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Drug Classification System

My Lords, this has been an excellent and, perhaps I may say, courageous debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, for introducing it at a time when it has become clear that government drugs policy is not working and is wasting both taxpayers’ money and the lives of many of our citizens and their families. I agree with the noble Lord’s wise words about the need for change. I have no argument with the current drug classification system, apart from, possibly, the position of magic mushrooms there. However, the system is just one tool in our armoury, and should be treated as such. Like the noble Lord, I do not think that it is the system, but the UK’s entire drugs policy, that needs review. Unfortunately, policy is being driven by political cowardice and the resulting tiered and judgmental punishment system, rather than all the evidence in favour of a better approach—treating drug addiction as a medical problem. As the spokesman on children and education on these Benches I have naturally looked at recent research on drug use and how it affects young people in particular. I was horrified to learn from the recent House of Commons Select Committee report on the effect of scientific advice on drugs policy that the Home Office has undertaken research that shows that among young offenders the main ages for experimenting with drugs are between 11 and 14, although those are not the ages of the highest use. Some 44 per cent of those said that they had committed crime in order to buy drugs, alcohol or tobacco. I find those figures significant, because they show that we need to put much more emphasis on drugs education in primary schools, not just secondary schools. Sadly, of the £1.5 billion the Government spend annually on the drugs problem, three-quarters is spent on enforcing drug laws, only 13 per cent on treatment and 12 per cent on education. Clearly that is the wrong way round, and other findings I will mention later reinforce that view. The £1.5 billion is a tiny percentage of the financial cost to the country of drug misuse, as other noble Lords have said. One of the aims of the 10-year drugs strategy launched by the Government in 1998 was to increase drugs education, and it is true that most primary and secondary schools have drugs policies. But many teachers lack confidence in teaching about such issues. There has been some success, given that a recent British Crime Survey and a European study show that the number of young drug users is falling for all drugs except cocaine. That is encouraging but not really good enough. The Government’s ““Talk to Frank”” campaign website is all very well and has proved to be a valuable resource for children and their parents and teachers. However, the trouble with a website is that you have to proactively choose to go on to it. It is not ““in your face”” as some would put it. We need a totally different approach. I have noticed that drink-driving among the younger generation is no longer widespread because it is no longer cool. It is their peers who put pressure on young drinkers not to drive and vice versa. That indicates to me that we should look to how that has been achieved to obtain the same result in relation to drugs. Hard and effective messages about the damage drugs can do to young people’s lives need to be driven home through their own methods of communication, so that they cannot help coming across them. We need to use the advertising breaks between the television programmes that they like to watch. The messages need to be shown at the cinema, in the magazines that teenagers and even children read—and even on their mobile phones. I do not mean the preachy kind of messages, I mean the kind that bring to life, using real people, the destruction and havoc that drugs can wreak on the lives of drug users and their parents. Let us not shrink from using emotions. The current series of ads against smoking that show teenagers angry and in tears at the prospect of losing their parents to lung cancer through smoking would surely encourage any parent to give up the dreaded weed. Similar techniques should be used to reach both children and adults about drugs. There has been a little bit of this in the past, but it has been discontinued, presumably because the cost of buying advertising time is great. But so is the cost of picking up the pieces when people become hard drug users, so the spend would be most worthwhile. Home Office research has proved that for every pound spent on treatment, at least £9 is saved in crime and health costs. I am not sure how easy it would be to make the same calculation about the cost-effectiveness of prevention through education, but I strongly suspect that the return would be even greater. The question we have to ask is: where should this money come from? I suggest that it should come from the discontinuance of some of the Government’s current policies relating to drugs and a redirection of that money into treatment and education. The recent report of the noble Lord, Lord Birt, to the policy unit, published recently in The Guardian and placed by that newspaper on the web shows a number of interesting and extremely significant conclusions. It shows that each harmful drug user causes an average of £75,000 worth of harm every year—nearly £60,000 of which is crime harms and the rest health harms. These people commit 56 per cent of all crime. In a year about two-thirds of these people will come into contact with either treatment or the criminal justice system but at any one moment 80 per cent of them are not in treatment but are out in the streets committing crimes to support their habit and destroying their lives and those of their families. Why? The noble Lord showed that in 2003, although 60,000 chaotic drug users were convicted in the courts, only 6,000 were given a sentence that dealt with their drug use. The courts seem to be dealing with the offence and not the underlying cause. The report also said that although 50,000 such people went to prison that year, only 5,000 of them received any treatment for their drug use. This is because of a combination of short sentences and lack of capacity in the prisons. We have a revolving door into prison and ineffective treatment regimes. That is why the money should be spent on the most effective residential regimes and not those treatment programmes which are cheap and allow the Drug Action Teams to report large numbers in treatment rather than large numbers being effectively treated. I must declare an interest as a trustee of a residential drug and alcohol treatment charity called ADAPT, but my claims for the effectiveness of residential treatment are not biased but well proven. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, found no causal link between the availability of drugs and the incidence of drug use. Does that not show that all the money the police are spending trying to intercept drugs coming into the country is wasted? Should that money not be spent on education and treatment? We need to take away the markets of these evil people and re-open the debate about the decriminalisation of drugs. I agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others on this subject. We should spend the money saved on police enforcement on further taking away the markets through treatment and education. The noble Lord, Lord Birt, also recommended an increase in legal prescribing of hard drugs to chaotic users by medical practitioners. I agree with him and those, including the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, who said that drug treatment should be regarded as a medical problem. This has long been Liberal Democrat policy. Most of the fatalities are among those who do not know the strength or concentration of the drugs they are taking. Doctors prescribing clean drugs would be able to direct users into treatment where possible and could ensure that the amounts and quality of the drugs were safe, thereby reducing fatalities considerably. Prescribing is expensive, but is it not better to prescribe £15,000 worth of heroin per year than have the addict go out on the streets and commit four times that amount of crime? We owe it to our children to protect them from the evils of drugs through effective and well thought out policies that are driven, not by prejudice or political expediency, but by facts. The report of the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, and that of the noble Lord, Lord Birt, are based on independently gathered facts. The conclusions that can be drawn from their findings are blindingly obvious, and have been outlined most effectively by many noble Lords today. The Government are culpable if they do not respond to them by radically changing the thrust of their policies and the way they spend our money, which is currently being so flagrantly wasted.