---

Drug Classification System

My Lords, I apologise for missing the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, but thank him for introducing this debate. I am afraid that I had not reckoned on the previous debate finishing slightly early. I was in the City. Hurry as I might, I did not quite make it in time. I have known quite a few people who have been involved with drugs or been serious addicts at various times in their lives. I do not have an addictive personality and I have not had a problem with drugs, though one or two people might accuse me of occasionally having a tipple too much of alcohol. Over the years, I have become aware that every culture has a drug; every culture needs some form of release. A certain percentage of people in any society cannot handle day-to-day reality. They become stressed easily or they have some mental problems or whatever. They need something to cushion them from that reality. Whatever you do, you are never going to change that. What worries me about our drugs policy is that we end up criminalising something that is much more of a medical problem. That is the wrong way to go about it. Whether cannabis leads to various things or heroin produces this, that and the other is a chicken-and-egg problem. Did the fact that a person had certain tendencies and certain mental problems lead them to use a drug which helped them with that problem, whether the drug was legal or not; or was it the other way round? There is a great assumption that everybody is born normal and that we would all become well-balanced bureaucrats were it not for all these other influences in life. Life is not like that. Humanity is a broad spectrum which extends from extreme risk-takers and those who want excitement, to those who have mental problems and cannot handle life, to others who want intense safety and no danger in their lives. Our mistake was to start to criminalise something that was really a problem with people’s personalities. As a result, we handed huge potential profit to the drugs suppliers. If we really want to tackle the problem, the first thing that we need to do is to take the profit out of the supply chain. That does not mean that one makes drugs more criminal. Under the Prohibition, several large American political families made their huge profits. Some of us may be rather looking forward to the prohibition of tobacco-smoking as offering huge potential for making a lot of money in the next few years. Another problem is that if one ends up pushing people into the hands of the criminal fraternity for their supply chain, the criminals will tend to move them on to things to which they are not necessarily suited. They will try to move people from soft drugs to hard drugs. I do not agree with the argument that soft drugs do not lead to hard drugs. Who in this House started drinking whisky before they had a pint of beer? One does not usually start on the whisky. It would be natural to try the less hard drug first. If one puts those people in the hands of others who have a financial incentive to move them to a harder and more addictive drug, one is doing exactly the wrong thing to achieve one’s aim. Therefore, the whole idea that one classifies a drug to send a signal is completely the wrong approach. One ends up imprisoning people who need to be handled gently. I have looked up some figures, though I had trouble finding them. In 1970, we had 1,299 registered heroin addicts. I remember that there were reckoned to be about as many unregistered addicts. Those were the days when the doctors controlled the supply. I know that most people talk about cannabis, but these problems are interrelated. Heroin was studied more, so more figures are available. It is apparent that while doctors controlled the supply of the people who had a problem and therefore needed to be kept on some drug—it does not matter whether one uses an opiate or some other form of drug to control their mental problem—the system worked. There was not the same, huge pressure on the wider community. That may have occurred anyway as part of a global trend, but it would not have been so bad. However, we suddenly took control out of the hands of doctors and left no support system for a while, as a result of which people fell into the hands of the pushers. The criminal groups moved in and, a few years later, we had a major problem. To anyone who is interested in the matter, I would recommend a book called Heroin Century written in 2002 by Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith. It was sent to me by a friend whose son had a problem, because we were discussing it. I agreed with the arguments in the book. They did not form my opinions; I already had opinions which the book very much reinforced by presenting research by two GPs who had worked in a practice which had had to deal with these problems. One of them had never taken drugs; the other was a reformed addict. Many people take the absolute view that once you are hooked, you are hooked for ever. That is not necessarily so. People grow out of drugs. I have never been into smoking cannabis—I am not a smoker—but could one honestly say that one could avoid being at a party at university at which something was passed round at the end? I do not know how many noble Lords present could stand up and say that they were never at such a party.