here - United Kingdom Parliament

285WH
Drugs
6 JUNE 2013
Drugs
286WH
I am attracted by the idea of whether people should
be made more accountable for the drugs that they
produce or sell in this space, but even that is not
straightforward, because the issue often arises about
who has produced the drugs, and they are often sold as
not suitable for human consumption. All kinds of legal
problems make what appears, on first inspection, to be
a very seductive idea slightly less straightforward in
practice than I would wish, but I am open-minded to
what more we can do in that area, because it is worth
exploring.
Dr Huppert: The Minister is making a very good case
about there being lots of different types of harm and no
single obviously right answer. He is absolutely right to
say all that, and to say how complicated it is. He talked
about it not being straightforward, so does he not think
that he is making a very good argument for a royal
commission? It is precisely because it is not straightforward
and there is not one clear answer that we need that level
of inquiry.
Mr Browne: I think that that is a good argument for
elected politicians, including those who have participated
in the debate this afternoon, to devote more time to
thinking seriously about the subject. The point I was
making about a royal commission was that we can put
together an expert body of men and women who are
full of integrity, knowledge and decency, and they could
spend a long time thinking about the issue, but they
would not produce “the right answer”, because I fear
that the right answer does not exist in that form. They
would produce a series of interesting observations and
recommendations, which may match, to a high degree,
the series of interesting observations and recommendations
that the Committee made in its report. We would then
have a debate along the lines of the one we are having
this afternoon. As I said, although a royal commission
would be a good opportunity for stimulating debate, I
do not think that it would in itself necessarily reach the
outcomes that we seek, because I am not sure that the
outcomes are ever fully attainable.
A number of other issues have come up. The
Government’s strategy has three prongs: reducing demand,
restricting supply and building recovery. In addition, we
have always said that we are open to learning from best
practice in other countries. I have had the opportunity
to travel, as recommended by the Committee, to Portugal,
and last week I spent 24 hours in Denmark and 24
hours in Sweden. During the remainder of the year, my
plan is to visit South Korea, Japan, the United States,
Canada, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. We should
be open-minded to the ideas that such other countries
have come up with, because they are broadly equivalent
to us in their economic and social development, and
they are confronted by the same problems as us in terms
of drugs policy. There is no reason to believe that every
good idea in the world originates in this country, and
they may well have ideas that we can learn from.
Going to Portugal was interesting—my hon. Friend
the Member for Cambridge dwelt particularly on that
country. I will write a report when I conclude the
process, so I will not do a running commentary on a
weekly basis. I thought Portugal was interesting, but I
was perhaps slightly less bowled over by it than I might
have expected to be, because in some ways, the Portuguese
codify what, in practice, happens to a large degree in
this country anyway. People might think that that is
quite interesting in itself. The fact that Portugal has
made that formal codification is a significant step, but,
in practice, there are very few people in Britain who are
in prison merely for the possession of drugs for personal
consumption. People are in prison because they have
stolen money to buy drugs, or because they have supplied
drugs to others, but most people in Britain who present
with a severe heroin addiction, for example, are treated.
We try and find ways of enabling them to address their
addiction and, in time, recover from it, rather than
treating them straightforwardly as criminals. Therefore,
the gap between what happens in Portugal and what
happens in practice in the United Kingdom is perhaps
not as great as some might say.
It was interesting, for example, to talk to the Portuguese
about the impact of changes in their laws on infection
and blood-borne illnesses caused by the injection of
drugs. They had a very big rise in instances of HIV
infection in intravenous drug users, and when they
changed the laws, there was a dramatic fall. It is a
striking graph—like a mountain, it goes up and then
comes down, and there is a clear correlation. The only
thing I would say is that their starting point was higher
than the United Kingdom’s. They then went to a point
that was dramatically higher than the United Kingdom’s,
and they have now come down to a point that is just
higher than ours—but they are still higher than us.
For a number of reasons, we have never had that level
of infection in the intravenous drug-taking community.
Because the scale of our problem is dramatically different
from the scale of the problem that they were confronted
with when they changed the law, we should not
automatically assume that changing the law would have
a similar impact on infection rates in this country. There
are interesting lessons to learn from talking to people in
other countries, but we should not automatically assume
that changing the law in the way that other countries
have will lead to the same public policy outcomes, as we
are starting from a different point in this country.
The Portuguese are having conversations about how
their law is working in practice. In my experience—I
agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge—it
was virtually impossible to find anyone in Portugal who
wanted to turn the clock back and change the law to
what it had previously been. Last week in Denmark,
which is one of the more liberal countries in the European
Union in terms of drugs policy, I found that some of
the liberalising measures that had been taken had become
widely accepted, even among people who had initially
been sceptical about the changes.
In Portugal, however, there was a debate about whether
it could modify its law and in some ways potentially
strengthen it. The idea of having 10 days-worth of
personal drugs consumption was thought by the Minister
to be a high figure. There was a lobby or case for
reducing that to five, or even possibly three days. I
suppose that if someone who was minded to transport
drugs for sale to others had 50 days-worth of supply
that they wanted to take to another house five minutes’
walk away, they would be better making that journey
five times, with 10 days-worth on them each time,
because they would then not be breaking the law. There