---

Drug Classification System

My Lords, I cannot help commenting on the last point of the noble Lord, Lord Desai. I think that it was President Nixon who resolved to buy the Afghan poppy crop in the mid 1970s. Professor Milton Friedman questioned it as a policy and President Nixon did not buy the crop. At that time, the United State’s entire consumption in a year was one tonne and the crop was 10 tonnes. He was so alarmed that he refused to buy it, at what we would now regard as a cheap price. It is interesting to note, three or four years after the allies’ invasion of Afghanistan—one of the main reasons for which was to eradicate the poppy—that this year’s poppy crop will be 40,000 tonnes. What a really successful policy that was. That is the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, draws to our attention today. Most of us who have been involved in drug issues realised long ago that while cannabis was in class B, it would sit more comfortably in class C. The reason no one has made a fuss about this since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was passed 34 years ago is that it does not really matter and nobody really cares. Most people, including me, do not know what the precise criteria are that lead one drug to be put in class A, B or C, except that we assume that what you might colloquially call the most nasty or dangerous drugs are in class A, and the softest, weakest and least harmful in class C. I have worked in the field for 20 years, and I have never met anybody who could tell me precisely the definition, or why there should be three categories. Why not have six, eight, 25 or 312? I have absolutely no idea and neither does anybody else. We know that class A drugs attract higher penalties and that class C drugs attract lesser penalties. That is probably all that we know. The controversy surrounding classification arose only when the Home Secretary of the day, David Blunkett, proposed to reclassify cannabis from B to C and immediately created a great row. If you stand back and look at it, on the scale of important things to do in drug policy, this one comes pretty near the bottom. I am not sure whether your Lordships or Members of another place who spend their lives in what is now called the Westminster village—the strange, introverted world of politics—know this, but despite drugs being the most serious, damaging and costly social issue facing Britain today, the question of which class of drugs cannabis is in is a matter of supreme unimportance, as it makes no difference to those who take them or might take them, their parents, teachers or policemen. The Power Commission report on the state of our democracy, which was published and launched with great fanfare on Monday, made a great point about how the political establishment has become divorced from reality. There is no better example of this than the drugs issue. Politicians are so busy not sending the wrong message and being tough that they have completely forgotten that, outside Westminster, a whole world does not care whether they are weak or tough, and merely wants them to be effective. At the moment, the policy is completely ineffectual. The trouble with reclassification is that when the row took place, the Home Secretary lost his nerve, and having decided to lower the classification, raised the penalties, which effectively meant that we were back where we started. The only effect of the change was therefore that everybody—the general public, parents, children, policemen, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh—was even more confused than when they started. The Government will doubtless tell us that the result has been a reduction in cannabis use. Lots of organisations will tell us that there has been an increase. I say to your Lordships, ““Just wait and see””. We have seen reductions before, and we know that people do not tell the truth about their drug use or their sex lives, which is why those surveys are so inaccurate. We know, however, that over a period of years we see an inexorable rise. If there has been a bit of a blip this year, it would be great if it really meant that drug use was levelling out and lowering, but I doubt it. Let us wait and see. We now have another furore because the Government have talked about changing the classification back from C to B, on the basis of some new evidence. The report of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to which the Home Secretary is rightly obliged to listen, is prayed in aid by both sides in this argument. Again, I urge your Lordships to exercise a bit of caution. There has always been a link between cannabis and mental health, and there always will be. We do not understand the link. Quite a lot of research has been done, and more research comes out every year. Like most research, it does not produce an answer but more questions. The incidence of schizophrenia has not increased in society in this country or across the world, but the incidence of cannabis use has. Presumably, the link between mental illness and cannabis would therefore also go up—it is kind of obvious. New research that came out recently shows that people with a propensity for mental illness may be attracted to cannabis because it does something for them that it does not do for other people. We do not know what that link is; we do not understand it yet—we need more research. But the bottom line—horrible phrase—is that although there are some interesting new snippets, there is no evidence to suggest that there is a massive increase in mental illness due to cannabis use and there are no grounds to change the policy again. Rather as the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, said, if you think that as a cornerstone of our national policy on drugs, illegal drugs should be classified in three groups, it is not entirely unreasonable to think that cannabis should be in class C. That is not saying that the Government managed the process well, because they did not, and that is what has caused the problem. The debate surrounding the reclassification of cannabis is only a small part of the picture. If you think it is a difficult area, as most of us do, you have to look behind reclassification, as the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, said, to the Misuse of Drugs Act, which is the centre of the Government’s policy and has been for 34 years. I can think of no other social policy whose centrepiece is an Act of Parliament that is 34 years old and was pretty much cobbled together in the first place. However, we can agree with the philosophy behind the Act. The perception 34 years ago, when much less was known, was that drugs were not a good thing. They are bad for the people who take them; drug-taking injures the health, harms the families of the drug-taker and damages the communities in which those families live. Putting aside the fact that most people take drugs without any harm, injurious effect or legal problems, that philosophy is pretty much right. It is desirable that we as a community, a society and a government reduce drug use. That has to be a good idea. The philosophy is simple: drugs do harm, so you ban them, so nobody can take them, so the harm you fear does not come about. Problem solved. The trouble is, it did not and does not work like that. It is not that prohibition is wrong but that it does not work. We cannot ban these drugs because people want them; if they want them, somebody will supply them, particularly as they make a huge profit out of them. As the noble Lord said, this is reputedly the second biggest industry in the world. Like all illegal industries, it feeds on a black market. The rise in crime in the western world during the course of my adult life is entirely down to drugs—nothing else. That crime is a direct consequence of a government policy to create prohibition. That is why our criminal courts are stretched to breaking point, why our prisons are overcrowded and why our police cannot do the job our citizens want them to do every day. That is why WPCs get shot on the streets of Nottingham, as that lady was two weeks ago; she was shot by a cocaine dealer, with a gun. That is why he was there—he was in the drugs trade. That is why policemen get shot at; that is why we have gun crime and gang crime. That is why each successive criminal justice Bill contains a tiny measure which will suddenly tip the balance after 30 years and make everything all right. But it does not—it will not work and it is rubbish. The emperor has no clothes. The policy cannot, does not, and will never work. But it will not be discussed and it will not be changed because elected politicians can never appear to be weak. If you are not tough on drugs, you are weak. But we are not tough on drugs. The week before last, a pop star called Pete Doherty, whom I had never heard of before, was arrested and convicted of seven counts of possession of class A drugs—his second or third offence. He got a six-month community order. What more do you have to do to go to prison? Prisons are not full of people taking drugs; they are full of people who were working in the illegal drugs industry and end up on drugs because they have gone to prison, paid for by you and me. The illegal drugs problem is costing the British taxpayer £16 billion a year, with £12 billion of that spent on the criminal justice system. Last year’s report by the noble Lord, Lord Birt, for the Cabinet Office made it clear that that has absolutely no effect on the level of drugs on our streets or the harm that drugs cause. As the noble Lord said in opening, this is a complex subject, difficult to deal with in a short debate. I will leave your Lordships with a question at a human level. We either change the policy or we continue it pretty much as it is. The question that your Lordships have to ask yourselves at a human level is simple. If, like me, you are a parent—some of your Lordships are; and some, extraordinarily enough, are grandparents—when your child, grandchild or their friend goes out to buy a drug—we know that 25 per cent of them buy cannabis and others will buy other drugs—do you want them to buy them from a state-controlled outlet at a reasonable price knowing what they are buying in the safest possible way, which I think is a better idea; or do you, like the Government, want them to go out and buy an unknown substance at a vast price from an armed and extremely dangerous criminal on a darkened street? I know which I would prefer; I look forward to hearing what the Government prefer.