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Drug Classification

By the time that I finish, hon. Members might think that it is not a bad idea to have a 15-minute break every now and then during my speeches so that they can recover. I shall not return to my initial remarks about the intervention made by the hon. Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn)—I think he got my point. I shall deal with my position as a sentencer in detail a bit later, but I make it clear to the hon. Gentleman that what I do as a Member of Parliament and what I do as a judge are entirely separate. As a judge, I do what Parliament and the law require of me; as a Member of Parliament, I hope that I make policy and law—whether as an Opposition or Government Member. As is proper, the two functions are entirely separate. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not give him a running commentary of every sentence that I have passed in respect of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. However, I invite the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members present to look—not now, perhaps, but later—at Ev 113, a page towards the end of the evidence section of the report. It contains a table that lists the drugs covered by the schedules to the 1971 Act and sets out the classifications of ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, heroin and the class B and class C drugs. Notwithstanding the concern of the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) about magic mushrooms, the most controversial drugs issue for the past year, or perhaps longer, has been cannabis. I shall not repeat the facts because that would be tedious and I am insufficiently well versed in the science. Various arguments have been made about what I would call modern cannabis, as opposed to the sort that the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) did not take as an undergraduate some 20 years ago. The table that I mentioned contains a helpful list of illegal drugs and the way in which they are categorised, and despite the fact that the report is critical of the approach of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to classification, there must have been some form of intellectual process behind the grading of drugs under the ABC system. All I have to say on that subject is that the classes are a guide to sentencing. I shall not talk about a particular case, but when the courts are sentencing, they clearly need to know Parliament’s view of the seriousness of the harm—be it public, social or personal harm—caused by a drug as a matter of public policy. When a judge sentences, he looks not only at the schedules, but to previous authorities from the Court of Appeal and, now, the Sentencing Guidelines Council to see what the higher courts consider to be the correct way in which to deal with an offender who has committed a drug offence. One considers the defendant’s previous history, the quantity of the drug that he has in his possession, the value of the drug—one often has to listen to expert, or less than expert, evidence about the street value of that drug—and the purpose for which he had the drugs. It might be of some comfort to the hon. Member for Newport, West, although probably not much, to hear that if a defendant had a small amount of a class C drug in his possession purely for personal use, the court would, because Parliament advises it to do so, take a less punitive view than it would if the defendant was an industrial importer of a class A drug and the huge quantities of drugs with which he was caught were for resale. That is not a terribly difficult concept to grasp. It seems, at least from a criminal justice point of view—the debate is being answered by a Home Office Minister and I am a Home Office shadow Minister—perfectly legitimate to have a classification system for drugs so long as we continue to believe, and Parliament decides, that the possession of certain substances should be against the law. Although I know that the hon. Member for Newport, West would like to have such a debate in Government time, today is not the day to discuss whether the drugs in classes A, B and C, or any other drug—alcohol, for example—should or should not be illegal. I urge hon. Members who have so carefully contributed to the debate and the report to bear in mind that that is at least one of the purposes of the classification system, albeit that I suspect that many of them have some disagreement about whether the drugs are in the right box of that system. I do not want to be personally offensive to the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, although I was tempted to be personally offensive to his colleague, the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon. However, I chide the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough as Chairman of the Committee. Although I do not think that he intended to be rude about the witnesses who appeared before him, and while I dare say that he was probably frustrated by the answers that he received, when one is preparing and publishing an important Select Committee report—I hope that he does not take this badly—it sometimes helps the discussion if one reduces the personal and increases the impersonal. That is my only criticism of his most valuable report. When I say that that is my only criticism, I do not mean to suggest that I wholly agree or disagree with many of the recommendations. I agree with some, while some need further study and others probably will not be taken much further. None the less, the report is valuable and deserves the Government’s consideration. I could tell that the hon. Gentleman was a little cross with some of the responses that he received in the follow-up document and the evidence session with the Minister and the two witnesses from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. That aside, we are considering one of the most problematic issues with which any set of public policy makers or any Department—whether it is the Home Office, the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills or one of the ancillary agencies that take an interest in drug use, abuse and addiction—have to grapple. Irrespective of the ABC classifications, drugs are one of the causes of most problems in our criminal justice and health systems. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) set up a body called the Social Justice Policy Group, which reported earlier this year that there are 325,000 adult problem drug users in the United Kingdom. The report termed it ““an explosion in addiction””. It has been found that Britain has a higher recorded use of opiate use—opiates are predominately class A—than anywhere else in the world. This country has the highest use rates for cocaine, another class A drug, in Europe and 6.8 per cent. of UK adults, more than 3 million people, have tried cocaine at least once—the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon proudly told us that he was not part of that 6.8 per cent. That information comes from an annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, ““The state of the drugs problem in Europe””, which was published in November 2005. Another factor that we must bear in mind is that the street price of heroin, a class A drug under the 1971 Act, has dropped by 45 per cent. over the past five years and the price of cocaine, another class A drug, has dropped by 22 per cent. Drug deaths have risen a hundredfold since 1968, when there were only nine drug deaths. One can see that in the past 40 years or so the effects of the misuse of drugs have become a huge social and public policy problem that has to be dealt with. According to the Home Office, the cost of dealing with drug abuse in Britain is between £10 billion and £17 billion a year. How do I see the problem? As the shadow Minister for home affairs who deals with prisons, and as someone who has visited nearly 25 custodial institutions—adult prisons and young offender institutions—over the past 15 or 16 months, I have seen the evidence of drug abuse and addiction. I see people who are sent to prison who, it seems, do not care very much whether they are inside for the use of a class A, B or C drug. They are inside, and this returns to the point about which the hon. Member for Newport, West asked— Sitting suspended for a Division in the House. On resuming—