Drugs

Lord Birt Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for her relentless focus on drugs policy—a matter I spent 18 months of my life studying when I led the Cabinet Office review 10 years ago.

Serious drugs have been with us for hundreds of years. Heroin was sold over the counter in the UK in the mid-19th century, although it was not until the mid-20th century that diverse drug use began to rise exponentially and to involve many millions of users. Those of us who were young in the 1960s can understand this well. Drug use was part of revolutionary social and cultural change. We read about hallucinogens in our Aldous Huxley. My next-door neighbour at college, a biochemist, kept a test tube on his bookshelf that was openly labelled LSD. Marijuana appeared exotic and bohemian. Jazz musicians took heroin, we were told, and that seemed cool—and no one talked about the dangers. We know better now. Which of us would not be horrified to learn that our children, or in my case my grandchildren, were using a class A, B or C drug, or one of their legal high near-equivalents?

There are, however, modest grounds for hope. A combination of better public education and the street-smart insights of a new Trainspotting generation have reduced the allure of drugs. Overall numbers appear to be in gradual decline. It may take another 50 years, however, before we return once again to mid-20th century norms. In the mean time, unlike many of your Lordships, I continue to support the notion that the state needs to do all it can to stigmatise—and not to legalise or in any way legitimise—the use of classified drugs, for they are all harmful in their different ways.

We should focus on one category of drug user above all others: the 300,000 consumers of heroin and crack cocaine. They do terrible harm to themselves and to their families but cause grievous harm to the rest of us, too. They commit the majority of all crime—more than half of all burglaries and muggings—to fund their habits. The consequence is huge trauma for their victims and a vast economic cost that is borne by us all.

Problem drug users do wicked things, but for the most part, as other noble Lords have suggested, they are troubled individuals, many with mental health problems. They are rootless and chaotic, caught in the whirligig of short sentences, routinely switching in and out of prison. They merit our compassion and they need our help. We offer well intended help, but the system is itself chaotic. The problem drug user is passed between different health and justice institutions and slips between the cracks again and again. I have long believed that our present approach is not fit for purpose.

The notion that treatment will invariably lead to abstinence is a chimera. At best, 20% may become abstinent for more than five years, for heroin is the most pernicious and unshakeable of all addictions. Treatment, none the less, is worthwhile. A broad-based regime with a battery of approaches from heroin substitution to heroin prescription, from counselling to coaching, from help with accommodation to workplace training, will not bring a cure but will bring substantial harm reduction, including a significant cut in acquisitive crime. However, help must be available consistently and continuously.

To protect society, we need something that we do not have now: a legal framework—not necessarily a criminal framework—that would enable us to grip problem drug users to ensure that they do not slip through the cracks, and an agency that is part of the criminal justice system to keep them under what may well be a lifetime of humane and compassionate supervision. Only a step change in our approach will reduce the impact of what will be a very long-lasting epidemic.