Ten-Year Drugs Strategy

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

I welcome the report and congratulate the Government on being prepared to set out a strategy. I can understand why some people are unhappy about part of it. Alcohol is quoted as the great place to go for a wonderful life with wonderful regulation and without all the consequential problems that you have with an unregulated market. All I can say is that, if we had a strategy on alcohol that set out some of the targets that we have here, I would almost think about joining the Government.

I declare an interest, in that I am the co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Twelve Steps Recovery Programme for Addiction, which covers not just alcohol but gambling and drugs and a whole range of things. We have already had an intervention in the Commons, and we have been offered a ministerial meeting over the recovery part of the report—over whether you are prepared to spend more time trying to get people totally sober, because we feel that the effort to try to get recovery and sobriety in so many areas has been falling so short.

In particular, we have harm reduction with methadone, and the rumour is that we are now spending £1 billion a year on methadone; it is very difficult to get to the real figures, but the story is that it is £1 billion a year. We did not have methadone available at all in 2006, when it first came around. How many people have secured sobriety during that period? How much work has been done to try to get them sober and off the drugs—because it is a drug, and it has its consequences. People die from methadone. That is the kind of research that needs to be done—then we can try to look for adequate resourcing.

I am grateful that the Minister has set out targets. Those of us who want to see recovery will be trying to keep her nose to the grindstone on it, so we deliver on them. I am sorry that we do not have the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, with us today, because much of this problem of course ends in jail. That is where we need more openness in jails, to admit people who are willing to assist people to get recovery. We have found with the 12-step programme—

[Noble Lords]

Question!

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

Sorry, we need a full debate on this. My question is on the 12 steps. Will the Government commit themselves to apply them more fully than they have done in the past, and will they do a proper record of the work that is done and research on that?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

I am very pleased to have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, who equates the harms from alcohol with the harms from drugs. Socially, in many cases, the harms from alcohol are worse, because it is so freely available. He is right that quite often these things end in prison—whether it is drugs or alcohol. He talked about the ministerial meeting, and I would be very happy to join him in that if he wishes—and I would also be very happy if he wanted to join the Government. It is not my call, though.

The original impetus for a new strategy came from Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs, which recommended the setting up of this cross-government drugs unit, responsible for co-ordinating and delivering a drugs strategy. Of course, our strategy goes wider than just the health harms—although the noble Lord’s point about alcohol stands just as much. That said, I look forward I hope to joining him, and take on board all the points that he makes.