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273WH<br />
Drugs<br />
6 JUNE 2013<br />
Drugs<br />
274WH<br />
positive things, and the full Government response was<br />
rather more positive than the initial comment that came<br />
out from the Home Office.<br />
The Chair of our Committee described the Government<br />
response as supporting about half of our recommendations.<br />
In a number of cases, the suggestion from the Government<br />
was that what we were recommending was already<br />
being done. We could argue about the extent to which<br />
that is true, but my summary is that the Government<br />
response was largely saying no to most of our new<br />
suggestions.<br />
However, I strongly welcome two things in the<br />
Government response to our report, because I think<br />
that they will make the difference. Again, I strongly<br />
commend my hon. Friend the Drugs Minister for his<br />
work to get them into the Government response. One of<br />
them is set out at the top of page 15, w<strong>here</strong> an interesting<br />
sentence says:<br />
“High quality drug treatment is the most effective way of<br />
reducing drug misuse and reducing drug related mortality.”<br />
I agree completely with that. To start off by putting<br />
treatment as the principal aim rather than the criminal<br />
justice focus is exactly what many of us have been<br />
arguing for. We now need the Government to follow<br />
through on their own statement that we need to focus<br />
on the “high quality drug treatment” and not on the<br />
policing or the criminal justice. That fits with our<br />
recommendation that we need to get the Department of<br />
Health far more involved.<br />
With the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the<br />
Drugs Minister, having a Drugs Minister based in the<br />
Home Office means that the starting point will always<br />
be the criminal justice-led approach. T<strong>here</strong> is co-operation<br />
and working with the Department of Health, but many<br />
other countries have the lead for drugs policy based in<br />
their departments of health—or their equivalent—because<br />
the focus needs to be on treatment, as the Government<br />
<strong>here</strong> have now accepted.<br />
The other key thing that came out of the Government<br />
response was the international comparators study. I was<br />
very pleased to see that. During our evidence sessions, it<br />
was clear that although t<strong>here</strong> was a stated commitment,<br />
in the words of the Drugs Strategy 2010,<br />
“to review new evidence on what works in other countries and<br />
what we can learn from it”,<br />
that commitment was being honoured—certainly at<br />
ministerial level—in a slightly more relaxed way than<br />
perhaps some of us might have liked. It is absolutely<br />
right that we should proactively look at other countries<br />
to see what they achieve.<br />
My hon. Friend the Minister has been to Portugal<br />
already, and I am sure that he will talk a bit later about<br />
what he saw t<strong>here</strong>. When our Committee went to Portugal,<br />
we saw a few things that were really striking. The<br />
Portuguese model is often misdescribed. In Portugal, it<br />
is still an offence to possess large amounts of any drug<br />
and it is still a criminal offence to supply drugs. The key<br />
difference is that possession of a relatively small amount<br />
of any drug—up to 10 days’ personal supply, and t<strong>here</strong><br />
are estimated figures for what that amount is—is treated<br />
outside the criminal justice system. T<strong>here</strong> are dissuasion<br />
commissions that deal with those cases in a non-judicial<br />
way; t<strong>here</strong> is no criminal sanction and the focus is on<br />
treatment. The aim is to have individualised care, to<br />
make sure that people can get out of using drugs.<br />
We were impressed by how fast people could be set up<br />
with treatment in Portugal. T<strong>here</strong> are often delays in the<br />
UK in trying to find appropriate treatment facilities. In<br />
Portugal, people said that it was very frustrating that<br />
sometimes they would have to wait for two days, which<br />
would be amazingly fast for many of the people in my<br />
constituency who I have spoken to. So Portugal has this<br />
process w<strong>here</strong>by people who are addicts are pushed<br />
towards treatment. T<strong>here</strong> are other ways that they can<br />
be dealt with, but none of them involves dealing with<br />
the criminal justice process and none of them affects<br />
people’s ability to work, except in a very few special<br />
circumstances.<br />
The Portuguese approach was controversial when it<br />
was established but it seems to have worked, and t<strong>here</strong><br />
are a number of ways to look at it. According to the<br />
official Portuguese figures, the number of long-term<br />
addicts has declined from more than 100,000 people<br />
before the new policy was enacted, which was about<br />
10 years ago, to half that number today. The Portuguese<br />
have also found less drug use in prison.<br />
What was striking when we went to Portugal and<br />
spoke to politicians from across the political range—from<br />
the Christian democrats on the right to the communists<br />
on the far left—was that none of them disagreed with<br />
the policy. With the Christian democrats, we had an<br />
interesting meeting with a very impressive woman from<br />
the party who had opposed the policy when it was<br />
introduced. The Christian democrats had made all sorts<br />
of dire predictions about what would happen—the sort<br />
of thing that we can read in The Daily Mail—but they<br />
said, “We were wrong. We didn’t see increased drug use,<br />
which we were concerned about; we didn’t see drug<br />
tourism; we didn’t see any of the problems.”<br />
The live debate in Portugal around drugs policy is<br />
whether treatment should be funded on a national or<br />
regional basis.<br />
That was the debate across the political spectrum. Nobody<br />
was questioning whether the decriminalisation of possession<br />
of small amounts was the right thing or wrong thing to<br />
do. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison),<br />
who was leading us on that occasion, made a point of<br />
asking everybody whether they agreed in principle with<br />
the policy. Not a single person disagreed; we could not<br />
find anybody who did so. We spoke to the police, who<br />
had originally opposed it, and they said, “Actually, this<br />
has been better for us for policing. We don’t have to<br />
spend so much time on people who are addicts, who are<br />
small users. Instead, they can help us to deal with the<br />
people who are dealing, who are causing the higher-level<br />
problems with gangs and organised crime.” Nobody<br />
opposed the policy.<br />
We met a gentleman who leads a non-governmental<br />
organisation that is staunchly anti liberalising the drugs<br />
policy—it was the closest we came to meeting somebody<br />
who disagreed—and he said that 10 days’ supply was<br />
too much and that it should be more like two or three<br />
days’ supply. I explained that that would be seen as<br />
phenomenally liberal in this country, and he was shocked.<br />
They all agree that that is not the right way to go. I hope<br />
the Minister found things much the same in Portugal—I<br />
am sure he will speak for himself—and that t<strong>here</strong> was a<br />
strong sense that the policy worked well.<br />
The principle of focusing on not criminalising people<br />
in possession has already been accepted by the Government<br />
in a different context: temporary class drug orders,