Lord Howarth of Newport
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Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL]
Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts(9 years ago)
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“Guidance
The Secretary of State must issue guidance, before this Act comes into force and regularly updated thereafter, as to how users, enforcement authorities and others can identify individual psychoactive substances, the degree of the psychoactivity, their safe uses and their relative harms.”
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, the new clause proposed in Amendment 11 follows very closely on the debate which we held just before the dinner break. In their proposals in this Bill the Government are setting a very complex and difficult task for police officers, customs officers and others. The definition of a psychoactive substance is quite deliberately broad and, some would say, vague. Powders and pills look much alike and the question is, how is an officer to know, first, if a substance is indeed a psychoactive one and, secondly, what is in the mind of the person in possession of that substance? How are they to determine the intention? That is essential in the establishment of whether or not a criminal offence is being committed. I would also be grateful if the Minister told us whether he envisages that there will be a de minimis level of psychoactivity and below that level, enforcement officers will not be worrying and will not seek to enforce the regime that the Bill creates. Or, are the Government saying that any substance which is at any level psychoactive is to be controlled, in the sense that this particular legislation will control it?
As we have also acknowledged in earlier debates, there is a shortage of forensic facilities in this country. That is why the Home Secretary belatedly, just before the Bill was tabled in Parliament, wrote to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to ask,
“how best we can establish a comprehensive scientific approach for determining psychoactivity for evidential purposes”.
That suggests that the Home Secretary is rushing into enacting legislation before she has any clear idea as to how it would work. What we know is that significant additional burdens will be laid upon police whose numbers and resources have been diminishing and may well continue to do so. These measures, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, has already put to the House, may further inhibit research in important respects and create multiple new possibilities for the criminalisation of people who are in some way involved with new psychoactive substances.
I propose that the Government owe it to consumers, businesses, research institutions and those responsible for enforcement to explain exactly what they intend, and to advise them all on how this legislation would work. The Minister kindly undertook to write to us, the Peers who have been involved in consideration of this Bill, between Committee and Report. I suggest that in due course the Government should write to a much wider range of readers—people who will have responsibilities created under this legislation, who will need to understand the definition of and the practicalities of identifying a psychoactive substance, and what is in the minds of people they apprehend who may be contemplating purposes that the Government wish to discourage and would make a criminal offence. That is the burden of the new clause proposed in Amendment 11. The Secretary of State must issue guidance before this Bill comes into force and keep it regularly updated thereafter as to how users, enforcement authorities and others can identify individual psychoactive substances, the degree of their psychoactivity, their safe uses and their relative harms.
I now move to the new clause proposed in Amendment 12, in the same group. If people are to look after themselves and others—their children, friends and people whose interests they care about—they are going to need full and reliable information about psychoactive substances. We have heard much about how the internet can be a force for bad, but it can also be a force for good in its ability to disseminate information that may be extremely valuable and helpful in enabling people’s safety to be preserved. It is the Government’s responsibility to use the means at their disposal to provide the fullest information they can. The previous Government, I think, relaunched the FRANK website, the earlier version of which was considerably criticised, but I praise them for doing this because it is a genuine effort to provide fairly full and certainly honest information about psychoactive substances.
The difficulty about the Talk to FRANK website is that its official provenance and rather starchy tone mean that it will not be the go-to website for young people who want to find out about drugs. While it is important that the Government maintain a website of this kind and amplify the information that it provides, they should recognise that the work they do in preparing and maintaining such a website is complementary to other, unofficial sites that are created and maintained by experienced people, whose motive is good, because they want to share information about the realities of psychoactive substances and protect people from coming to harm by their use of such substances. I have in mind websites created by organisations such as DrugScope, Bluelight, Urban75, SafeOrScam and PillReports, which are examples of some of the websites to which people can go to learn about psychoactive substances. Those websites are maintained with very good intentions with regard to the public good—public safety and health—and I therefore hope that the Government see their work as complementary.
At all events, we need to capture as much evidence as we can about the substances, so that we better understand the harms we are trying to prevent, the ills we need to cure and the effectiveness of the measures taken to prevent people coming to harm, and to remedy— so far as is possible—the harms that people experience. We should learn as much as we can from collaboration with other countries; the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction is an excellent model of international information sharing and co-operation. However, we cannot expect the people of this country habitually to turn to the website of the EMCDDA; they need to have something that is designed for them, and more appropriate and accessible for them.
My second proposal, in subsection (b) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 12, is that the Secretary of State should provide,
“a network of testing centres, readily accessible at no charge to users and others, at which they can be informed about the identity, composition, toxicity and potential harms to human health of any substances brought in by them which there is reason to think may be psychoactive”.
As I understand it, that service is available in the Netherlands. It appears that they have a fuller range of forensic resources and facilities for the identification and testing of substances, and that access to those facilities is freely available to the public at large as well as to officials and enforcement authorities. We should seek to construct such a model in this country, not least because an early alert to a bad consignment of drugs, which is very dangerous, could save lives. I beg to move.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, on both those amendments. We talked a lot about legislation earlier on today, but we know, both internationally and from the Home Affairs Select Committee and others, that legislation does not make very much difference at all to the key issues relating to drugs, whether traditional drugs or new psychoactive substances. The important job the Government have concerns information. I have said it before and will say it again: young people do not want to kill themselves, believe it or not, and they do not even want to harm themselves and finish up in hospital. Why do they kill themselves and finish up in hospital? Because they do not have the information they need to keep themselves safe. Why do they not have the information? Because far too many substances are banned in a rather simplistic way. Countries such as the Netherlands, which have coffee shops where people can get cannabis, have very little problem with heroin, for example. There are other ways of keeping people safe. But the most important way, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, says, is information. I agree with his ideas about how this should be done—it cannot be typical government information. It really is important. If we stopped focusing on legislation quite so much and focused on some of these other issues, we might actually make some progress.
I want also to support the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, in relation to the testing centres. Testing centres would be a very important adjunct if we were to have a more proportionate system where low-harm substances would be regulated, labelled and so on, as recommended by the European Commission and approved by the European Parliament. If we had a proportionate system like that, and had testing centres, a young person could go into a testing centre and ask whether a substance was low harm and okay to take. With a combination of a proportionate legal system, testing centres and really good information, we would begin to have a really good drugs policy. Would that not be wonderful? We could lead the world with such a policy.
Many Latin American countries talk about these things. They know just how bad the war on drugs can be. They know just how important it is for the demand end of the drugs market to be managed effectively in order to save them from tens of thousands of deaths a year, corruption, government failure and all the rest of it. It is absolutely disastrous across the Atlantic. In my view, we have a responsibility to ourselves and our young people but also to Latin America and central American countries.
I very strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said. I really hope that Ministers will take it very seriously and somehow link it with a proportionate, rational system of drug control.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
I thank my noble friend Lord Norton for that. That is probably covered by FRANK, which is an element of our broad approach to prevention. We are investing in a range of programmes that have a positive impact on young people and adults, giving them the confidence, resilience and risk-management skills to resist drug use. It has been a valuable resource for young people, parents and teachers, especially when used for wider resilience-building and behaviour change. It continues to be updated to reflect new and emerging patterns of drug use and to evolve to remain in line with young people’s media habits and to strengthen advice and support. Since its launch it has been visited by more than 35 million people, and millions have called the helpline to speak to specially trained advisers.
I hope that explanation has gone at least some way to satisfying the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and that on that basis he will be content to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Norton, and particularly my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe on the Front Bench. He saw some merit in what I said. This illustrates the virtue of the Committee process. The dialectic helps us all to learn. My noble friend Lady Meacher was right to say that information is at the very least as important as legislation, because we have all this evidence that prohibition has not worked. In that case, it is much better that people should be helped to understand what they do.
The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, was concerned that my recommendation of a network of testing centres would lay impossible demands on the existing resources of laboratories and forensic facilities. Of course, he is right: with our existing resources we could not possibly construct such a network that would be accessible in all regions of the country. My proposition is that we should aim to achieve that. We know that this legislation will in any case require an expansion of forensic facilities. It seems to me that you can achieve both purposes simultaneously: to enable those whose responsibility it is to enforce the law to have speedy access to the information they need, but to also assist vulnerable consumers. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Norton, for his endorsement of the value and importance of providing reliable, trustworthy and up-to-date information to all concerned.
Baroness Hamwee
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord when he is in full flow, but I think he might be coming to the end. If he is considering bringing this back, I wonder if I could raise one thing that has been troubling me during this debate, concerning the advice as to harm or danger. If it is advice as to whether something is or is or not harmful, perhaps before the next stage, he might think about duties of care and liability and all those things. If it is advice as to whether a substance is dangerous, very dangerous or fatal, does he share my concern? I am not seeking to pick holes; I genuinely want to explore the subject. My concern is that if there are those categories, the lowest category would be interpreted as meaning “not harmful”; in other words, it would be reduced to people thinking, “Well, it’s not fatal and it’s not very dangerous, so it must be okay”. I do not know if there is a way through all this.
Lord Howarth of Newport
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, makes a very important point, and I think that it was strongly suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, as well. We have to convey that there is no such thing as a safe dose. We are dealing with relative harms. We are helping individuals who are possibly ignorant, gullible and vulnerable—they may be very knowledgeable—to navigate their way through what is very treacherous territory indeed. The Government, in partnership with other well-intended agencies, NGOs and the voluntary sector, should be quite systematic about trying to ensure that the best information is available to people who are going to take risks and may come to appalling harm. In this policy-making process, we are looking for the least bad solution. We are not dealing with an ideal world—there is not going to be a drugs-free world; some would contend that that is not even an ideal. At any rate, the practical reality is that people will always use drugs, so our responsibility as good citizens and the responsibility of the Front Bench opposite on behalf of the Government is to minimise harm and danger.
Finally, the Minister talked about the value of the European early warning system, which is an important component of the array of policies to try to protect people from harm. But as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, inquired, we need to know how the Government intend to make sure that those early warnings are widely circulated and reach the people who are perhaps most in need of them. Earlier this year there was a spate of stories about people being killed by taking new psychoactive substances, which seem to have arrived somewhere in East Anglia and were spreading quite rapidly across the country. Whether or not there had been an early warning from an official European system, the fact is that people did not get the advice they needed in time. We have to think of all the best practical ways we can in order to help spare people that kind of fate. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Education
(1) The Secretary of State shall require that all children of secondary school age receive education designed to teach them about the realities of psychoactive substances (whether controlled or otherwise) and develop them as persons who are informed, risk-aware, resilient and responsible in relation to psychoactive substances.
(2) Ofsted and equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland shall, in the course of their normal inspections of secondary schools of all kinds, inspect the performance of individual schools in drug education and include their findings on this in the reports which they issue on those schools.
(3) Ofsted and equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland shall publish an annual report on the state of drug education in schools in each nation of the UK, together with recommendations.
(4) The Secretary of State shall monitor the programmes and resources available to schools to support their teaching about psychoactive substances of all sorts (including both controlled and exempted substances).”
Lord Howarth of Newport
I apologise that the Committee has to put up with an inordinate amount of talk from me, but I will be as brief as I can on what is a subject of major importance: how we strengthen education in relation to drugs. In introducing this proposed new clause, I congratulate my noble friends on the Front Bench on their excellent new clause set out in Amendment 104, which is grouped with this one.
The coalition’s strategy as enunciated in 2010 included reducing demand, and in that, education is or should be key. I would like to see the Secretaries of State for the Home Office, for Education, for BIS and for Health jointly reporting as proposed in the new clause set out in Amendment 104. My noble friends have called for an annual report on the subject of education, but it should be one that emanates from the Government as a whole, and particularly those departments.
The situation as it stands is that schools are required to provide drug education programmes and information about drugs in the science national curriculum. But not all schools, indeed a diminishing number, are required to deliver the national curriculum, and even in those that are, the evidence is that this fairly minimal requirement does not prove to be particularly effective in educating people about the realities of drugs. After much anguished debate, the last Government decided that PSHE should be a non-statutory subject in the national curriculum. It is fair to say that the last Government provided funding for early intervention to support children at risk, and I assume that the troubled families programme has something to offer in this connection.
I have read that the Government are spending some £7 million annually on drug education as a whole. On the other hand, the Minister of State at the Home Office, Mike Penning, told the House of Commons in a Written Answer on 2 June that the total spend on education and prevention campaigns in relation to new psychoactive substances from 2013 to 2015 had been only £180,556. That seems extraordinarily little. It would be helpful if the Minister provided the House with correct figures so that we know what the Government are spending on various aspects of drug education. Whatever it is, however, I would contend that it is inadequate.
The Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons, in its 2012 report Breaking the Cycle, was scathing about the efforts being made at that time by the Government to promote education about drugs. It quoted the charity Mentor, which complained angrily:
“We are spending the vast majority of the money we do spend on drug education on programmes that don’t work”.
The committee found that most schools provide drug education once a year or less. I have no doubt that there are schools that do very well, but the Home Affairs Select Committee was talking about the generality of schools. It reported that the Department for Education, with, one might say, a shrug of its institutional shoulders, had said that it does not monitor the programmes and resources that schools use to support their teaching. That is why, in subsection (4) of new Clause 13, I have proposed that the Secretary of State,
“shall monitor the programmes and resources available to schools to support their teaching”.
It seems to me a dreadful dereliction of responsibility if that is not happening.
Education strategy in the fight against drugs must be transformed. When the public health campaign about tobacco got serious, it worked. The Secretary of State must insist that all secondary schools take seriously their responsibility to educate children about drugs. It may well be argued—and it may well be right—that education should start before children reach the secondary level; certainly it should apply in every secondary school.
Effective techniques exist to teach young people resilience and the capacity to make their own considered decisions. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, said, we must act on the demand at that point—legislation is not going to do it on its own. We must bring about a society in which fewer people want to use these substances. The way to make a very good start on that is to get serious about education.
I have made specific proposals about the role of Ofsted and the equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. School inspections should routinely examine what is happening with drug education in schools, and Ofsted’s findings should go into its reports on each school. Ofsted should also publish an annual report on the state of drug education in schools in each nation of the United Kingdom and make recommendations about necessary improvements. That way, not only would the message get out to all schools but all schools would be invigilated and monitored on the way they acquit themselves of this responsibility.
More broadly, it is not just specific drug education that matters: it is the quality of education overall. The propensity to use drugs correlates with poor educational standards and is found more widely in communities where, as things stand, the standard of education offered in local schools is not what we would wish. Deficient education is among the pathologies that incubate drug abuse. It is a broader question.
The same vigour needs to be brought to the approach in further and higher education. The funding councils should make it a condition of publicly provided support for the universities that they demonstrate that they have programmes to help people understand the realities of drugs and that they report on what they are doing every year. Universities UK ought to promote best practice, not only in relation to new psychoactive substances but to prescription drugs that are being widely misused by students in universities, as I have mentioned before.
Drug users of all ages need help to become properly informed, properly risk aware and properly capable of taking their own sensible, responsible decisions. I hope that the Minister, in responding, will also tell us how his department, which has lead responsibility in government, plans to work with other government departments, particularly with the Department for Education, and to ensure that we have a coherent strategy that tackles this problem at the roots and does not simply try to patch things up when they have gone wrong. I beg to move.
Lord Bates
My Lords, I am grateful as these are important amendments and I pay tribute to the noble Lord for introducing them. When we had our meeting of all interested Peers, he said that it was vital that we spaced our time in Committee to allow in-depth debates on the key themes which run through drug policy. To me one of the key themes, along with enforcement, must be the value and importance of education. The noble Lord has afforded us that opportunity, along with the Official Opposition, and I am grateful for that.
I want to address some specific concerns, but a number of the points that I will raise were touched upon by my noble friend Lady Chisholm. She was good enough to say something about me but, behind the scenes, the great joy which your Lordships cannot see is that when we are having our briefings, because of her distinguished background in nursing and her volunteering within a drug rehabilitation unit, she brings great sensitivity and understanding to this issue. I have drawn on that many times myself and I am grateful for it.
I want to start with the big picture on education. The more that I have looked into it, the more I think that the most difficult thing in winning the battle in education has been the term “legal highs”. The fact that we have seen this sort of heading everywhere—it is pervasive, even on the high streets—saying there is somehow a high which is not age restricted, and which you can walk into a shop to get without being prosecuted for it, has been one of the most dangerous things for the policy of education. One of the groups which came to see me and officials at the Home Office in support of the Bill said that, above all, they wished that we could get the message out to young people that these are often not legal highs but lethal highs. Because of the point that the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, made at Second Reading about the pharmacology of these drugs, the term used was that people are often playing Russian roulette as to which part of the batch they receive. Added to the fact of their being able to get these substances on the high street through a store, without producing any ID or proof of age whatever, it does immense damage to the education cause to which we are all committed.
As in other parts of the legislation, we have sought to draw upon expert opinion where we can. A number of recommendations were made in the report by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Prevention of Drug and Alcohol Dependence. It highlighted the importance of embedding universal drug prevention actions in wider strategies to support healthy development and well-being in general. It also recognised that targeted, drug-specific prevention interventions remain a valid approach to those individuals considered to be at risk of harm. That came on board along with the expert panel’s report. When the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, spoke at Second Reading, he really tried to put me on the spot by saying that there was a substantial section in the expert panel’s report about education. While that was published under the coalition Government, he wanted to know whether it would remain government policy. I made the point that that was absolutely the case and that we remain committed to it.
I am pretty sure—and I will write on this if I am wrong—that the relatively small amount of £180,000, which was quoted in the Written Answer, will be part of a breakdown of the £7 million. The majority of that is a health lead and we were talking about what the Home Office spends, not on overall drug prevention, but specifically on new psychoactive substances. That is a key element.
I know this may sound strange but the legislative programme has a place in provoking awareness. I know this from my own Twitter account, where I now have a large number of new followers who do not necessarily agree with the policies of HMG in respect of new psychoactive substances. I am also realising that saying that might also get me trending on social media. I welcome this, because it is part of people engaging with the debate and the legislative process. People are asking, “Should they be banned?”, “Should there be a universal ban?”, “Should we be having partial bans or temporary banning orders?” and “Should we be widening the debate?”. The more young people who engage with the type of debate we have in this House the better.
In a similar vein, my noble friend Lord Blencathra talked about people in suits not being taken seriously when they talk in schools about drug prevention. I must be careful what I say here, given her presence in the Chamber, but the Lord Speaker’s schools outreach programme is very effective and I had the privilege to take part in it. People engage with it and talk about legislation and about the fact that legislating is not easy.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, when the Minister takes part in the Lord Speaker’s outreach programme, does he wear a suit?
Lord Bates
That is mandatory, is it not, at least for the male Members? I would certainly not dream of turning up in our ceremonial gowns. They would probably think it was Christmas and misunderstand what was coming.
Education is not just for teachers and it is for all of us, including the media, to ensure positive role models. As a parent and grandparent, I think children often respond best to very clear messages. Ambiguous messages which say, “This might be okay or it might not—take it along to a testing station”, or “This might be against the law or it could be legal”, spread confusion which is unhelpful to pupils and teachers.
Drug education is part of the national curriculum for science at key stages 2 and 3. My noble friend Lord Norton of Louth said that if we made this a key performance indicator then schools would start taking in seriously. It is already, in a way, because to be judged outstanding by Ofsted you must be able to demonstrate with great clarity that pupils are safe and feel safe at all times and that they understand how to keep themselves and others safe in different situations and settings. We need to explore further whether inspectors follow that in every school but the bones of what is necessary are there.
We have had some excellent contributions and discussions. As I flagged up earlier, we have a further meeting on 7 July. We have invited Public Health England to be represented at that, as well as the Department for Education. That will be a useful opportunity to explore these issues.
Lord Bates
I understand where the noble Lord is coming from, and we will look at this. The Bill is primarily a law enforcement measure, setting out definitions et cetera, although it is part of a wider context that includes education. As to whether we should have references to education or treatment programmes in the Bill, I personally favour things that are very clear and focused about what they want to do. What we hope to achieve through education is a very important part of the context. I undertake to reflect on that between now and Report.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, the debate produced a very beautiful meeting of minds between the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, which once again demonstrates the supreme value of Committee proceedings in your Lordships’ House. I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, all of whom have emphasised the fundamental importance of education and the critical need to get it right.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, that children do not take kindly to being preached at. I was suggesting not that they should be preached at but that they should be taught, with real professional skill. I would certainly envisage that appropriate role models—the kind of people who can talk to young people in their own language and whom young people will be able to identify imaginatively with—are of course the sorts of people who will be able to play a very valuable part, if schools have the imagination and skill to find them and bring them into the schools programme.
However, there have to be more systematic pressures on schools. I very much agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, when he said that having performance in respect of drug education forming part of the data that go to establish league tables will give a salutary shock to quite a number of schools. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, suggested that that is almost the case, and I drew some encouragement from the quotation that he gave us about the requirements of Ofsted. Yet I have a sense that the prevailing culture in our schools is such that they are not taking that point from Ofsted sufficiently seriously, and if they fail to perform in this regard they may not be able to qualify to be rated “outstanding”. I am not sure that enough of them know about it or that enough of them are being seen to act on it.
The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood, made the point with which I so much agree: that the funding so far provided for the system is—I do not think this was his word—derisory. That is sending a signal from government that this is a second or third-order issue. I know that the Minister does not think it is at all but I hope he will reflect on how he can, tactfully as always, bring more effective pressure to bear on his ministerial colleagues in the Department for Education. He undertook that he would talk to them. I also understand that it is very difficult for them to persuade the system as a whole that it has got to take on yet another task in a new way. There are endless pressures on schools. New Ministers and officials are for ever coming up with new policies and asking the people on the front line to implement their bright ideas. I understand all those difficulties, but having acknowledged that, we have all recognised and are all fully persuaded that we have got to do better on education and that that is going to be fundamental to the success of the overall strategy.
I am glad that my noble friend Lord Rosser drew attention to a significant section in the report of the expert panel which should give strength to the Minister’s elbow. I was grateful for the remarks from the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who survived her education, which is something that everybody has to do. I was grateful to the Minister for a series of thoughtful and helpful points. Of course he is right that the term “legal highs” has been profoundly unhelpful, and I have every sympathy with the Government in their creation of an aggravated offence of supplying psychoactive substances in proximity to schools. I think there is an amendment which adds other institutions where children may be present.
If the Minister would be kind enough to write to us clarifying the figures—what is being spent on what, on public account in this field—that would be very helpful. I was also much encouraged by what he said about wanting young people themselves to be involved in the debate, as it were owning the issue and the problem and to help us all to find better ways to deal with it. I look forward to returning to this broad issue at Report and in the mean time beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, I want to speak to Amendments 17 and 18, which I have tabled rather impertinently as amendments to Amendment 16 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher. Here I think that the substantial measure of agreement and meeting of minds that we had in the previous debate on education will rapidly dissipate.
I remind the Committee that it is my belief that prohibition has broadly failed and that it is because of that failure that we have the problem of new psychoactive substances. I believe that our objectives should be to protect people, particularly young people but people of all ages, from the dangers of drugs and to minimise the harms that they may cause. In nothing I say do I mean to imply that I would encourage the consumption of drugs—we are looking for the least bad solution to a very intractable and very important problem. My proposal is therefore pragmatic, but I believe that the least bad way to go is selectively and cautiously to legalise certain drugs and very strictly to regulate their availability.
The purveyors of psychoactive substances, after all, seek to create and distribute substances that mimic the effect of controlled drugs, and they do so quite unscrupulously. They do not mind how corrupt, how adulterated, how toxic and how dangerous those substances are, and that is the problem that we are up against. It seems to me therefore that it would be more prudent and more responsible, rather than to have a blanket prohibition or ban, to make legally available one substance in each of the three principal classes of drugs. The first would be a stimulant—it might be MDMA, better known as ecstasy. The second would be a depressant, which might be cannabis—the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, spoke of the significance of the ratio of THC to CBD within any individual variety of cannabis. If you have no THC, you have no “high”, as I understand it, so I guess that there would have to be some element of THC if people were to use the drug. We would seek to provide a version of cannabis that was the safest kind—that does the trick in the sense of making people feel that this is the substance that gives them the experience that they are looking for. Thirdly, there should be a hallucinogen: perhaps magic mushrooms or mescaline. In all those cases, I propose that we legalise and regulate drugs that are of relatively low risk, of which society has long experience, and which in many societies have become socialised and in their use normalised.
The Minister was quite quickly dismissive of the experiment that has been initiated in New Zealand. It is perfectly true that the expert committee, having carefully considered the policy adopted in New Zealand, decided it could not recommend it, and that the policy has run into a number of practical difficulties there. But essentially the New Zealand approach was to find a way, very carefully and selectively, to legalise the use of drugs that have been demonstrated to be of low risk, and I do not actually think that the story of the New Zealand experiment has yet reached an end.
At all events, I emphasise that there would have to be strict regulation and quality control and that these drugs should be introduced only in circumstances of the best security that we can provide to their users. There should be regulation of their composition and their strength; there should be control over how they are transported; manufacturing should be licensed and strictly regulated, as should retailing; there should be no sales to children; I believe that no advertising should be permitted; marketing would certainly have to be very strictly regulated; and so forth. That is the type of regime that we already operate in our society. That is how we deal with alcohol and tobacco—two drugs, as the noble Baroness said, which are, by any reasonable standard of judgment, more dangerous than cannabis—and with medicines. So there are already models. There is already a basis of selective legalisation and regulation on which we can build—and, no doubt, which needs to be improved.
The availability of these drugs should be accompanied by advice as to their safe use, exactly as happens when you collect a prescription for medicine; there should be full information. Of course, as we have already argued, this all needs to be set in a context of education, to help people to make mature and wise decisions.
The Lord Bishop of Bristol
I just wanted some clarification. One thing that worries me is whether, in the end, the direction of Amendment 18 will not prove to be a bit confusing. I think it was John Maxwell who said that when people say, “Yes, but”, nobody ever hears the “Yes”. If you say, “No, but”, does anybody hear the “No”?
Lord Howarth of Newport
I hope that I can offer some reassurance to the right reverend Prelate, if he will follow me in the argument that I want briefly to unfold. Let me continue by noting that there would be the advantage, as with alcohol and tobacco, that the Government could tax these substances and use the lever of taxation to influence the preferences of consumers and their behaviour. Of course, the Exchequer would benefit, and I know the great importance that the Minister and, indeed, all of us attach to the reduction of the deficit. A new source of taxation would be not unwelcome, I think, to the Exchequer. What I am recommending is, in effect, a market solution, a kind of reverse Gresham’s law. I believe that relatively good drugs would drive out bad drugs. It works in the Netherlands, where safer varieties of cannabis are made available in licensed shops and there is no demand in that country for the synthetic cannabinoids that are so fashionable and so popular in this country—and so very dangerous to their users.
Of course, there will always be people who are inveterate and irremediable risk-takers, and young people will always be tempted to challenge authority. But I suspect that most consumers would be very happy if they knew that they could obtain legally a psychoactive substance that they could be assured was relatively safe. After all, that has been the attraction—albeit the illusory and deceptive attraction—of so-called legal highs. Why would people go to dodgy dealers to buy white powders about which they knew nothing if they had a safer and legal alternative available to them? There may be a fear that the legal availability of certain drugs would lead to an increase in consumption; but I mentioned in an earlier debate the report by Dr Deborah Hasin of the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University in New York, in which she found that there is no correlation between the availability of medicinal cannabis and increased consumption by teenagers. Public opinion has allowed the state governments of Colorado, Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia to legalise and regulate cannabis. The same process has happened although with a very different model in Uruguay. This is a less dangerous approach than the prohibitionist approach, which we have had nearly 50 years of experience to demonstrate does not work. What I am putting forward is by no means perfect, but I believe it would be safer and better than the kind of anarchy that, paradoxically, prohibition creates. I would be grateful if the Minister would, if he does not agree with me, explain why he does not agree with me.