Drugs Policy

Debate between Norman Lamb and Paul Sweeney

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) on an immensely impressive maiden speech. I confess that I am quite a fan of her predecessor’s—I have not said that until now—but I am now also clearly a fan of the hon. Lady, who, like the other two Members who have made maiden speeches today, spoke incredibly powerfully. The hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) gave a powerful and moving speech, and I am just glad I was here to witness it. I thank him.

This has been a fascinating debate, in which there have been more voices for reform than I have heard before; I am particularly encouraged by what the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) said. I will come to my thoughts on reform in a moment, but I want to start by acknowledging that there are important things in the Government’s drugs strategy.

I welcome the shift away from an over-emphasis on abstinence, which in many respects was damaging. I also welcome a focus on evidence-based drug treatment programmes and on addressing the underlying causes of addiction, whether poor housing or mental health issues. I acknowledge those good things. I also welcome the references to drug rehabilitation requirements as a sentencing option along with alcohol rehabilitation requirements and mental health treatment requirements. That is a sensible innovation. I note the preparation of a protocol to ensure good access to treatment and the potential for a maximum waiting time, which all make sense.

However, although the mental health treatment requirements, introduced by the last Labour Government, were a very good policy response, they were virtually never used across the country. Organising mental health treatment services alongside the criminal justice system has proved to be beyond most parts of the country, and I do not want the same to happen with drug and alcohol orders. It is really important that the Government focus on making sure that all three of those sentencing options are available everywhere to ensure that when it comes to offences of which the underlying cause is an addiction or mental health problem, the person gets access to treatment and not just punishment. That is incredibly important.

I want to focus on two key objections. The first has been mentioned by other hon. Members: the cut in public health funding. Frankly, that makes no sense at all. If we are to ensure that the NHS as a whole is more sustainable, we have to shift resources to prevention, not cut the funding available, which is completely counter-productive. In a report published just last week, the King’s Fund highlighted the fact that across the country councils have planned expenditure cuts to really important public health programmes: sexual health clinics as well as programmes reducing harm from smoking, alcohol and drugs. A total of £85 million is involved. The spend on tackling drug misuse for adults involves a planned cut of £22 million, or 5.5%. It totally undermines the Government’s strategy, which, in any case, I disagree with, to be cutting funding from the treatment programmes that can help people to recover. Unless the Government seek to address that, they will fail in their objective.

My second objection is far more fundamental: it relates to the philosophy behind the Government’s approach to drug use. Instinctively, I am hostile to drugs. As the father of two boys, now in their 20s, I get really anxious at the thought of my children—our children—taking drugs, or, indeed, engaging in excessive use of alcohol or smoking. Let us remember, in all the talk about harm from drugs, that smoking, which involves a legal product, kills 100,000 people in our country every year. There is no consistency in Government policy at all, and that is simply not good enough. My starting point is not to advocate a free-for-all but to find an effective approach to the use of drugs that seeks to reduce harm. Surely that is what we should all be searching for. However, the Government’s approach and that of successive Governments—indeed, that of much of the western world—amounts to a monumental failure of public policy. We need a fundamentally new approach.

The Royal Society for Public Health, in its response to the Government’s strategy, says that it

“falls far short of the fundamental reorientation of policy towards public health and away from criminal justice needed to tackle rising drug harm. Decriminalisation of drug possession and use is a critical enabler that would enable drug treatment services to reach as many people as possible as effectively as possible. Instead, the Government still continues to lead with unhelpful rhetoric about ‘tough law enforcement’ that contributes to the marginalisation and stigmatisation of vulnerable drug users”.

If the Government are interested in ensuring that they follow the right approach, surely they should be listening very carefully to those experts in public health.

The British Medical Journal editorial from November last year makes an incredibly important point, saying that

“the effectiveness of prohibition laws, colloquially known as the ‘war on drugs’, must be judged on outcomes”—

what is actually achieved. It continues:

“And too often the war on drugs plays out as a war on the millions of people who use drugs, and disproportionately”—

this is a really important point—

“on people who are poor or from ethnic minorities and on women.”

If the effect of the Government’s policy is as it says in the British Medical Journal, then surely the Government need to think again. The editorial also says:

“All wars cause human rights violations, and the war on drugs is no different. Criminally controlled drug supply markets lead to appalling violence—causing an estimated 65 000-80 000 deaths in Mexico in the past decade”.

That is an extraordinary death toll that surely we should not ignore.

I want to focus on the number of people who die through drug misuse. We heard earlier that a third of such deaths in Europe are in the UK. Ten families are bereaved every single day as a result of drug use. That could be a loved one of any of us in this Chamber. If we think that official Government policy is perhaps contributing to that—and I argue that it is—we need to think again. In 2015, the number of deaths was up by more than 10%. The previous year it had risen by more than 14%, and the year before that by nearly 20%. That is a shocking failure of official policy. Deaths from heroin doubled between 2012 and 2015.

[Mr Paul J. Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

One interesting way of reducing harm from intravenous drug use—particularly heroin, which the right hon. Gentleman just mentioned—is the use of safe and hygienic facilities for intravenous drug users in a non-stigmatic environment. Glasgow is piloting that solution in the city, and perhaps it is worth noting as an option that we should look at and consider the results of with interest.

[Norman Lamb]

I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I was going to mention that solution in a moment. Let me quote Anne-Marie Cockburn—she has been mentioned in the debate—from the Anyone’s Child project:

“I invite the Prime Minister to come and stand by my daughter’s grave, and tell me her approach to drugs is working.”

That is a parent who lost their daughter as a result of the current approach to drug policy.

The claim in the strategy that the increase in the number of deaths relates to a problem of ageing drug users simply will not wash. The same demographic is replicated across Europe, including in Portugal, but the increase in deaths is not, and we have to ask why. The number of deaths per 100,000 of population in the UK is 10 times that in Portugal. I appreciated the Minister’s statement that she would listen carefully to what I said, and I hold her in high regard as well, but when our death rate is 10 times that of Portugal, which has chosen, incidentally, an approach that commands cross-party support in the country, from left to right, surely she should stop and listen. Surely she should investigate further Portugal’s approach, which has resulted in such a reduction in the number of deaths from drug use.

In 2015, 1,573 people died of a heroin overdose in this country. That is shameful. In the past, those people might have been dismissed as victims of their own stupidity, but we can no longer accept such thinking. These are people. They are citizens of our country, and they are losing their lives. They would not have died if they had had access to the treatment rooms that the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney) referred to. So why are the UK Government resistant, as I understand they are, to the project proposed in Glasgow, which has the potential to save lives? Surely that should be part of the strategy, but it does not even mention drug use rooms of that sort. Why on earth not, given that all the evidence points towards significant reductions in the number of deaths? No one dies of an overdose when they take their drugs in such safe rooms. Why are we not moving towards that? It is a disgrace, frankly, that we are not.