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Drug Classification

I congratulate the Select Committee on its splendid report, which I am afraid will, along with the Wootton report, the Runciman report, the Police Foundation report and the RSA report, be totally ignored by the Government. It is a document of intelligence and is based on genuine research and evidence. However, such reports have been being produced for 40 years now and none of them has influenced Government opinion in any way. The final report having been produced, the Government produced their response. It is a remarkable document, in which they try to justify their response to the Committee. On reading it, the document inspired a powerful memory in me; I had read something like it before. I was thinking of the trial of Galileo, when he was arraigned by the Church. On one side were all the forces of prejudice, superstition and ignorance, set against a man of science who was making arguments based on rationality and evidence. I do not want to embarrass the Minister or the others who gave evidence too much, but I will make one point. I thought that when the Committee discussed the Government’s basis for the classification system, it was commendably patient. It asked again and again on what basis the Government reached their decisions. On page 7 of the follow-up document containing oral and written evidence, we read that the Chairman, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), said"““you have not commissioned any research and nor have the ACMD.””" The Minister answered:"““No, but what we have said in response to where the Committee challenged us and said, ‘Where is your evidence base for that?’, as we have done with a number of other things, we said that we understand that point, we accept that point and we need to look at establishing a better evidence base for that””—" and so on. Thirty-five years after this country passed the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which established the classifications, we are about to consider searching for evidence on which the system was based. We know that the system was based on the prejudice of the time. A good guide to the value of Government policy is that when there is a policy before the House on which every party agrees—that happened in 1971 and, and in 1998 there was only one voice in the Chamber opposing the policy—the policy will not work. This is not an issue on which any of us can relax or feel that it is trivial. As recently as five hours ago, I was approached by a parent who lost a child as a result of drugs. Two people have died because of drugs in my constituency in the past eight months. I believe that in all three of those cases, the people would not have died if they had been living in Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland or Belgium. They were killed not only by the drugs, but by the drug laws. They were killed by the stupidity and cowardice of politicians. All the debates on the issue—I have been attending them for 20 years in the House—are marked by the same thing. In that regard, I was struck by a comment from a member of the drugs misuse committee when a Minister came along last year and gave the usual story: that we must rely on the policy that we have been following for the past 48 years, which has depended mainly on the criminal justice system. That member of the committee, who had a great deal of experience of drugs as a former heroin addict, said that he had been attending sittings of the committee for many years. He gave a list of all the Tory and Labour Ministers responsible for drugs policy and said that every one of them had talked—the word he used rhymes with rowlocks and starts with b, and it was an absolutely accurate description of Government policy and what has been happening through the years. We have had not policy that is based on sense; we have had policy that has been influenced by the media and the tabloid writers. Any party—I am sorry that a Liberal Democrat Member has not spoken so far here today; I hope that they will later—that suggested a different policy on drugs was denounced as a party that had gone to pot. The party would be wounded by that and the policy was never apparent again. We must look at the dreadful legacy.