Drug Policy

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, I hope you can spare me two minutes in the gap. I, too, risk—as the noble Lord, Lord Rea did—boring noble Lords by repeating what I have said in your Lordships’ House many times before. Drugs are primarily a health problem, with significant social consequences, as we all know. It was for the historic reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, just told us about so very graphically that the establishment of the day, and the political establishment, decided to address what we now know is a health problem by using the criminal justice system to restrict drugs, a pillar of this policy being the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Indeed, the international comparators report says:

“Our legislative response to drugs is based in the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which continues to provide a flexible yet consistent legislative framework to control emerging harmful drugs and target illegal suppliers”.

The problem is it does not actually work and that is why we are having this debate today.

We have been given evidence that drug use in the United Kingdom has levelled out and is, perhaps, even falling. Most of the evidence comes from the national crime survey. I have to tell the Government that no reasonable, intelligent, well informed person outside either the House of Commons or the Home Office actually believes this to be true. Public opinion—well informed opinion—has moved on significantly. We know that drug use is not falling. Virtually every other piece of evidence tells us this. I ask your Lordships to push your minds back a bit; one of the reasons we were given for sending soldiers into Afghanistan was to eradicate the poppy crop, but the United Nations tells us that in the 10 years since we have been there the poppy crop has increased fourfold, and 80% of the Afghan poppy crop is aimed at the United Kingdom. Are we really pretending that a fourfold increase in production is aimed at a falling market? That simply is not realistic. At the other end of the equation, the numbers accessing treatment continue to rise, and there is some evidence that the waiting lists are continuing to rise too.

None of this would matter if the second plank of the Government’s drug strategy was working. In the introduction to the 2010 drugs strategy the Home Secretary said:

“This strategy sets out a fundamentally different approach to tackling drugs and an entirely new ambition to reduce drug use and dependence. It will consider dependence on all drugs, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines”.

I noticed that only last night when I was writing this as I was watching the television programme about the appalling rise in prescription drug use in this country. That clearly has not worked either.

Why is this so important? It is very simple. Millions of people in the United Kingdom take drugs. We can debate whether the number is going up or down or, probably, staying vaguely the same, but the number is in the millions. The vast majority of the people who take drugs in this country have minimal, if any, health or social consequences. They do not get arrested, they do not commit repeated acquisitive crimes and they do not visit A&E. The 350,000 chronic and chaotic drug users are the ones who cost us money and it is those people we should be spending our £15.5 billion on, not the remaining people in the population who do not cause us any problems.