here - United Kingdom Parliament

267WH
Drugs
6 JUNE 2013
Drugs
268WH
[Keith Vaz]
education system. In some cases, they believed that it
was likely to inspire children to take drugs rather than
the opposite.
The Government have now told us that education
will be their focus in the third year of the drugs strategy.
In our view, we cannot wait three years for a resolution
to the issue. This is the earliest possible chance to break
the cycle of drug addiction, and we cannot squander it.
Local authorities are being left to decide and fund the
most appropriate way of educating children about the
dangers of drugs. As focus rightly moves from enforcement
for possession to tackling supply and demand, it is vital
that our children are aware that there are more risks to
drug taking than just being arrested.
Another critical intervention point is recovery from
addiction. In 2011-12, some 96,070 people were given a
prescription for a substitute drug as a method of treatment.
Another 30,000 people were given a prescription and
some sort of counselling. Only 1,100 people were in
residential rehabilitation.
If the Government are serious about their policy of
recovery, they must improve the quality and range
of treatments available. There is an over-reliance on
prescription treatment, and no recognition of the
importance of also treating the psychological symptoms
of addiction. Each individual needs a treatment plan
tailored to their needs. Intensive treatment is more
expensive in the short term, but if it breaks the cycle of
drug addiction, the long-term benefits to society are
enormous and the cost to society is greatly reduced.
Treatments that we know work, such as residential
rehabilitation and buprenorphine as an alternative to
methadone, are under-utilised. In 2011, more than 400
deaths were related to methadone. Treatment must also
be supplemented by housing, training and employment
support, if required, because the end goal of recovery is
integration into society. A league table of treatment
centre performance should be established so that patients
do not waste time and money on care that is not up to
scratch. The Department of Health and the Home
Office should lead jointly on drugs to ensure that the
focus on recovery is maintained. If we reduce demand,
we automatically reduce supply.
Many groups are working hard to bring such matters
to the Government’s attention, and we met some of
them during our inquiry. I want to commend the work
being done by Mitch Winehouse, and the living memorial
that he has set up to his daughter Amy. He has been one
of the most vocal and articulate voices about the provision
of rehabilitation support to so many people.
Prison is another critical intervention point. Tackling
drug addiction, as the Secretary of State for Justice has
said, is vital to the prevention of costly reoffending.
Some 29% of prisoners reported having a drug problem
when they arrived in prison, 6% developed a drug
problem after having arrived and 24% reported that it
was easy or very easy to get drugs there. Last year, Her
Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons, Nick Hardwick,
reported an increase in the number of people in prison
with prescription drug addiction.
The Committee visited Her Majesty’s Prisons Brixton
and Holloway, and we were impressed by their voluntary
testing schemes, which were having a real impact on
addiction. I want to thank the governors of Brixton,
Edmond Tullett, and of Holloway, Julia Killick, for
helping to make that happen. We were, however, concerned
that funding for such schemes was under threat.
I welcome the Justice Secretary’s commitment to a
rehabilitation revolution, with inmates being met at the
prison gates to be given support. To identify those who
need rehabilitation, we need compulsory testing on
entry to and exit from prison, including for the use of
prescription drugs. We must also ensure that the voluntary
sector, with its valuable experience, has a chance to win
rehabilitation contracts against large procurement
companies such as G4S that are cheaper but, frankly,
just do not have the expertise.
The Committee’s visit to Miami alerted us to the
epidemic scale of prescription drug addiction in the
United States. More than half of American drug addicts
are prescription drug addicts. It is difficult to measure
the exact scale of the problem in the UK, because
treatment is by general practitioners and is not treated
as drug addiction. However, valuable reports by newspapers
such as The Times highlight that it is a ticking time
bomb in British society that we are doing very little to
address. It is a problem not just in our prisons, but right
across the country.
I was pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for
Health, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry),
who has responsibility for public health, highlighted her
concerns about the abuse of prescription medication
several months ago. I hope that the Government will
heed the Committee’s warning and push the issue up
their agenda as a matter of urgency. In Miami, we heard
about the first prosecution of a doctor for giving out
multiple prescription drugs. People sometimes say that
if we look at America, we see what might very well
happen in Europe: it is on an epidemic scale, and I urge
the Government to consider that very carefully.
If prescription drugs are a powder keg awaiting a
spark, legal highs have already exploded. In 2012, the
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction identified 73 new drugs in Europe, which is
10 times the number of new substances identified in
2006. A survey on the drug use of 15 to 24-year-olds
found that 8% of them had taken a legal high.
The drugs market is changing, and as well as warning
our children of the dangers of heroin, cocaine and
ecstasy, we need to worry about the creation of a
culture in which people can order so many legal highs
for next-day delivery through the internet. The Government
have introduced temporary banning orders, but just last
month Maryon Stewart, who gave evidence to our
inquiry, found legal highs on sale on Amazon. There are
200 different substances that are not covered by our
drug laws, and we do not know the dangers of those
psychoactive substances because, clearly, we have not
tried them. Temporary banning orders work, and once
a substance has been banned it can no longer be used,
but what are the Government doing about the five
substances that are created for every one that is banned?
New Zealand is introducing a law to regulate such
substances, under which the requirement to prove that
the drugs are safe is a duty on the manufacturer. I do
not want to extend the Minister’s travel plans, because I
know how much he likes staying in his constituency,
having been a Foreign Office Minister and gone all over
the world, as he did so assiduously, but we should look