EU Drugs Strategy: EUC Report

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick, and his colleagues on the Select Committee on what is a really thorough and incredibly useful piece of work—one which we have not had before the House for a very long time. It makes some extremely useful recommendations and comes to some very helpful guiding conclusions, and I am grateful for the opportunity to debate it today. I would add to that my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, on the way that he has introduced this debate. Were it not for the fact that my name is on the list and so I had better say something, I would not be speaking, as the noble Lord covered his report extremely well, and certainly covered all of the main points that need to be addressed. It is late on a Thursday afternoon and we have a long speakers list, so I shall try to keep my comments as short as possible.

It is very helpful that the report emphasised, at paragraph 26, that member states should continue to decide and enact health policies in respect to drugs. That is the position we have had for many years and have now, and it complements the position of the United Kingdom’s own national drugs policy, where the Government would like to see such decisions go further down, even to a local level. That co-ordinated approach is helpful.

The report’s conclusions in paragraph 27 are also extremely helpful. They concern the difficulty of amending a treaty signed by 180 countries, namely the United Nations conventions. This is important, because a lot of people and NGOs in this country and around Europe have been devoting quite a lot of time over the last four or five years on working to amend the conventions, or get them amended, on the basis that it is difficult to develop policies and strategies in this difficult and complex area while the conventions remain as they are. If we read the report before us today and its conclusions, we see that that is not so. By way of a very helpful example, the committee draws attention in paragraphs 30 to 34 to the different national policies in Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal and the Czech Republic. They are well worth looking at, because they demonstrate the flexibility within the conventions which many countries have not taken advantage of. Nor, certainly, have we, and we might well think about doing so.

The report refers to the EU strategy’s two “broad brush” objectives—which have been the policies of most nations, too—of restricting supply and reducing demand. These are indeed very broad brush. Reducing demand is left to subsidiarity and the individual member states. Where the European Union has played a significant role is in attempting to restrict supply. There is great co-operation between member states’ police forces and different agencies. Of course, one could always say that it could be improved, but it is an area where the strategy has been successful. However, as the report says, it is rather broad brush, and it would probably be more helpful if that broad brush were to become a slightly narrower brush.

On reducing supply, I would make two points only. First, the report makes a number of points on trafficking. I noticed and read carefully the Home Office’s evidence about that. Apparently, it has had great success in managing to stop drugs coming into this country and other European countries, to the effect that, for example, the purity of cocaine has significantly reduced and the price has gone up. Of course, this is good news and the Home Office should be congratulated on it. However, I have heard such statements from the Home Office many times during the past 25 years. I am sure that what it says is correct, but I note that it has had absolutely no effect on the amount of drugs that can be got on the streets of Britain and of other cities in Europe nor on the ease with which one can do so. I wonder whether that is an effective use of resources. That, too, has never been looked at.

The report also makes an interesting point about displacement which has not been taken into account previously; namely, that if security forces, be they customs or police, adopt a strategy for getting rid of trafficking in one particular area, it has the undesirable effect of moving it somewhere else. Within Europe, that could mean moving it to a part of Europe that has not had a serious drug problem so far. There are two examples of exactly the same problem occurring outside Europe. Only this week, we have heard that Honduras has now taken over as the murder capital of the world. The work that the Mexican and United States Governments have done to reduce trafficking in Mexico has caused enormous problems in Honduras, which did not have any problems previously. The second example is the work being done by the Americans and the Royal Navy in the Caribbean to stop that being a drug route for South American cocaine. It has been very successful, but it has displaced the problem to west Africa, which now has an appalling drug problem which it did not have 10 or 15 years ago. We must be careful not to recreate those problems in Europe. It is helpful that the report draws attention to them.

My main point rather echoes that made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and is about differences in national policies and what they mean. I draw attention to Sweden and the Netherlands, two countries which are often regarded as being at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to drug policies. I know both of them quite well and have spent quite a lot of time looking at policies in those countries during the past 20 years. They are very interesting and very different. Although Sweden is regarded as being hugely successful, it is the nature of the way that things happen there that a degree of its problems is not visible. I would not say that it has been swept under the carpet, which would be unkind and unfair, but it is like an iceberg—it is below the surface.

I do not necessarily think that the Swedish policy overall is quite as overwhelmingly successful as is presumed. My background is in drug treatment, and although a lot is talked about the success of the treatment system in Sweden, for a number of cultural and social reasons, that form of treatment, without going into the detail, would not be acceptable in this country. You could not do it. Equally, in the Netherlands, their approach to life, the way that they choose to live, and their morals and ethics, are very different from ours in Britain. Although what they have done is very interesting, and some people have asked why can we not do in London what they have done in Amsterdam, one of the things I have noticed is that you can learn from other countries—I wish we would learn more from them—but you cannot pick up another country’s policy and transpose it. We are not Los Angeles, Amsterdam or Stockholm, we are different. We can learn from them but we cannot do exactly as they do. That is an important thing to take on board.

Perhaps the most important part of this report for me was Chapter 5, which is devoted to Portugal. Everybody in the drugs field has something to say about Portugal—that it has either been a huge success or a great failure, depending on the position you started from. The interesting thing about this report is that it is so dispassionate and refuses to come to a conclusion, but recognises the importance of what has happened in Portugal, where there has been a reduction in the use of the criminal justice system, an increase in the treatment system and a resulting reduction in drug use. There has been a complete change in what has happened in that country. Could we do that here? I do not know. Nobody knows, because we have not done it. However, I fully support the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, when he referred to the fact that we have not had that debate. One of the reasons we have not had that debate is not only because of the irresponsibility of the press, which scares politicians off from doing it, but because important social debates of this sort need to be led by the political class, particularly by the Government of the day, and successive Governments for the last 20 years have declined to engage in this debate. They have not said whether it is right or wrong but have just refused to engage.

What this report says to us more than anything else is that there is a hugely important debate out there to be had. It could have an enormous effect, because the single biggest cost of the drug problem—an economic cost in these difficult economic times—is the criminal justice cost, which we are told by the Government is about £18 billion a year. If there is any possibility that we could save some of that money and save some of the people to whom that money is directed as individuals through healthcare—this Government are doing a great deal on healthcare and drugs—that is something we should be looking at. If there is one message that comes out of this excellent report for me, it is that we must have this debate and that it is worth while—but it must be led by the Government.