Misuse of Drugs Act

Debate between Kieran Mullan and Tommy Sheppard

Thursday 17th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

I wish to associate myself entirely with all of the comments that my two colleagues have just made from either side of this House. I wonder what it says about our ability to function as a body that makes and reviews legislation that such a significant piece of legislation, dealing with such a major social problem, can lie on the statute book for 50 years without review or amendment. That is all the more incredible when we consider that by any conceivable measure it has been an abject failure in trying to achieve what it set out to achieve. As we have heard, back in 1971 just 1% of the British population said that they used the drugs that the Act would go on to criminalise, whereas today the figure is 34%. We are facing the biggest social policy catastrophe of our generation. Thousands of people are dying every year needlessly because they do not know what they are taking and help is not available for them when things go wrong. Tens of thousands of people every year get a criminal record because of the way in which we try to tackle this problem. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, living in communities up and down this land, have their lives blighted, not just by the misery of people dependent on those drugs in those communities, but by the brutal violence used by those involved in organised crime to enforce their regulation and supply of these products.

By any measure, this policy and this legislation ought to be reviewed. It is not just the fact that the legislation has not been able to do what it wanted to do; it is worse than that, because the legislation is now an active cause of the problem, because the entire area is looked at not as one of public health and wellbeing, but as one of criminal activity. The centre of the Act is about criminalising people who use drugs, and that does a number of things. First, it immediately means that the state has no role in the supply and regulation of these products, and that responsibility is given to the private sector and to organised crime within it. That is the first consequence of the Act. The second is that if people are getting into trouble and need medical help because of their substance addiction, many of our health and social care staff working in our public agencies are unable or unwilling to put themselves at risk of criminal prosecution by offering that help.

[Dr Mullan]

If that is true, how does the hon. Gentleman account for the fact that we have tens of thousands of heroin users on methadone replacement therapy?

[Tommy Sheppard]

I will come on to look at that concept and drug consumption in a minute, but what I am talking about is the fact that people have no ability to come to a health professional and say, “What is this?” They have no ability to ask for clean needles, because these actions are prohibited under the 1971 Act and the schedules to it.

The third thing, which has already been remarked upon, is that the Act stigmatises, big time, those who use drugs and puts them in a position where they are unlikely, because of social opprobrium, to ask for help. We surely need to have a review and a fresh think about a problem that is so manifestly out of control and where the existing legislation is so manifestly unable to provide any assistance.

I always like to try to see the other side of the argument, so I want to ask: why are people resistant to review? Why do they want to hold on to things as they are? I can only conclude that it is because they fear the consequences of decriminalisation or of changing the law. They must somehow think that if we were to do that, we would open the floodgates and unleash supply into communities where there are not already drugs, and that many more millions of people would get caught up in the problem, because we would not have the criminal mechanisms that we have at the minute. I say to any colleagues who think that: wake up and see what is happening on the streets of your constituencies.

Those colleagues should come with me to any medium-sized town in this country, stand in a bar and make their intentions known as to what they would like. Within one hour they will be offered any drug of their choice. If they do not want the personal contact, they could order in advance. If they go on the internet, they will find a mobile phone number on which, through the county lines network, they can order whatever they want and it will be delivered to their door. Sometimes people will even get a customer service message asking for feedback on the supply. That is the extent of what we have at the moment.

It is just fantasy to suggest that there are loads of people out there who are somehow prevented from getting into drugs by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That is not the case, so we surely need to have a grown-up conversation about what we should do given that potentially a third of our citizens could be made criminals by legislation that is so manifestly unfit for purpose.

I hope that the Home Office and Ministers can begin that process of review with an open mind, rather than just defending the status quo. They should be prepared to look at an evidence-based approach, drawing on international comparisons, and to try to work up a better system that is grounded in protecting public health and wellbeing, rather than trying to criminalise behaviour. I and my party would support—I think there would be support in all parts of the House—any bold Minister who wanted to take that initiative and begin that dialogue. I am not saying prescriptively what should be in such a review; I am not saying how it should be done. I simply want to have the dialogue, the discussion and the debate, because too many people are dying for us not to do so.

While we are doing that, there are some things that ought to be done immediately. I want to turn for a moment to the question of drug consumption rooms—probably better called overdose prevention centres. These are medical facilities, and I have been in them and seen them working in Portugal, Germany and Canada. These are medical facilities where someone can use their own drugs under medical supervision. Such places are not going to make the overall problem any better; what they do is drive a focus into the very sharp end of the problem—the point at which people are dying.

At the moment, people do not voluntarily overdose because they are fed up with life and want to commit suicide. That is not the case at all. People are taking substances and they do not even know what is in them. Sometimes these substances contain a lethal concoction which is much, much stronger than they thought it was going to be. Because it is all criminal activity, it has to be done behind closed doors. It is not something that someone does in the open. By the time someone realises they have a problem—by the time they cannot breathe, they have a heart attack or they need medical help—it is too late to call for assistance. For the limited number of people in those circumstances, being able to satisfy their immediate addiction under medical supervision would literally be a lifesaver. That is what happens in other countries.

It is blindingly obvious that we ought to try to consider having such places here, but the law forbids it. Even pending a change in the law, by regulation the Home Office should allow pilot centres to emerge so that we can see for ourselves whether they would work here. After all, what is there to lose? There is nothing to lose and everything to gain—there are lives to gain.

This idea does not stop people using drugs; it does not get rid of the problem; it does not make people get their life back together; it does not get people the medical help or social services help that they might need; it does not get them a job if they have not got one—of course it does not, but it keeps them alive long enough so that those interventions can take place further down the line. We cannot give help to a dead person, and that is why it is so vital that we have a sensible discussion about drug consumption rooms and supervised facilities. The Scottish Government stand ready and have been pressing the Home Office to allow them to go ahead and do that in Glasgow, which brings me to my final point; I know you did not want people to go on too long, Mr Deputy Speaker, so this will be my final point.

We have a bit of a disjuncture in the interrelationship between the devolution of political authority and Administrative action in the United Kingdom and this particular problem, in that the whole criminal framework—the 1971 Act and others—is a reserved matter for Westminster, which sets the problem, if you like, but dealing with the consequences of that, including the health and social care and the economic fall-out from that policy, is a matter for the devolved Administrations. Without getting into the arguments about Scottish independence or whatever, it seems to me a matter of ultimate sense and grown-up policy to have the same part of government responsible for the regulation as is responsible for mopping up the consequences of the problem. That is why, when the time comes, we need to urgently look at devolution of the controls currently in place in the ’71 Act, and whatever replaces it, to the devolved Administrations, and to locate them within a health and social care context, which is already devolved.

In advance of that, I have spoken with the Minister several times on this matter, and I trust that he is thoughtful about it. I think he is prepared to consider other points of view and evidence, but I think he feels himself mightily constrained by tradition, convention and, perhaps, political pressure elsewhere. However, he has now received a letter from the Drugs Policy Minister in Scotland, Angela Constance, asking for a four nations summit to consider, among other things, establishing pilots of these types of medical facilities. I hope very much that he will today confirm that his reaction to that is positive and that, if we cannot change things overnight across the whole UK, he is prepared to let us employ the apparatus of devolution to allow one part of the UK to go beyond where other parts are perhaps willing to go at the minute and to collate the evidence to point a way to the future, which could then lead to best practice being adopted throughout.

We have a responsibility not to continue to stick our heads in the sand on this matter; there has been a collective exercise of ignoring the blindingly obvious for far too long. We are not voting on this today, but I appeal to colleagues to do what they can through the various structures of this place and within their political parties—this matter should not divide us on party grounds—to consider why we need a review after this half-century and why things are so clearly wrong that we must do something. We cannot continue to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that things are okay. Now, 50 years after the passage of the Act, is the time to admit that it is not working and to do better. The citizens of this country deserve that.