Drug Consumption Rooms

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I join others in congratulating you on your skilful navigation of the timetabling and the Divisions this evening. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for giving me a little extra time to respond in what is a very complex debate. I thank the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) for bringing the debate and for his obvious passion and commitment to this topic.

I will start from a position of agreement: nobody in this House wants people to become addicted to heroin, crack cocaine or any drugs. We are all grappling with the ways in which we can fight that drug battle, help addicts and ensure that gangs do not lead young people on to the wrong paths and into taking drugs. We want to rid our country of these awful substances if we possibly can. It has already been said that that is incredibly difficult, as it is in every country in the world, and nobody has the answer yet.

To be very clear from the start, the Government do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion. We have no intention of introducing drug consumption rooms, nor do we have any intention of devolving the United Kingdom policy on drug classification and the way in which we deal with prohibited drugs to Scotland. Drug barons do not respect geographical barriers or boundaries and I dread to think what would happen if we devolved our UK-wide policy in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests—it would then create an internal drug market within the UK, adding further to the pressures on law enforcement.

The hon. Member for Inverclyde is looking a bit askance at me. He knows my background. I used to prosecute criminals for a living. I prosecuted drug gangs; I prosecuted international drug gangs, so I know whereof I speak. There has been a certain naivety in some of these arguments about what these international gun-toting criminals will do if we, the UK, regulate prohibited drugs. They are not going to run away and study university degrees and lead law-abiding lives. They are going to find ways of undercutting the regulated market, which presumably the hon. Gentleman is calling for, with prices. They will find ways of getting to their addicts. They will still continue their awful trade; it is just that under the hon. Gentleman’s model, as I understand it, it will be the taxpayer who is helping to pay for some of the drugs that we are against.

[Ronnie Cowan]

Imagine the people whom we would drive out of business! This will do the same thing as it did in the 10 other countries where it has been introduced. I am talking about drug consumption rooms to help people with addiction problems through that phase of their life. Some 90% of people who use drugs in a recreational fashion do not have an addiction problem. We are talking about people with an addiction problem and helping them through that in a compassionate and humane way. That is what DCRs are about.

[Victoria Atkins]

I will come to what DCRs are about, because their purpose is not recovery. Their purpose is to provide a place where illicit drugs that have been bought in the local area are then consumed in a place funded either by the taxpayer or charities. Recovery is an optional part of that usage; it is not the sole purpose of it. That is very different from our drug strategy. I will come on to that in a moment.

Let me first of all deal with the international comparisons, because much has been made of the evidence from abroad. I accept that there is no clear answer here, but I am obliged to put into context some of the evidence that has been put to this Chamber by the hon. Member for Inverclyde and the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle). Ten countries have DCRs. Seven of them are in the European monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction, and in those seven countries, 78 facilities exist. When we are talking about changing our national drugs policy, we have to be very clear about the limits of the evidence on which the hon. Gentlemen are relying.

The hon. Member for Inverclyde mentioned some countries. Canada has kept its provider, Insite, not because of the evidence that the services provided by Insite work, but because the users of Insite brought two court actions, and the Canadian Supreme Court ordered the Minister who wanted to close them to grant an exception to Insite in order to respect the constitutional rights of facility users and staff. I read that, with my legal hat on, not as an endorsement of the effect of DCRs but as a constitutional issue.

France has not agreed to use these rooms permanently. It is running a pilot project for six years. In terms of Spain, the evidence I am given by those who sit behind me is that there is one room open in Catalonia for one hour a day from Monday to Friday. When we hear that there have been no deaths in DCRs, which I accept, we have to understand the context in which these rooms are operating. I suggest that one hour a day from Monday to Friday does not support a great deal of people; we are not talking about the majority of heroin users in that town in Catalonia.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown talked about there being no deaths in Sydney. I was grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) for clarifying that the hon. Gentleman was in fact saying that there were no deaths in DCRs, not that the introduction of DCRs has stopped deaths from heroin in Sydney as a whole.

We do not know, because nobody has done the research yet, what happens to addicts when they leave DCRs. DCRs are not residential. Addicts are there for a number of hours. We do not know what happens when they leave those clinics and walk down the street. We do not know the impact. As we have heard, they are not there every single day. This is not a regular form of treatment, and that is precisely why I will now turn to the drug strategy. Recovery is at the heart of the Government’s drug strategy. We have brought together Health, Education and all of the relevant Departments to tackle drug addiction and the illicit trade in drugs and to look at the answers within the community, including with the police, but recovery is at the heart of it. I am sorry to hear of the experience in Scotland.