Psychoactive Substances Bill [Lords]

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

I do not think that putting them on the exempted list means that anybody should draw the conclusion that they are harmless. They obviously have an effect of some sort on individuals; otherwise, my constituent would not have, as he reports to me, 32% repeat orders for many of these substances. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. However, in relation to cholinergics, the National Academy of Sciences has said that choline is a dietary requirement, as I mentioned, and the Food and Drug Administration has recommended 425 milligrams of choline intake a day. With regard to racetams, oxiracetam, for example, has been shown to improve step-down, retention and acquisition performance in research carried out on rats, I believe, and was supported in a paper in “Behavioural Brain Research” in 1996. I have various other references citing good research carried out into these drugs; some, I admit, have not had so much research into them.

The purpose of amendment 1 is to make sure that the law of unintended consequences does not apply to this Bill. The Minister needs to reassure my constituent, and the many organisations such as online companies and health food shops that sell these substances, that either they do not fall within the ambit of this Bill, and that therefore they need not concern themselves about falling foul of it, or, if he thinks that these substances need more research, to tell us what needs to be done. I expect, at the bare minimum, that he will undertake to review the products that I have listed in the amendment and to let us know, after discussions with the ACMD, what he intends to do. I hope that he will be able either to add these products to the exempted list or to let us know that the Bill does not apply to them. If it does not, he needs to reassure my constituent by letting me know the timescales within which he will investigate these products and perhaps others that might be brought to his attention.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan), who is one of the most distinguished and respected Members of this House, and makes her case very powerfully. I owe her an apology. Because of the speed with which the Home Affairs Committee had to look at the Bill, owing to the timetable that the Government gave us, we did not have the opportunity to explore properly the points she has made or to take evidence from her constituent and others who might have felt that they were going to be affected by it. If we had had more time, we certainly would have had them before us. I am sure that, as is our policy, when we come to review this Bill in a few months’ time we will have the opportunity to consider exactly what its effect has been. I thank her for tabling the amendment and for reminding the House of the importance of all the other products that might be caught by the Bill.

I want to commend the Minister, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite Home Office Ministers, partly because he agreed to be Father Christmas at the Westminster kids club party, and did it so well, but also because he is prepared to listen to the House. He said he would look at the work of the Select Committee and try to reflect some of it in the amendments he tabled in Committee, and he did so in the case of many of our recommendations. Yesterday he sent me—I thank him for giving me plenty of time to read it for today’s debate—the Government’s response to the Bill’s Committee stage and to our recommendations.

I thank the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) for last year pushing the Select Committee to hold an inquiry before the House had to consider the Bill on Second Reading. Again, we were caught out by the Government’s timetable being moved forward, as a result of which we did not have all the time in the world to consider these things. However, I thank him for doing it. I thank members of the Bill Committee, some of whom are here today, for the work they did at very short notice to ensure that that happened. The hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) attended many of the Committee’s sittings despite the fact that she was serving on two other Committees at the same time.

The Government have moved on several of the points that we have made. They were right to legislate—there is no question about that. This has been in the in-tray of successive Home Office Ministers for a number of years. The previous Labour Government were committed to doing something about it—it was in our manifesto, as our excellent shadow Home Office Minister said—and I am sure that if the votes had fallen in the opposite direction, we would have a Labour Minister introducing a similar Bill. I therefore say well done to the Minister for doing this and for incorporating most of what we have suggested.

I particularly want to talk about amendments 1 and 5. It is very important that we give support to voluntary organisations such as the Angelus Foundation, which invariably know more than Government, because they draw on the experience of real, live people, and they are prepared to come together voluntarily to try to warn the public and Parliament about the risks of these substances. I am glad that we are not using the term “legal highs” any more, because, as the report clearly says, that encourages people to want to try them.

I agree very much with the shadow Minister’s comments about education, which I am sure the Minister will echo. We cannot do too much to persuade young people that they should not be taking these substances. My children are 20 and 18, and they are away at university. It is every parent’s nightmare that one of their children, on a night out after studying and doing their work, will be offered a substance that is perfectly legal, take it, and then be ill and, in some cases, die. The Home Affairs Committee therefore absolutely support the Government’s tough approach.

[Paul Flynn]

My right hon. Friend says that the name “legal highs” attracts people to the drugs. Does he not think that if we change their name to “illegal highs”, they will become even more attractive to adolescents?

[Keith Vaz]

They may well do, but we are not going to call them “illegal highs”. The Bill does not seek to change their name. The effect of the Bill is to ban the substances that cause death. It is not about relabelling. I have great respect for my hon. Friend, who was a distinguished member of the Home Affairs Committee. I know that his position is to liberalise the law on drugs, but that is not my position and nor is it that of the Committee. Although we miss him, and I know he would have forced most of our reports to a vote, we do not miss him that much.

[Crispin Blunt]

If I get called, I will speak in support of the right hon. Gentleman’s excellent Committee’s report. It is every parent’s nightmare that their child should die of drugs. Whether they are legal or not is neither here nor there. If we legislate in a way that makes the use of illegal drugs more likely, which is what will happen if amendment 5 is not carried, we will not be serving our children and others.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and he brings me on to the issue of alkyl nitrites. The shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), has said—this was a bit of shock for me after 28 years in this House—that Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box having had poppers. I think that is what she said and it was a great surprise to the House. She obviously knows more than I do about such issues, even though she claims that she knew nothing about drugs until she became the shadow Minister with responsibility for drugs.

[Andrew Gwynne]

Having served on the Bill Committee alongside my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), my recollection is that Ernest Bevin of the post-war Labour Government had a bit of a heart murmur and was prescribed amyl nitrate by his doctor. It is alleged that he sniffed poppers around the Cabinet table.

[Keith Vaz]

I thank my hon. Friend for that information. I wonder whether they are still in use around the Cabinet table.

The Minister has moved some way since the Home Affairs Committee report’s recommendation 45:

“We accept the evidence given by Professor Iversen, the National Aids Trust, and the Gay Men’s Health Collective on alkyl nitrites”.

Professor Iversen said that they were

“not seen to be capable of having harmful effects sufficient to constitute a societal problem”,

and therefore we recommended, unanimously, that they should not be banned. We said that if the Government were to present evidence that changed that position and our view, they should, of course, be added to the list of banned substances. Indeed, the report states:

“If in the future there is any evidence produced to the contrary, then ‘poppers’ should be removed from the exempted list or controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act.”

As a result of the immensely able work of the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), the Minister wrote to me last night proposing that a review should begin. He felt that there should still be a case for putting poppers on the banned list, but that if the evidence changed he would come back to the House, or by some other order, and put them on the exempted list. I think that that approach is the wrong way around.

The shadow Minister has asked me for my view and I have listened to the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who I know also has constituents who are very concerned about drugs issues. The Committee, which also addressed the banning of laughing gas, does not believe that this particular case has been made. This is my personal view and other Committee members can, of course, say what they want, but when we considered the issue and voted unanimously on it, we did not consider poppers to be harmful.

The Minister wrote back to us and told us that poppers are beneficial, as if in some cases they may well be mandatory. He wrote that

“the Government recognises that representations have been made to the effect that ‘poppers’ have a beneficial health and relationship effect in enabling anal sex for some men who have sex with men, amid concern about the impact of the ban on these men. In consultation with the Department of Health and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Home Office will now consider whether there is evidence to support these claims and, if so, whether it is sufficient to justify exempting the alkyl nitrites group (or individual substances in the group).”

Although I welcome that approach—it is a really positive step forward—it is actually the wrong way around. A better course of action would be to put alkyl nitrites on the exempted list, conduct the review and then come back to the House or by order and change the position. It is what we like to call evidence-based decision making. That is what we have said consistently over the eight years I have chaired the Home Affairs Committee.

There is a lot of emotion out there about drugs, and a lot of people have great concerns. Some, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), are passionately in favour of liberalisation, while others have a different position, but why take a position of banning and then unbanning? That affects the huge authority that the Government have in respect of this very important Bill. The Minister has the whole House with him on it. I doubt we are going to divide on many issues, which is pretty rare for Home Office Bills. I am trying to think of another Bill where that has happened. There is always a division of some kind, but why divide the House on this issue when there is no reason to do so?

I call on the Minister to accept amendment 5, or to not oppose it, and to let us move forward constructively. He could have his review, come back and then everyone in this House will accept what the experts say. Without equivocation, I give him a guarantee that if the review decides that poppers are harmful, I will be the first in the Division Lobby with him, supporting that view. But to ban and then unban sends a powerful message to a section of our community that they are not being listened to, and to experts who have given evidence to us that they are wrong.

I urge the Minister, even at this late stage—as I have said, he is a Minister who listens to the House, the Home Affairs Committee and individual views—to look at the issue again and ensure that alkyl nitrites are put on the exempted list until his review is concluded.

[Several hon. Members rose—]