Drugs Policy

Debate between Mike Weatherley and Paul Flynn

Thursday 16th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[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.