point that was dramatically higher than the United Kingdom’s, and they have now come down to a point that is just higher than ours—but they are still higher than us.

For a number of reasons, we have never had that level of infection in the intravenous drug-taking community. Because the scale of our problem is dramatically different from the scale of the problem that they were confronted with when they changed the law, we should not automatically assume that changing the law would have a similar impact on infection rates in this country. There are interesting lessons to learn from talking to people in other countries, but we should not automatically assume that changing the law in the way that other countries have will lead to the same public policy outcomes, as we are starting from a different point in this country.

The Portuguese are having conversations about how their law is working in practice. In my experience—I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge—it was virtually impossible to find anyone in Portugal who wanted to turn the clock back and change the law to what it had previously been. Last week in Denmark, which is one of the more liberal countries in the European Union in terms of drugs policy, I found that some of the liberalising measures that had been taken had become widely accepted, even among people who had initially been sceptical about the changes.

In Portugal, however, there was a debate about whether it could modify its law and in some ways potentially strengthen it. The idea of having 10 days-worth of personal drugs consumption was thought by the Minister to be a high figure. There was a lobby or case for reducing that to five, or even possibly three days. I suppose that if someone who was minded to transport drugs for sale to others had 50 days-worth of supply that they wanted to take to another house five minutes’ walk away, they would be better making that journey five times, with 10 days-worth on them each time, because they would then not be breaking the law. There was some thought about whether that law was perhaps too liberal and could be slightly tighter to restrict the potential for abuse.

[Mr Clive Betts in the Chair]

My point is that there were many interesting features of the experience in Portugal, as there were in Denmark and Sweden. I am genuinely open-minded on this matter. I approach open-mindedly what changes we could consider and potentially even adopt in this country to make our laws more effective.

I heard the point that was made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North, who speaks for the Opposition, and others about where responsibility lies for drugs policy in the United Kingdom. It is worth noting that in all the countries that I have been to so far, the lead responsibility lies with the Health Department. In this country, of course, the lead responsibility lies with the Home Office. I am not sure that in practice that is as significant as it is regarded as being by both those who believe vehemently that it should remain with the Home Office and those who believe vehemently that it should not, because we have a cross-Government approach.

There needs to be a lead Department, and of course much of drugs policy is about law enforcement, so there is a persuasive case to be made for that being with the Home Office, but we also of course involve the Department of Health, the Department for Education, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Cabinet Office and others in a cross-Government strategy on drugs, so I would not want anyone attending this debate to think that the Home Office ploughed on without listening to other parts of the Government.

The three parts of the strategy are demand, supply and recovery. We have a range of initiatives on demand reduction. The FRANK website and programme was mentioned during our debate. That has been updated and relaunched and is widely used as a source of information—particularly, but not exclusively, by young people. Another example is the Choices programme that we have developed. That focuses on preventing substance misuse and related offending among vulnerable groups of young people aged 10 to 19. The programme received funding of £4 million in 2011-12 and engaged more than 10,000 vulnerable young people.

This issue is not just about schools. In fact, many people take drugs for the first time when they have left school—when they are adults. Schools have a part to play, but so do other methods of education. It is worth noting that the number of young people taking up drugs and particularly school pupils experimenting with drugs has fallen markedly, so there does not seem to be a shortage of information among young people about the harmful consequences of taking drugs. Indeed, increasing numbers of young people seem to be mindful of those harmful consequences and, as a result, have not taken drugs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Browne]

My short answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question is yes, it is wrong. It is a source of great regret and sadness that someone might go to prison, not as a drug taker or drug addict, and become one while they are there. I recognise there are practical difficulties with trying to restrict drugs in prisons, and people find ingenious ways to smuggle drugs into prisons, just as they find ingenious ways to smuggle them into other places, but the Government are doing work, as we should be, to try to reduce that threat.

What I am saying is that we could just as well do random testing throughout the period people are in prison. I have been told that if we tell somebody they will be tested on a set day, they may take steps to make it less likely that drugs will be detected in their body on that day. We are not, therefore, against the idea of testing prisoners, and we are strongly in favour of trying to ensure that people do not take drugs in prison, while those who might be minded to take drugs are dissuaded or prevented from doing so, but the proposed testing regime would not necessarily automatically have the most successful outcome.

On the Government’s approach to reducing demand, it is worth putting on the record that drug use remains at around the lowest level since measurement began in 1996. The 2011-12 crime survey in England and Wales estimated that 8.9% of adults—about 3 million people—had used an illicit drug in the previous year. In 1996, the figure was 11.1%, so there was a fall of a bit less than a quarter—about 20%, according to my rough and ready calculations. There was therefore a significant fall in the number of people who said they had taken illicit drugs in the previous year.

School pupils also tell us they are taking fewer drugs. In 2011, 12% of 11 to 15-year-olds said they had taken them in the previous year. In 2001—a decade earlier—the figure was 20%, so it fell from 20% to 12% in a decade. Some hon. Members may think that 11 to 15-year-olds are not entirely reliable when talking about their drug consumption, but there is no particular reason to believe they were any more or less reliable in 2011 than they were in 2001.

The number of heroin and crack cocaine users in England has fallen below 300,000 for the first time. We have now got to a situation where the average heroin addict is over 40. The age of heroin addicts is going up and up, as fewer young people become heroin addicts in the first place. We are trying to rehabilitate and treat addicts and to keep those figures falling. They are not falling dramatically, but they are falling consistently, year on year, for those very serious drugs, which often concern people most.

On restricting supply, we have talked a bit about the countries that some of the class A drugs come here from and about the work we are doing with European partners and others. Tribute has rightly been paid to the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the National Crime Agency, which will succeed it later this year, will also have a focus on working with countries around the world to reduce harm in the United Kingdom.

On building recovery, the average waiting time to access treatment is down to five days. There is an impressive support structure available, and drug-related deaths in England have fallen over the past three years. Record numbers of people are recovering from dependence, with nearly 30,000 people—29,855, to be precise—successfully completing their treatment in 2011-12. That is up from 27,969 the previous year, and it is almost three times the level seven years ago, when only 11,208 people recovered.

I do not pretend that we have all the answers or that the situation is perfect, but we should not despair, because, in the light of all those statistics, there is good reason to believe that the harm resulting from many of the drugs that have caused people the most upset and alarm over many years has diminished to a degree.

The problem is evolving. For example, cannabis, which was largely imported a decade ago, is increasingly home grown by criminal organisations in the United Kingdom. The cannabis that people consume is also a lot stronger. I sometimes tell people that the active substance in cannabis is as much as seven or eight times stronger than it was, so people can be talking about quite a different drug. Sometimes, older people talk about cannabis in a bit of a summer of love, Janis Joplin, 1967 way. Now, however, we are talking about a much stronger drug, with the potential to cause greater harm.

It is a bit like going from drinking a pint of real ale to drinking a pint of neat vodka. In both cases, an alcoholic drink is being consumed, but most people would accept that the potential for harm is quite a lot greater in the latter case. That is what we are discussing. The strength of modern cannabis is seven times greater, which raises some interesting public policy questions about how we deal with cannabis and how much concern we should have about people consuming it.

[Dr Huppert]

The Minister is absolutely right to say that there are different strengths of both THC and some of the psychoprotective components of cannabis. It is of course hard to regulate and set standards for something that is fundamentally illegal. Has the Minister looked at the experience in California, for example, where medical marijuana is available? The different levels of strength are clear, so people can judge what they actually want to buy. I have no idea what will happen, but will the Minister keep an eye on the legalisation trials in Washington state and Colorado?

[Mr Browne]

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to the United States of America and I am visiting both Colorado and Washington state, which are the two states that have voted to legalise cannabis. I was in Denmark last week and the mayor of Copenhagen is keen to legalise cannabis, but the pretty liberal Danish Government are keen to remind the mayor that it is not within his power to legalise cannabis and that it is not a policy that they want to pursue.

The point is that the public policy debate around cannabis is evolving. The potential health harms caused by cannabis are greater than when it was a much less powerful drug. People sometimes talk about cannabis as being the softer end of the drugs market and say that cannabis could be legalised while everything else is kept illegal as if it were a benign drug and all others harmful. If that were once the case, it is less the case now. Cannabis does have cause to concern people.

I move finally on to psychoactive substances, which is a whole new area that is evolving a lot. It is good that we see significant reductions in people consuming heroin and crack cocaine, which are very harmful drugs, but new psychoactive substances are a fast-evolving threat to many people. In the most tragic cases, some people have died after taking such drugs. People sometimes assume—this is interesting for public policy—that because something is legal it is safe. People have quite paternalistic assumptions about the state even when they are not necessarily minded to believe the Government in other areas of public policy. Just because something is legal, that does not mean that it is safe to consume.

Some such drugs get under the barrier by claiming not to be for human consumption and serious harm has been caused to people by consuming so-called novel psychoactive substances. We have tried to adapt how we respond to such substances to take account of their fast-moving nature. As has been mentioned, we have introduced temporary class drug orders and just this week the Government laid such an order in my name that will take effect from 10 June for two groups of NPSs known as NBOMe and Benzo Fury. We are discussing families of drugs, because, as has been said, these chemical compounds can be manipulated and form whole categories of drugs. We therefore do not just ban street names or individual drugs; we ban groupings of drugs to try to stop people breaking the spirit of the law but staying within the letter of the law. The problem, however, is constantly mutating and we want to maintain the academic rigour that enables the ACMD to consider such matters at length while also having the speed to deal with evolving threats more quickly than it otherwise could. That is why we have the temporary orders lasting 12 months and a more considered process following on from that. I do not pretend that this is an area in which any country does not have public policy challenges to consider. How such drugs are couriered and supplied is also a potential new cause for concern, because people order them on the internet and the drug smuggling does not take the familiar, conventional form.

This is a big area of public policy and there are some causes for cautious optimism. Some drug consumption trends in this country are positive. If they were going in the opposite direction, I suggest that there would be far more Members at this debate and a bigger clamour to ask the Government what they were doing about increases in heroin or crack cocaine consumption. We should momentarily reflect on the good news and progress, where it is being made.

However, this is an area of public policy that never stops evolving, and many new drugs are becoming available. The patterns of drug consumption are evolving. It is subject to fashion and trends, and we must be alive to the harms, educate people about them, try to persuade people not to take drugs, look at where we can restrict supply to benefit public health and help people to recover. All of those are part of our strategy. I welcome the contributions of hon. and right hon. Members and I remind open-minded as to how to ensure that we can work as intelligently as possible to reduce the harm to the British public.