---

Armed Forces Bill

moved Amendment No. 42: Page 9, line 26, after ““orders”” insert ““or advice”” The noble Lord said: Clause 20, under which I have tabled Amendments Nos. 42 and 43, deals with unfitness or misconduct through alcohol or drugs. Although my amendment seems a fairly minor typographical one, it is important that subsection (2)(c) and (d) should provide a way out of being found guilty if a drug is taken or administered on the orders of a superior officer. The clause does not quite meet the situation in which service men and women find that they need to take protective drugs—for example, in theatres of operations where they may be exposed to biological agents or whatever. Often, they are given advice rather than an order and are left to make a decision one way or the other. In the past, that advice has occasionally been quite strong but it has been short of an order, and one needs to take that into account. Under this clause I also want to raise the question of performance-enhancing drugs, into which a great deal of research is being carried out. Again, I am looking to the future of warfare. In the United States, such drugs appear to have had an operational status. I should like the Minister to assure us that the clause does not give a superior officer the authority to order the use of a performance-enhancing drug. I think of a case in April 2002 in which two American pilots killed four Canadians on the ground and injured eight others. The subsequent inquiry into that friendly fire incident revealed that the pilots had been taking amphetamines—legally from the American perspective—supplied by the US Air Force. We certainly did not ever do that when I was in the Air Force. I trust that that is the case today and that we are not in any way legitimising that sort of event. Does the Minister believe that the clause addresses the problem or should we insert an amendment that would ensure that we did not administer to our service people drugs designed for performance enhancement? So I have two questions: one concerns the advisory use of drugs; the other relates to whether there is an absence in the clause of a prohibition of the use of drugs for reasons other than protection. I beg to move.