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Drug Classification

I speak with two hats on today: I have been a member of the Science and Technology Committee, including during this extremely enjoyable inquiry into evidence-based policy making and this particular case study, and I speak as the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman. May I say that it is a pleasure once again to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Bercow? Had you not been in the Chair, I suspect that although you are a scrupulously neutral Chairman, you might have participated in this debate speaking from the Conservative Benches. I am not sure, because sadly we shall never know, whether you would have agreed with everything that Front Benchers said in this area. I ought to say a number of things at the outset. First, we have had an interesting and good but one-sided debate. It would appear that the Back Benchers who have been inspired to turn up are highly critical of the current system and of the Government and the Conservative Front Bench team’s support for it. It is important to note that not a single Labour or Conservative Back Bencher can come to support their policy, particularly given the fact that we know that there are easy headlines to be grabbed. The hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) made it clear that much of the posturing in this area results from a desire to attract good headlines and a keenness to avoid bad ones. It is remarkable that people have such a lack of interest in coming to support their policy. It is important to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) for the way in which he chaired the inquiry, as well as for how he introduced this debate. He made a number of important points, thus saving me from having to make them both as a member of the Committee and, where they agreed with Liberal Democrat policy, as a Liberal Democrat spokesman. I do not know whether it is appropriate to declare an interest in terms of past drug use. In a sense, this has become fashionable, but in another it has become unfashionable. I am prepared to confess that I am one of what is probably a minority of MPs who are willing to admit that they have never taken illicit drugs. I accept that, at least among parliamentarians of my age, and having gone to university, I am unusual in that regard. That at least means that I do not have a vested interest in trying to protect my past and the prospect of criminal sanction when I seek a much more effective way of tackling the drug problem. My approach does not criminalise users as much as the current system does, and it targets the dealers and the people who exploit the vulnerable in the illicit drug trade. The current system simply is not working. Whenever I read the adverse press comments—they have been mentioned by the hon. Member for Newport, West—about Liberal Democrat drug policy being too liberal and not tough enough, I am always reassured by the fact that the current system is not working, and that every independent inquiry that has examined it recognises that it is not working. Lists of such inquiries were given by the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, who set out the fact that every independent inquiry that has looked at this system accepts that it is not working because of its failure to recognise the problems of an approach that is so reliant on the criminal justice system and that does not recognise that drug users need medical help and not the services of the prison system. I find that situation reassuring. I accept that our approach enables headlines in the right-wing tabloid press to attack an effective drugs policy as being weak and allows the Labour and Conservative parties, during parliamentary by-elections, to produce cheap leaflet headlines about people being soft on drugs. Without being defensive, I can say that our party is tough on drugs, because we back effective policies. Such policies work in other countries in which they have been tried and there is a huge amount of evidence that they would work well in this country. I want to make it clear how much importance I attach to the role of evidence in policy. This has two levels, and the wider report of the Science and Technology Committee on evidence-based policy making, which I commend to hon. Members, makes these points clearly. Self-evidently, it is best if policy that can be made on the basis of evidence is made in that way. Clearly, there are some policies for which there is no evidence or for which an evidence base is unhelpful, and we are not talking about those. There are some policies where evidence is a factor, but where economic and ideological considerations are involved. I understand that if a manifesto commitment is made to something that is not evidence-based, it is more difficult to berate the Government for not following the evidence. I accept that there is a hierarchy of policies that can be based on evidence. The key point is that where the Government claim that a policy is evidence-based, it must be evidence-based, otherwise a deceit takes place that undermines faith in the Government’s scientific advisory system and in politics itself. When the Government have a policy that is not evidence-based, or that is evidence-free when it might or would benefit from the evidence, such as drugs enforcement policy, the Government have a duty to say that it is not an evidence-based policy and that it is ideological, economic or media-based. I would have far more respect for the Government’s position—although I have enormous respect for the Minister—if they said, ““This isn’t evidence-based. We’re doing it because it’s political.”” Then we could all stop wasting our time trying to persuade the Government of the evidence, and the ACMD could go home. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough referred to a number of instances in which the views of the ACMD and its members in the literature are at variance with the Government’s policy. The one thing that I look forward to hearing the Minister say, other than that the Government have changed their policy on any of the issues introduced by my hon. Friend, is that he accepts that the policy of refusing even to consider reclassifying ecstasy, for example, from class A to class B is based not on any semblance of evidence or willingness to hear evidence, but on raw politics. I feel strongly about this matter, because I feel passionately about the issue of evidence, and the drug classification system is one in which evidence can apply. When I was employed in public health medicine in a training role, there was an old joke about an epidemiologist in court on a charge. The judge said, ““How do you plead—guilty or not guilty?”” The epidemiologist said, ““I don’t know. I can’t answer that question; I haven’t heard the evidence yet.”” I accept that one can sometimes go too far in thinking that everything must be evidence-based, but in this area we must accept it. I hope that Hansard will note that there was laughter at that point—well, chuckles. One can get carried away, but not on this issue, because so many lives are affected—those of the victims of the health effects of both legal and illegal drugs and of their families—and such a huge amount of resource is spent on a criminal justice approach that could be spent on treatment and education. It is a tragedy all the way around, and my colleagues and I feel strongly about it. My hon. Friend raised a number of issues, and I shall pick up a couple. One of my questions for the Minister concerns research. During his evidence session in the Committee on 22 November 2006, in question No. 66, we pointed out that the Home Office was said to have commissioned secondary research. We wanted a list of the commissioning, particularly in response to the ACMD’s 2002 report on cannabis, its 2003 report on hidden harm and its 2004 report on ketamine, as we had been told that the ACMD had requested research on all those matters. The Minister said that he would write and, as a man of his word, he did. His letter of 30 November noted that the ACMD had called for research. It said:"““We will consider these carefully when preparing the Government response””" to the ACMD report ““Pathways to Problems””"““for publication in the new year.””" The letter also listed what the reports stated, but I still do not think that we have seen research specifically commissioned by the Home Office in response to recommendations from the ACMD, which has limited capacity for research, if any. It is sad for such a body to be reliant on a Department to do research when we do not hear whether that research is being properly commissioned. During our inquiry, we made a number of strongly worded recommendations. I have re-read the report, and—this is not always the case—I would stand by almost all of them, although a couple were looser than they might have been. I was particularly disappointed personally to read the ACMD’s response to our report. To use the words of the Chairman himself, that response was defensive to the point of being paranoid about the criticisms made in our report. For example, the ACMD regarded our report as a ““disappointment”” and said:"““The Committee’s discussion and conclusions go much further than its own terms of reference—and investigations—permit.””" I know that the ACMD is full of distinguished people, but for it to tell a parliamentary Committee what it should inquire into and what it can recommend is remarkable. I admire the chairman of the ACMD, who puts up with much more criticism than we ever gave him in his role as the chairman of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. I hope that he is as robust in his dealings with the Minister as the ACMD was in its bizarre response to our report. The report made a number of criticisms of how the ACMD works. In particular, it criticised the role of the ACMD. For example, we argued that there was a concern about whether that role was understood. Given that the then Home Secretary seemed not to understand what it was, we repeatedly asserted that"““clinical, medical harm is the advisory council’s predominant consideration””" and concluded that it is perturbing that the chairman of the ACMD, who pointed out that social harms were given equal weight in its deliberations, and the Home Secretary have publicly expressed contradictory views about the council’s remit. The ACMD’s response was:"““It is unfortunate that the previous Home Secretary was inadequately briefed on the breadth of the remit of the ACMD.”” " I do not know what evidence it had that the briefing was inadequate rather than that those were just the Home Secretary’s views. In another part of the report, we expressed regret that Association of Chief Police Officers members on the ACMD appeared not to understand their role. The report pointed out:"““There is no point ACPO having a seat on the ACMD if its representatives do not bring their expertise to bear on the problems under discussion…It is highly disconcerting that the Chair of the ACPO Drugs Committee appears to be labouring under a misapprehension about his role on the ACMD more than four years into his term of office.””" In response to that reasonably fair criticism, and given that we had heard direct evidence from the ACMD, that organisation sought to point out that the ACPO members are not representatives, and that we were wrong to call them so. In fact, in using the word ““representatives””, we were quoting directly from the then Home Office Minister, who said in evidence to us:"““Two representatives of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) are full members of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and contribute their expertise and knowledge of policing issues to the council””." The ACMD lashed out in its response against the Government’s misapprehensions, not ours. It was extremely disappointing to see an apparently independent advisory council such as this being so defensive as not even to concentrate on the main points that we were making and to err in its own response by trying to be pedantic. When being pedantic, one must be right. Otherwise, it is unnecessary pedantry. At the risk of being accused, I shall move on. The report raised a number of other issues in its recommendations, many of which were covered by the other hon. Members who have spoken. I agree with what was said about the report in The Lancet in March this year. It is a significant step for active senior members of the ACMD such as David Nutt and Colin Blakemore to publish in the medical literature a peer-reviewed paper so critical of the basis for the drug classification system. It is key. They said:"““Our findings raise questions about the validity of the current Misuse of Drugs Act classification, despite the fact that it is nominally based on an assessment of risk to users and society. The discrepancies between our findings and current classifications are especially striking in relation to psychedelic-type drugs.””" I do not think that it is right that the ACMD, at the time that we published our report, should never have considered whether the classification system to which it worked was appropriate, but at least some of its members took the initiative in doing research and publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals. Surely that will give the Minister pause for thought and make him sit up and say, ““Perhaps something is wrong with our existing policy, it needs looking at and the then Home Secretary’s decision all those months ago is worth revisiting.”” It can only be disappointing for a Select Committee to hold an inquiry, to be boosted by an announcement of Government policy during that inquiry, to hear that a draft consultation paper is being prepared and to agree with the premise of that consultation paper, only for the Government to cancel their decision. That is extremely disappointing.