Drugs Policy

Mike Weatherley Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ainsworth]

I will move on to some of those issues later in my speech. The only point on which I disagree with my hon. Friend is his use of the term “nonsensical”, because we really must get away from flinging insults when discussing the matter. In the days ahead, many insults will be flung at me by sections of the right-wing press, which I knew would happen when I raised the subject, but it will be a great shame if we cannot have a more serious debate on that most serious issue.

I have had some busy jobs in the past few years and so might not be as current as I was a short time ago, but I have always argued that the regulatory framework adopted in different countries makes little difference to their levels of drug use. Sweden has a hard attitude to drugs and relatively low drug use. Italy has a softer attitude and relatively low drug use. We have a very hard attitude and relatively high drug use. Holland has a relatively liberal regime and a high incidence of drug use. That tells us that the regulatory framework has little effect on the levels of drug use in those countries.

[Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his courage in holding the debate today. It is a welcome contribution to the general debate that we should be having on the subject. As he will know, Brighton and Hove has a high rate of deaths related to heroin. Does he agree that drug users are not necessarily criminals and should be rehabilitated and assisted, and that part of that involves the recognition that criminalisation is perhaps inappropriate, particularly for marijuana? Does he also agree that the previous Government’s decision to declassify marijuana to class C perhaps sent the wrong message because it was neither one way, nor the other, and people buying the drugs are still buying them from criminal gangs? Either it should have been legalised, or the message that should have been sent out was that it was a harmful drug. We really need a full, independent review of the whole situation, without the emotion that seems to come from all sides.

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[Mr Ainsworth]

I, too, am ambitious for people, and if anyone can be cured of an addiction, I want them to be cured of it. I do not want us to leave one person whom we can get off opiates dependent on them, but, equally, I am not naive. I do not believe that any Government, never mind a Conservative-led coalition Government, will fund the levels of drug treatment that provide the rehabilitation episodes that are needed to get the number of people that the hon. Gentleman talks about off their habit.

Therefore, the choice that we face is to keep those people safe until such time as they can make progress, or to hand them back to the criminal market, put them back into the hands of the dealers, let the guy on the street corner supply them with diamorphine, encourage them to go back to prostitution or to start robbing their mates and neighbours. That is the stark choice . My Government chose to expand drug treatment hugely. We did it not for the benefit of the drug users themselves but for the benefit of the entire community.

[Mike Weatherley]

Were the drug rehabilitation programmes based on methadone or abstinence? I have been to various drug rehabilitation centres, and by far and away the most effective drug rehabilitation was through abstinence rather than methadone. I wonder whether there would be some cost savings in the long run from full abstinence.

[Mr Ainsworth]

We should listen to the experts. I went to see the person who runs the drug treatment facilities for Coventry and Warwickshire in Coventry city centre a few weeks ago, in preparation for this debate. He said that, to some degree—and if they do not go too far—we ought to look at the Government’s policy, because perhaps in some instances we have been complacent about moving people through. We were so pleased with ourselves for stabilising people, getting them safe and keeping them out of crime, but perhaps we should have been more assiduous in trying to cure them of their addiction. I am not opposed to trying everything to cure people of their addiction.

Let me say what I am and what I am not advocating. I am simply saying this, and no more: it is about time we had a debate in this country, and provoked one internationally, about whether the war on drugs can succeed, or whether we ought to be prepared, in a rational way, to examine the alternatives. We ought to look at continuing the current prohibitions, we ought to look at the alternatives, we ought to examine the issue properly, rationally and sensibly. We ought to be prepared to have that debate.

We ought to look at whether we should reintroduce heroin prescriptions as one of the potential treatments for heroin addicts in this country. We used to do that in the 1960s, but we stopped doing it. People, including famous and gifted people, lived with their heroin addiction and continued to make a contribution to our society, but we stopped that under international pressure. We are now part of the international pressure that stops others from moving.

Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalised small amounts of drugs. People do not go to Portugal to get zonked; there is not a huge problem. I understand that there is a huge financial problem in Portugal, but there is not a huge drug problem. People go to Portugal to play golf and to enjoy the sun. Portugal is still there. It is fine, it has saved a fortune, its HIV rates have crashed through the floor, the sky has not fallen in. We have been part of the international pressure to stop that country from doing what it has done.

Portugal has been successful to such a degree that the sitting Prime Minister at the last general election held up his drug liberalisation programme as a reason for his re-election. Would it not be amazing if the Prime Minister of this country could stand in front of the British public and say, “Vote for me because I have liberalised drug policy and it has made a huge difference,” instead of shrinking from what were his clearly held beliefs as he climbed the ladder and became leader of the Conservative party? The war on drugs is not working.

I want the Minister to answer only one question. I know that he will disagree with me today—he has to; he would not be allowed to be the Minister if he were to agree with me—but I want to ask him this one question. I flagged it up on the media this morning, so he should not be surprised by it. He has a new drugs strategy, which he says is different. He says that it will work, that it will make a difference. How many years will he give his new strategy to make a significant difference?

If in two years’ time we have not made any progress, will he agree to the kind of debate and policy shift that I am advocating? Do we have to wait five years, or 50 years? We have been at this, unsuccessfully, for 50 years. We have built international criminal organisations that dwarf the mafia that arose out of prohibition in America. In America, good people with good intentions banned alcohol for 13 years. They created Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and, in the end, they caused the St Valentine’s day massacre. After 13 years, they did not give in—they came to their senses and removed prohibition.

If we do not start looking at alternatives to prohibition, we will continue to have the Pablo Escobars and General Noriegas of this world. Sher Mohammed Akhundzada in Helmand province, the Taliban, the corruption of the Afghan Government and the funding of the Afghan insurgency will continue. If we move production from Afghanistan, it will simply go elsewhere, as it moved from the golden triangle to Afghanistan some years ago. If we spray the entire forest in Colombia and destroy the foliage so that coca cannot be grown, production will move to Bolivia, Peru and, potentially, to Africa. When? That is my only question to the Minister.

I am not advocating a big bang. I do not believe that any political party would dare to propose some huge, instant change in this regard. People are too frightened, and rightly so, by the size of the problem. I am proposing debate, incremental change, pilots and rational thought. I am proposing that the Government do not do what is in their Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill, which I believe includes a measure to remove the requirement to have scientists on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. How stupid is that? In a modern society, we are about to say that we do not need scientists on the advisory council. Perhaps we should legislate to have witch doctors on it. That is about as silly a thing as I have heard for some long time.

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[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a joy among reasonable people to hear one prohibitionist talking good sense. That can be a turning point in the national conversation on this subject. My right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) is not the first former drugs Minister to say that he disagrees with his policy in office. I collaborated with the late Mo Mowlam on a book about her views in and out of office, although, sadly, her illness overtook her. My part of that book has been published, and I can commend it unreservedly to hon. Members who are looking for an intelligent Christmas present for the discerning reader—it is all there. However, I will not burden hon. Members with that this afternoon, because I have had ample opportunities to give my views on that subject in the past.

My qualification for speaking today is that I have been in favour of the policy my right hon. Friend has described for more than 25 years. I have strongly advocated decriminalisation and legalisation throughout my parliamentary career. I agree with what he said about politics. It has been a great advantage to me to advocate such a policy. The results in Newport West at the last election show that if I had experienced the same swing against Labour as all my colleagues in neighbouring constituencies, I would not be standing here now.

I admire the present Prime Minister of Portugal, because he is a man of courage and principle. When he introduced his policy as a Minister, it was highly unpopular; indeed, it was not popular in his own party, and it certainly was not popular with the press or the public. However, he went ahead, and his policy is now supported by all parties in the Portuguese Parliament.

Yesterday, Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugal’s drugs tsar, visited the House and gave an account of what happened when the country de-penalised all drugs. The law came into effect in 2001. By 2005, it had halved the number of drug deaths—imagine that! The procedure is complicated, and I will not go into it entirely, but the Cato Institute did an assessment of it, which was published in Time magazine last year.

Every outcome of de-penalisation in Portugal has been positive. Seizures of big quantities of drugs have increased greatly because the authorities are not bothering with tiny quantities of drugs for personal use. The prison population has decreased, which has saved a fortune in prison and court costs, and the use of every category of drug has been reduced. The policy has been a huge success.

The point that I want to make is that we are on the verge of a breakthrough and a positive measure. I do not want to repeat the old argument—I have wasted many hours on it—between the prohibitionists and the pragmatists, who have a go at one another before retreating to their own silos, with no progress having been made. There has been success, and I say that as the current chairman of the Council of Europe’s sub-committee on health and the Council’s rapporteur on drugs for more than a decade.

I have visited more than 20 countries to look at their drug policy, and put forward numerous papers. The one that will be a success is a new convention on drugs, which I introduced in 2005 and which has gone through the great whale of a bureaucracy in the Council of Europe and European politics. I believe that next year it will become a convention that all the 47 countries of the Council of Europe will be asked to ratify.

The convention has already been approved—unanimously voted on by 47 countries in the Council of Europe. It has had the approval of the Red Cross and 150 countries in the world have supported it. It has gone through the Pompidou Group, which has the reputation of being very conservative. Having had the approval of the Council of Europe, it is being assessed by two international think-tanks.

It is based on this: I despair of ever getting the Nordic view in line with the southern Mediterranean view, of Portugal, Italy and Spain—or of the Netherlands and Switzerland. That will not happen; but if the different views are regarded as circles, there is a point where they intersect. That point is where the convention will be built—on that common knowledge.

Everyone will disagree on many factors, at the extreme of each side. We shall not get people to agree on decriminalisation, I am afraid, in the foreseeable future; but we can get people to agree on stopping the waste of believing that the criminal justice system is a good-value, effective way of dealing with addicts. Every country in Europe knows it does not work, yet we pursue it and spend billions on it.

[Mike Weatherley]

The hon. Gentleman was talking about the Nordic view and Portugal; is he aware of the Swiss model? The four-fold approach that they have is:

“Prevention, law enforcement, treatment and harm reduction”.

Everyone in this House would, of course, agree that the last—harm reduction—is the ultimate goal.

[Paul Flynn]

I am very much aware of it. I did a scientific analysis some eight years ago of what was happening in drug production in four countries—Switzerland, Sweden, Britain and the Netherlands. It was an attempt to examine the effects and the level of drug abuse. On one point I disagree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East: the level of drug use in Holland is lower than it is here. Sweden, from a very low base, had the biggest increase. The United Kingdom came out worst, and it remains the worst in all outcomes. Switzerland has tried a number of brave experiments, particularly in the way of prescribing heroin. That has been a great success as a way of reducing crime.

However, I want to mention our greatest failure internationally, and the one I feel despair about. I have addressed the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former communist bodies. The worst thing that has happened internationally on drugs concerns them, because when the Berlin wall fell, none of the communist countries had a drug problem; many had alcohol problems, but none had a drug problem. They came to us and said, “You in the west have had this problem for a long time. You guys know about it. What do we do? How do we deal with drugs?”

But instead of getting a formula in which we said, “Well, this has worked,” those countries got back a babble of conflicting views from all parts of Europe. They repeated our remedies and inherited our problems. Those states have 25 million addicts now. If we had adopted a model that worked 10 or 25 years ago, we could have handed it on. I believe that such a model exists in its best state in Portugal now.

I urge all hon. Members to approach the matter with an open mind. I have memories of previous debates of this kind, and in particular of David Mellor, in about 1990, announcing that we could be absolutely certain of one thing—that heroin use had peaked. We had about 90,000 addicts then. When I spoke on the subject about 18 months ago, the number was 280,000, and it is now 320,000.

I recall another debate—we used to have a three-hour debate on Friday mornings—when the Government and Opposition spokesmen had to leave the Chamber because they both needed a fix of the addictive drug to which they were enslaved; they both needed to go out and smoke. I am sure that later in the evening they would wander off to any of the 16 bars in this place, decrying young people’s use of drugs—with a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other, and a couple of paracetamol in their top pockets for the headache that they were going to get the next morning.

We behave with hypocrisy and incompetence on drugs. I do not want to go into the wasted years that we have had, but can we just say where the United Kingdom is now, and put aside tabloid pressure? Let us forget about what people say, and the abuse that my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East will get, and say we know what is right, and what works, and we know that the policies that we have pursued for 39 years have given us the worst drug problems and the worst outcomes in Europe.

We had tough policies in ’71. They did not work, so we had even tougher policies—and they did not work, so we went on again to still tougher policies. There were great plaudits for all the politicians putting them through. Each time, our problems went up and up. That has not happened in Portugal. In the Netherlands, there is some kind of control. The glamour has been taken away. The joy of forbidden fruit has been taken out of using cannabis. People can go to a cannabis café and have a cannabis cake with their grandmother. Where is the fun in that? Part of the attraction, here, is the illegality of drugs. Part of the problem, and the reason why people die here, is the illegality of drugs.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East mentioned that people can, if they get control of their heroin and know its quality and strength, become heroin addicts and live into their nineties. Many people have. There are homes in the Netherlands for geriatrics who are heroin addicts. They can be maintained. People here who are unfortunate enough to be addicted must take their heroin from illegal sources, from those who produce products that may well be toxic or contaminated. They take them in unhygienic surroundings in a dark alley. That is why prohibition is killing people.

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[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Thank you, Mr Walker. I appreciate that, and I am honoured to follow the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) who is such an expert on this issue and speaks such good sense about it.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) on securing the debate and on his position, which I believe is the right one and which my party has advocated for many years. My constituency is in a city that has the unenviable reputation of being home to the most drug-related deaths in the UK, so I have a keen interest in what can be done to reduce the harmful effects of drugs both on society as a whole and on individuals.

I shall start by saying a few words about what is wrong with much of the current drug policy, making a few references to the Government’s newly published strategy, and making the case for an approach that focuses on reducing the use of drugs and the harm they cause—treating addiction primarily as a health issue, rather than a criminal justice issue.

The facts about drug use are not new to anyone in the Chamber. In the UK, for example, the social and economic costs of class A drugs are estimated at more than £15.4 billion a year, and more than half of the 35,000 people in prison are thought to have serious drug problems, which put them there. Those facts should be the starting point for any strategy, which should be based on available evidence. Instead, much of our current approach is based on moral judgments against drug use and users. The Home Secretary falls into that trap in the Government’s drug strategy, which they published just last week. For example, she asserts that

“drug use in the UK remains too high”,

while failing properly to recognise that the greatest risk is not drug use per se, but the societal and individual problems caused by a prohibitionist response. Moreover, although there is, understandably and rightly, considerable fear about the impact of drugs, it cannot be allowed to dictate policy. Reducing drug-related harm is a public health concern and should be subject to the same sort of effectiveness and efficiency standards as other areas of public health.

Drug-related harm is caused partly by the nature of the drugs being used—not just their addictiveness—by the way in which they are acquired and used and by how society treats people who use drugs. Unless we develop an approach that seeks to reduce the harm associated with all those aspects of drug use, we risk perpetuating it, and that is what has been occurring since the current prohibition-based policy has been in place.

The matter is not as simple as saying that the war on drugs has failed to reduce drug-related harm; it is actually making it worse. Far from it being a neutral intervention, it often pushes people towards more harmful products and behaviour, and certainly more harmful environments. I am especially mindful that the poorest in society usually suffer most from drug misuse, but it is crucial to differentiate between the suffering caused by drugs and that caused by drugs policy. For example, the vast majority of drug-related offending is a consequence of drugs policy. The burglary, theft and so on to enable drugs to be bought at vastly inflated prices would be significantly reduced under a regulated system.

There is a growing view among the scientific community, as well as among politicians, the police and the legal profession, that we must move away from prohibition, which criminalises people, towards a health-based strategy that seeks to reduce drug use and drug harm through control and regulation. In an intervention, I quoted some of the experts who agree with that position.

All too often, alternatives to the current prohibition-based approach are depicted as a free-for-all, with drugs being readily available with no checks and balances, and with people being encouraged to become users. That is deeply irresponsible, because nothing could be further from the truth. I am certainly not advocating a free market in legalised drugs, and I do not believe that anyone else is. The legalised market exists for tobacco, for example, and it still exists to a great extent in some parts of the global south.

From a public health perspective, the free market approach is even more damaging than the unregulated criminal control of drug markets, with the aggressive promotion of consumption via marketing and advertising, all to the one end of maximising profits for legal commercial actors.

In fact, under the current system there is a free-for-all with no controls on who sells drugs, no controls on who can buy them and no controls on their make-up. Every drug supplier is, by definition, unlicensed, placing them beyond any form of state control or management. If we persist in burying our heads in the sand on this issue, we will miss the opportunity for the state to intervene to regulate and control the drugs market, properly to treat drug users, and to reduce the harm to users and society, all within an overarching framework of seeking to reduce drug misuse.

Poverty, social exclusion and inequality all have an impact on drug use and drug markets, so they must be looked at alongside policies on education, prevention, treatment and recovery. All too often, success in the so-called war on drugs is measured in terms of numbers of arrests or drug seizures, when we should be assessing whether harm experienced by individuals and communities is declining.

As the Home Secretary acknowledges in the foreword to the new drugs strategy:

“Individuals do not take drugs in isolation from what is happening in the rest of their lives”.

I welcome that recognition, and the strategy’s emphasis on the role of tackling disadvantage. In that context, it is important to note the work of the Equality Trust, which shows a clear and demonstrable correlation between drug use and inequality. There is a strong tendency for drug misuse to be more common in more unequal countries such as the UK.

[Mike Weatherley]

Does the hon. Lady agree that there is a small problem with the benefits culture, which often helps to perpetuate drug use?

[Caroline Lucas]

That is an interesting observation. Yes.

If the Government are serious about tackling drug abuse they also need to tackle inequality. Turning people with a medical problem into criminals, and burdening them with a whole new set of obstacles to overcome, seems particularly perverse and counter-productive. As well as tackling some of the social factors that contribute to drug use, we should tightly regulate the production, supply and use of drugs, as that is the most effective way to reduce drug harm.

Legal regulation of potentially risky goods is the bread and butter of Government, so it is logical and consistent to apply the same principles to drugs as those applied to alcohol and cigarettes, for example, or to imported toys and hair dyes. The Government are there to regulate potentially risky goods. Some of the most useful work on this issue that I have come across is from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which has published a “Blueprint for Regulation”. It starts by saying that it is helpful to know what regulation would actually look like, so that we can begin to outline different kinds of supply models. For example, it suggests prescription as one particular model, or pharmacies that have restrictions according to buyer age, the quantity of drug being bought, and the case specific concerns relating to potential misuse. One particularly appealing aspect of that approach is the scope to require pharmacists or licensed suppliers to offer advice about harm reduction, safer use and treatment services where appropriate.

I have had the privilege of visiting the RIOTT—randomised injecting opioid treatment trial—programme in my constituency. In case hon. Members have not heard of it, it is one of three trials to examine the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of treatment with injected opioids, such as methadone and heroin, for patients who were dependent on heroin but did not respond to conventional methadone substitution treatment.

Some 150 people receiving oral methadone substitution treatment and injecting illicit heroin on a regular basis were recruited to the trial. Fifty of them were provided with optimised methadone medicine to take orally, and 50 were given supervised injected long-acting methadone treatment. The remaining 50 were given supervised injected heroin, with access to doses of oral methadone. They also received—this is absolutely crucial—one-to-one personal support and had people who worked with them, got to know them and gave them advice and support. All participants were followed-up for six months to enable researchers to compare the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the three treatments.

The main measure of the trial’s effectiveness was the proportion of participants who stopped using illicit heroin. In other words, they stopped trying to get dirty heroin from the streets. Laboratory urine tests allowed researchers to check if the heroin used had been prescribed or had come from the streets. Researchers also collected information about other illicit drug use, injecting behaviour, health and social functioning, criminal activity and so on. The results and the strength of the conclusion were amazing. They suggested that pharmaceutical heroin was far more effective in helping to stabilise people’s lives, get them off the illicit heroin and, crucially, to begin to reduce their overall drug use. The treatment was not just about keeping people on a particular dosage for ever, it was about enabling them to withdraw from ongoing drug use. I met participants on the trial who told me that it had saved their lives. It had given them back control of their lives, allowed them to kick crime, find their families again and, over time, reduce their drug use.

Professor Strang from King’s College London, one of the leading academics on the study, described its outcomes as follows:

“The RIOTT study shows that previously unresponsive patients can achieve major reductions in their use of street heroin and, impressively, these outcomes were seen within six weeks. Our work offers Government robust evidence to support the expansion of this treatment, so that more patients can benefit.”

I am pleased that the drugs strategy foresees a role for substitute prescribing. I call on the Home Office and the Home Secretary to ensure that the results of the RIOTT programmes are properly factored into the analysis, and that such programmes are made more available across the country. The trials are an example of the regulated use of a drug that is otherwise prohibited. They provide a useful, albeit limited, example of how regulation can enable users to become prescribed users, rather than street users, thereby illustrating some of the benefits of regularising the supply route and decriminalising drug use.

I would like to address the issue of cost, which has been mentioned several times. Some people argue that programmes such as RIOTT are extremely expensive, but I would like to look at the other side of the equation. Given the cost of following up drug-related crime to the police, or the cost to the NHS, approaches such as that of the RIOTT programmes are far more cost-effective than the continuing prohibition that we see today.

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[Andrew Griffiths]

The policy is making a real difference in my constituency now. If the right hon. Gentleman comes to see this evening the 250 people in my constituency who, along with their families, have gone through an abstinence-based programme, he will see for himself that it works. It changes lives; it changes communities. He says flippantly that he will not force anyone to take drugs. That fundamentally shows that he does not understand addiction. The issue is not that someone would be forced to take drugs, but that they would be freely available. Every time someone went into the town centre, they would be able, if they were feeling down, to go to their chemist or doctor and get a hit of heroin or cocaine. Drugs would be much more readily available. The right hon. Gentleman does not understand that one of the major problems for addicts is removing themselves from the circle of friends, from the community, that leads to their drug use. All too often, people fall into drug use because friends, colleagues or associates are using drugs. Because of that, they get hooked; they get addicted.

Of course the right hon. Gentleman is well intentioned. I have always known him to be a thoughtful and considered person, but in advocating either licensing or prescription, presumably on the NHS, for heroin and cocaine, he fails to understand addiction and the way in which it works.

Let me read out an e-mail that I received this morning from a young lady who is a recovering addict. She says:

“Addiction is extreme. Doing everything to the extreme. Getting out of it and constantly chasing that buzz. Addicts don’t just use one drug, they use many drugs and alcohol to get out of it. One bag of heroin was never enough. Prescribe me one bag and I would want two. Give me two and I want three.”

When we hear from addicts and see the situation in which they find themselves, we can understand their concern. It is not easy to tackle an addiction. We recognise that that is one of the most difficult things that people can do. But when it comes to the idea that making drugs more accessible to people will in some way solve the problem, the addicts I talk to regularly just do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I urge him to come and talk to the all-party drugs misuse group. We will give him a good hearing. We regularly hear from dozens of very committed people who are involved in real drug treatment. Some advocate maintenance and some advocate abstinence programmes, but they are all actively involved in, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion says, trying to give people back their lives.

The right hon. Gentleman prays in aid the Transform organisation. That is a think-tank and a lobby group, but it does not help people overcome addiction. It does research and it talks to people, but it does not help people, on a day-to-day basis, deal with the effects of addiction. I urge the right hon. Gentleman to talk to people who are working with addicts day in, day out, to understand their very real concerns.

I am not going to hide away. I went on television today and said that I thought the right hon. Gentleman was not just wrong, but reckless and dangerous, because the message that is being sent out that drug use is acceptable in some way is simply wrong.

[Mike Weatherley]

Surely one of the reasons why we are having this debate is to have a frank and varied discussion. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need an independent review? We all agree that drugs are harmful and we would like to reduce their use in society. In my constituency, 70% of all crime is related to drug use. We need to stamp that out. I made the point earlier that the benefits culture perpetuates drug use. Many people are trapped in such a situation. Surely an independent review of the best way to make progress cannot be objected to; it must be a good thing.

[Andrew Griffiths]

My hon. Friend is well intentioned. I do not know whether he thinks that no one considers these things. I do not know whether he thinks that despite the thousands of people involved and the millions—indeed, billions—of pounds that are spent on trying to find a solution to the drug addiction problem in our country, someone has not at some stage sat down and considered whether legalisation would be a good idea, but I can assure him that they have. I do not want to send a message to young people that drug taking is an okay thing to do. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion can tut, but in my constituency I have seen families who have been devastated by drug deaths. I have seen people young and old who are living with addiction. I am sure that the hon. Lady has, too.