Draft Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Amendment) Order 2022

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 General Committees

[The Minister for Crime and Policing (Kit Malthouse)]

I beg to move,

That the Committee has considered the draft Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Amendment) Order 2022.

It is a great pleasure to appear before you, Mr Hollobone, albeit a few minutes early. If you are happy to proceed and it is orderly to do so, I am also happy with that. The order was laid before the House on 15 December 2021. I start by thanking the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for its advice on this matter, which helped to inform the order. That advice, published on 20 November 2020, recommended that three drugs be moved from class C to class B of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The drugs are: gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, which is known as GHB; gamma-butyrolactone, which is known as GBL; and 1,4-butanediol, which is known as 1,4-BD. I will refer to them collectively as GHB and related substances—or GHBRS. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs recommended that all three substances be controlled under class B of the 1971 Act because of their potential harm and the evidence of the prevalence of these drugs in the UK.

GHBRS are central nervous system depressants. While they have been used as recreational drugs, they have also been weaponised to commit drug-facilitated sexual assault and other crimes. Although this is a misnomer, they are commonly referred to as date rape drugs. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs provided wide-ranging advice on these substances. Prevalence of use increased steadily from 2005 to 2015 and has plateaued since. Gamma-butyrolactone and 1,4-butanediol are converted to gamma-hydroxybutyric acid on ingestion and are therefore similar in effect.

The ACMD found that there was evidence of an increasing number of deaths associated with GHBRS since it had last considered the harms, including 27 recorded deaths in 2018. It was found that these compounds can cause profound unconsciousness and that there is a high risk of overdose and death to users. Other severe effects include the loss of emotional control, depression, paranoia, anxiety, aggression and persistent cognitive impairment. There is strong evidence of GHBRS being used to facilitate crime, including in high-profile cases. They were used by the serial rapist Reynhard Sinaga and the murderers Stephen Port and Gerald Matovu to incapacitate their victims.

Clearly, it is right that we follow the advice of independent experts and tighten controls on these substances. Moving the drugs to class B will increase the maximum penalty for unlawful possession from two years’ imprisonment or a fine, or both, to five years’ imprisonment or a fine, or both. This will signal to the public that offences involving these substances are treated seriously and are subject to appropriate penalties, acting as a deterrent for their possession and supply. It will ensure that sufficient punitive measures are available to the courts, and will mean that the police place a higher priority on action against offences involving these substances.

The ACMD report recommended not only the control of these three drugs under class B of the 1971 Act, but also that gamma-butyrolactone and 1,4-butanediol be placed in schedule 1 to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001. This is the most restrictive schedule, which is applied to substances without recognised therapeutic use in the UK. Currently, GBL and 1,4-BD have a unique status. Although they have no therapeutic use, it is it is lawful to import, export, produce, supply or possess them in circumstances where they are not intended to be used for human ingestion. That exceptional status was intended to enable the legitimate industrial use of these substances. However, the exemption has been exploited to enable illicit supply. The Misuse of Drugs (Amendment) (England, Wales and Scotland) Regulations 2021, which were also laid before the House on 15 December, will therefore abolish the exemption for GBL and 1,4-BD, meaning that industrial users will need to obtain a Home Office-controlled drugs licence for their use.

Although the 2021 regulations are subject to the negative resolution procedure and therefore the rescheduling of GBL and 1,4-BD is not under debate, it is a crucial part of the package. Taken together, the two measures will deter illicit possession and supply and reduce the availability of GHBRS, thereby preventing crime. We all know the destructive effect that illegal drugs have on the lives of not only those who take them, but their families and wider society. That is demonstrably the case for GHBRS, which have been weaponised to enable crime. The advice from the independent experts makes it clear that these substances are harmful, so it follows that they must be subject to stricter controls. I commend the order to the Committee.

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[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to Members from across the Committee—particularly Opposition Members and the incoming Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North—for their support of the measure. As I hope people have understood, the draft order is part of a suite of tools that we are putting together as a general push against illicit drug use and the use of drugs in crime across the whole United Kingdom. Just before Christmas, we launched our 10-year drugs strategy, whose entire being is about driving down the pernicious effects of illicit drugs in the UK and the concomitant crime. This is a particularly pernicious and unpleasant area of business, on which we have become more focused recently—not least because, as a couple of Members pointed out, there has been a rise in the prevalence of the use of such drugs, and indeed in the number of deaths from it.

To answer the first question asked by the hon. Member for Bradford West, we do believe that the reclassification will reduce the use of the drugs, not least because the greater sentencing indicates a greater sense of priority, which will therefore attract greater police resource. The police prioritise their capacity on offences that we in this House deem to result in the highest harm, and they generally attract the highest amount of attention. For example, most murder squads will have 20 or 30 officers, while most burglary investigations will have one or two. By giving the matter such a level of importance, we think that greater attention will be paid to it. That includes, for example, sales of the compounds on the dark web, where we do enormous amounts of work, mostly thorough our National Crime Agency colleagues, on policing access to illicit equipment—guns, knives, chemicals or whatever it may be. Obviously, the draft order will help with that effort in directing them to where we think the most harm is emanating from.

The hon. Lady raised an interesting question about the use of the drugs consensually. Although there might be people who do that, I hope that everybody would agree that it is profoundly undesirable for their own health that they should use the drugs, whether they consent or not, given the effects that such compounds can have. They are effectively industrial solvents. They are not fit for human consumption. If we can discourage even that kind of use, we should.

Nevertheless, as the hon. Lady said, it is incumbent upon us to ensure that we have the right capacity and facilities in place for those who are victims of these kinds of sexually motivated crimes. As I hope she knows, just in the last couple of years we have expanded the number of independent sexual violence advisers and the support mechanisms available for people who are targeted by sexually motivated crime. On the wider response to the ACMD’s report, I would be more than happy to share that with her in due course.

I turn to the overall spiking strategy, although I am anxious not to expand beyond the general remit of the debate. The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North identified spiking as a specific issue, and she is right that it is an area of concern. Last autumn, there was a significant rise in the number of reports of individuals who thought that they had been injected with these chemicals, rather than just consuming them in a drink. As she will know, given that she has spoken to Jason Harwin, a national gold group is looking at the evidence to ensure that we have right the capacity, and that we are linking up the right patterns and looking for the right clues about what might be happening with that phenomenon. It is widely the case that the number of convictions for spiking across the country, against the number of reports, has not been satisfactory over the last two or three years. I think that we would all admit that. I hope that the work that Jason is doing, alongside the wider drugs strategy, into which enormous resource is being pumped, particularly on health and rehabilitation, will start to drive down the usage.

The other effect that I ought to outline is that the raising of the classification of the drugs means that the proprietors of premises where they may be deployed, such as nightclubs, will need to be much more on their guard for such compounds as they arrive through the doors, as they are at the moment for cocaine, heroin and other drugs that sadly make their way into the night-time economy. We hope that the raising of the classification, and of the seriousness with which we take the issue, will be reflected in the law enforcement effort more generally across the country, and therefore we will see a reduction in the pernicious use of the chemicals. I commend the draft order to the Committee.

Question put and agreed to.

[The Treasurer of Her Majesty's Household (Stuart Andrew)]

On a point of order, Mr Hollobone. I will not detain the Committee for too long, but I bring it to your attention that the notifications that were sent out said that the start time of the meeting would be 11.30 am, not 11.25 am. Also, my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) received notification to be on the Committee, but is not a member of it. I wonder whether there has been some confusion with the hon. Member for Brent Central, who shares the same surname.