Drugs

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those of other noble Lords to the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for tabling this debate. Of course, 50 years ago we could not have had this debate because Governments did not have drugs policies in those days. However, it became apparent during the 1960s that we were going to need one. Very little was known about drugs or drug use in those days but it was quite clear that they were damaging to an individual’s health. They hurt families and the wider communities, and there was potential damage to society itself. That is how it was perceived and, from where we are now, it probably was not entirely wrong. However, we need to look at the context of those days.

Drugs in 1971 meant cannabis, a little amphetamine, heroin—that was probably the most serious one—and some hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. Although cocaine existed, it was not really available in the United Kingdom then. All the new NPDs such as ecstasy, methedrone and ketamine really did not exist. Crack had not been invented and prescriptions for drugs such as valium and librium were really new, and their long-term effects not known at all. In 1974, there were 14,000 heroin addicts registered with the Home Office.

There are only two things you can do about drugs, then or now. You can put in place measures to restrict or reduce the supply of drugs or try to reduce the demand for them. You can restrict the supply by use of the criminal law. Unfortunately, in the 1970s there was no recognised way of treating drug addicts, so there was nothing much that you could do about reducing demand. We introduced something called the British system, whereby addicts were prescribed heroin every single day as a way of keeping them level and out of the black market. That in fact continued in this country until the 1980s and it is the forerunner of much of the state provision of treatment today.

The central plank was to try to control or reduce supply, which was done through the passage of the Misuse of Drugs Act, supported internationally by the United Nations conventions. While those and the law may not have changed over 40 years, quite a lot of other things have. We now have 300,000 addicts, mostly of heroin and cocaine. We have crack, NPDs, ecstasy, methedrone and ketamine, with two new drugs appearing every week. In 1992—but not until then—the Home Office decided that there was after all a link between drugs and crime. That led to the first ever drugs strategy, while my noble friend Lord Howard was in the Home Office. We learnt then that the cost of drug-related crime and the policing of drugs was about £12 billion a year.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, talked about the international side of the drug industry. He mentioned a lot of countries but missed out Afghanistan. The second reason why we went into Afghanistan eight years ago was to suppress the opium business, of which we are the largest consumer; 80% of the heroin on British streets comes from Afghanistan. Now we are leaving Afghanistan, though, and the poppy harvest has in fact quadrupled. I am not really sure that you could describe that as a policy success.

Whichever way you look at it—internationally, nationally or locally—I cannot see that our attempt to restrict the supply of drugs has been anything but a disastrous and incredibly expensive failure. In 1971 we did not have options but today we do. If we cannot restrict the supply, as we clearly cannot, we can reduce demand. The United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the NHS all accept that drug addiction is a primary illness; it is not curable but it is treatable. The previous Government recognised this and over 10 years put an enormous amount of time and effort into treatment, and formed the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse.

The present Government have taken that forward by ring-fencing the funding and by moving the National Treatment Agency into Public Health England, but there is a structural fault in drug treatment in Britain. The officials at both the Department of Health and the Home Office fundamentally do not believe in drug treatment; they believe that drugs are a symptom of social deprivation. They are backed in this feeling by the medical profession; because there is no medical treatment for drug addiction, which there is not and never has been, there is therefore presumed to be no treatment at all. Therefore the only treatment for drug addiction, in the view that is held, is substitute prescribing, which means that 150,000 out of 300,000 addicts in this country live on prescription drugs. To look at it another way, it is like taking an alcoholic off whisky, putting him on vodka and saying, “There we are, job done”. However, there is a vast amount of other treatment available such as abstinence-based treatment, which has been in existence in this country for 40 years but which virtually no one has access to because they cannot get it through the health authorities.

We started this debate 40 years ago with a degree of consensus; we need to find that consensus now. No responsible politician wants to do anything other than to reduce the demand for drugs and the harms caused by them, so there is quite a lot of agreement about the way forward. The consensus is growing among politicians, internationally and now in the media. All that we need now is for the Government to join that consensus.