Julian Huppert
Main Page: Julian Huppert (Liberal Democrat - Cambridge)Department Debates - View all Julian Huppert's debates with the Home Office
(10 years ago)
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Caroline Lucas
What the hon. Gentleman says is absolutely true. In a sense, this is not a party political matter: people from across this House and the other place believe that we should have an evidence-based approach, rather than an approach that for too long has been dictated by fear, particularly fear of the tabloids. It is important to have this debate.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on her award, even though, as I was nominated for it, I feel some frustration. It has been a great pleasure to work with her on this issue. Her voice is, and I hope will continue to be, very valuable in this place. Will she confirm that many newspapers are now coming out in favour of change, and that the public want change? Today, The Sun shows that roughly two thirds of people want a reform of drugs policy.
Caroline Lucas
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on being nominated, and I am sure he will win next time. His point is incredibly important. Until now, politicians often thought that they were reflecting public opinion, but they are now massively behind it, as the poll in The Sun absolutely demonstrates.
It strikes me that a time of austerity, with the Government seemingly looking under every last stone to find money to save, is an odd time not to consider drugs policy, given that so much money is invested in the current drugs regime. Yet drugs policy seems to be completely divorced from the usual considerations about public spending and the good use of taxpayers’ money, and we simply have no proper public mechanism for knowing whether the money spent on the so-called war on drugs has been put to good effect.
No one now buys alcohol in unmarked bottles from the back of a pub—that would be dangerous and unnecessary—but for 40 years we have left our children to do exactly that with drugs. There is no denying that drug misuse has the potential to wreck lives, but surely it is time to be honest about the damage caused by the drug laws, which can cause a proliferation of criminality and public harm. The entire drugs trade has been handed over to the worlds’ racketeers and gangsters. The drugs market has soared, and that has brought untold misery. Essentially, the current market is almost wholly uncontrolled.
From speaking to young people in my constituency, it is clear that many of them can get hold of drugs far more easily than alcohol, which is surely wrong. When someone tries to get hold of alcohol, they at least have to show an ID card if they are thought to be under age. Drug dealers do not care about someone’s ID or anything else; they care only about their profits. I believe that the current policy is based on a deliberate ignorance about the effect of drugs.
Dr Wollaston
May I make a little progress and then I will come back to the hon. Gentleman?
I would like to focus on cannabis for a moment—that is the issue I have most correspondence about—and on its harms. Cannabis is often presented as somehow a harmless product, and if we compare it with alcohol and consider the numbers of deaths and injuries, alcohol undoubtedly currently causes far greater harm in our society. However, before we assume that it must therefore be acceptable to legalise cannabis, I want to focus a little on its harms. In the short term, there is double the risk of a car crash for people driving under the influence of cannabis, and in the longer term, one in six young users will become dependent. It simply not true to say that cannabis is not a drug of dependence—it is.
For me, this is about the impact of cannabis on young users and teenagers, because they will double their risk of a psychotic illness. In my career I have met many families and young people whose lives have been completely devastated as a result of psychosis—I come to this debate from that viewpoint and my real concern about what psychosis does to people, because many of them did not recover. That is particularly important for those who have a family history of psychotic illness. For example, if someone has a first degree relative with a history of schizophrenia and they start using cannabis as a teenager, they will double their risk of a psychotic illness from 10% to 20%—a significant increase.
Dr Huppert
It is always interesting to listen to the hon. Lady, and I do not think anybody is trying to make the case that drugs, legal or illegal, are harmless. Does she accept, however, that because we make it an illegal system, we cannot do what has been done in California, for example, where medicinal marijuana has allowed the breeding of strains of marijuana that are less psycho-harmful?
Dr Wollaston
That is why I want to see the longer term results from Colorado and Washington state, and whether as a result of that system the harm to young people from cannabis is reduced. Personally, I think it is too early to say what the effects will be, but I will be following the results closely. If I see clear evidence of harm reduction, I will completely change my approach to this issue.
People often write to me and say, “Well look at Portugal where there has been a reduction in drug use”, but the Czech Republic, which has the same approach in not prosecuting people for personal use, has one of the highest levels of cannabis use across Europe. We must be careful about how selectively we quote from the evidence.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), who was an advocate of this cause well before it was fashionable. It is good to see him in his place still arguing for it. I also echo his praise for the fantastic work that my right hon. Friend the Minister has done, which means that we have now heard praise for his work from all parties present in the Chamber, even though some representative parties that are not here have been rather more critical of the stance he has taken. It is also good to hear a degree of unanimity in the comments expressed today. There are some differences, but they are in the nuances. There is not a principled difference; all the speeches have broadly called for change to our policies.
My belief is that the so-called war on drugs has simply not worked. What it has done is cause more harms than it has alleviated. That has been clear for quite a long time, and I and my party have long called for reform. It is not about being hard on drugs or soft on drugs; it is about being smart on drugs and doing the right thing. Of course drugs are harmful. Whether they are legal or illegal, and whether they are prescribed or not prescribed, tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine and heroin are all harmful things. They all cause harms—to people who take them, to other people and to society. The model for so long in this country and in many parts of the world has been based on the idea that when it comes to some substances—not tobacco and alcohol, but the other ones, for historical reasons—our aim should be to stop people taking them. The idea is to reduce the number of users, rather than looking at the harms the substances cause. That is the wrong goal and it has not worked.
Drug use is still high, with millions of people regularly breaking the law, which is not an effective disincentive. Hon. Members can talk to many police officers about this, but frankly it makes the law look silly when 4 million people a year are committing a criminal offence, of whom 100,000—randomly selected, but with somewhat more from poorer communities and black and minority ethnic groups—get arrested, with a few unlucky people, again disproportionately poorer people and those from black and minority ethnic groups, being thrown in jail. It does not work.
Stephen Phillips
I may come to this if I am lucky enough to catch your eye in due course, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I do not think anyone else has made this point, but does it not also cause a lack of respect for the criminal law when every year 4 million people regularly break what is regarded as the criminal law for something that they do not think is a criminal offence?
Dr Huppert
Absolutely. If we asked people what sort of sentence it should be possible to get for having a spliff, they would not think that many years in jail was proportionate. I know that that does not always happen, but the maximum sentence in this instance brings the law into disrepute.
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.
Stephen Phillips
The hon. Gentleman mentions the US, and earlier in his very powerful speech he mentioned the difficulty some young people have with being criminalised over the possession of drugs. Does he regard it as an oddity, as I do, that a person could be denied a visa to go to the United States, in some parts of which marijuana can be bought and smoked quite legally, just because they have a criminal conviction in this country for having used cannabis?
Dr Huppert
The hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right; I agree completely with his point. We are blighting people’s lives for no good reason, and many do not think it is proportionate.
It is not just my party that has pushed for this change for a long time. Many other Members have called for reform, like the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas). We have heard the clear view of The Sun in a very strong editorial just this morning, stressing that we cannot continue with the status quo. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) said when he was Secretary of State:
“We have been engaged in a war against drugs for 30 years. We’re plainly losing it. We have not achieved very much progress.”
The former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller called for us to acknowledge the truth that
“much…of the vast expenditure on the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ has been fruitless.”
The noble Lord Lawson, with whom I disagree on many things, said:
“I have no doubt that the present policy is a disaster.”
Then there is the Prime Minister. When he was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2002, along with the hon. Member for Newport West, he voted to recommend
“that the Government initiates a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways—including the possibility of legalisation and regulation—to tackle the global drugs dilemma”.
The Prime Minister used to be a reformer. When he ran for the Tory leadership, he said:
“Politicians attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator by posturing with tough policies and calling for crackdown after crackdown. Drugs policy has been failing for decades.”
All those voices are on side; we need to bring the Prime Minister back. Portugal has been a huge success. When we visited, we found that the new drugs policy was supported across the parties, and by the police as it helped them to deal with crime.
Let me make two last points before concluding. In 2016, the UN General Assembly will hold a special session on drugs in 2016, providing a key chance to change the global system in respect of drugs policy. This is key, and there are calls from around the world. Britain is leading the way in the calls for reform, but unfortunately not in an official capacity—it is the all-party parliamentary group on drugs policy reform that is seeking to co-ordinate Ministers around the world. The Government should support this change.
I echo the calls of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Prevention to look again at marijuana as a medicine. The evidence is that it can be a very effective medical remedy, dealing with many diseases, including MS and glaucoma, and easing the side-effects of chemotherapy and HIV/AIDS treatment. This can help improve people’s lives, so clearly we should look at it as a medical intervention. This country has followed the wrong approach for 40 years. It has not worked, and it is time to change.