Cannabis

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on this debate and the all-party group on its work and the excellent report that was published on this subject. I need to warn my noble colleague next to me, the noble Lord, Lord Low, that I am going to be very short in my contribution. I put my name down for this debate because I did a little bit of background research again, and the thing that really came over me was the Government’s own 2017 drug strategy. It is an excellent document, which states:

“In 2015-16, around 2.7 million ... 16-59 year olds”—


so on the whole, as Members of the House of Lords, we are not included in this—

“in England and Wales reported using a drug in the last year”.

It is estimated that just over 2 million of those were cannabis users. Of course, included in that are a number of people who had to use cannabis as a medicinal aid for their suffering.

I was also interested to look up the information—asked for by my former right honourable friend, Nick Clegg—that only about 2,000 people are actually arrested over cannabis. The message that this put over to me was that those people who need cannabis as a medicine to help their suffering have to go down an illegal route so that they can either be healed or get help with their suffering. But this is something that the majority of recreational users do not even have to worry about, because the chances of their being arrested or prosecuted are very low indeed. Yet—for all the illogical reasons already given around how other drugs are treated—we demand that the people requiring this degree of assistance from this particular drug have to commit criminal acts themselves to alleviate their suffering. It is crazy and I hope this debate will be a part of stopping the very illogical and cruel situation that we put those users in.