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Welsh Affairs

It is a pleasure for me to follow, for the first time, the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Davies). Our backgrounds have a great deal in common, and I should like to take up some of the themes that he raised. It is also a pleasure to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State on his return to office, for two reasons. The first has already been mentioned by the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes): now that my right hon. Friend is in office, he can indulge fully in what the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey decided was his passion for Welsh devolution, and his deep enthusiasm for the Welsh language. The second reason why I welcome my right hon. Friend back to office is that it means that his time will be fully occupied. It will be busy in the office, so he will have less energy and time for some of the activities to do with devolution in which he was involved, together with his comrade, the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig). That will be extremely beneficial. Sir Martin Evans has been mentioned. We are all very proud that the professor of mammalian genetics at Cardiff university has won a Nobel prize, together with others, and we are proud of the other winner of a prize in Cardiff. Sir Martin is a proud Welshman and he delights in his roots in the capital city. The best thing about the win is that his work, which involves embryos, is in an area in which there are boundless opportunities for development. There are possible future Nobel prize winners in a little-known firm in Newport called Lifeforce. It was founded by Professor Bradley Stringer and a man with an exotic Welsh name—although he is Welsh—Mr. Del DelaRonde. The firm is in the business of parking immune systems. It is an exotic business; a sample of blood, in pristine condition, is taken from a healthy patient, and the white cells are extracted and kept in three different locations. When the immune system is attacked by disease, or is weakened by chemotherapy or radiotherapy, it is possible to expose the white cells to a natural growth factor that multiplies them into an army of healthy white cells, which are re-infused into the patient. That is an exciting possibility. Lifeforce in Newport owns world patents. It already has a link with the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich and a firm in America. It is one of only three companies that are in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The possibilities are immense, if one thinks of how the technology could be used. It could be used for AIDS patients. If someone who has HIV gets full-blown AIDS, and has a re-infusion of their healthy immune system, they could go back to where they were, with HIV, and with full-blown AIDS in remission. That is causing a great deal of excitement in the scientific world. The company is wholly Welsh. Its founder, the professor, is a former patent examiner in Newport. One of the crucial factors is that the firm has a link that has been approved, and unique patents. Approval has come from the Food and Drug Administration in America, and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency in the UK. There is the possibility of huge expansion in that field. We are talking about the medicine of the future, and I think that it will certainly rank with surgery, radiotherapy and various drugs as a cancer treatment in future. That is one example of the great things that are happening in Wales. It is part of our pride in Newport, a city that is in a very healthy state. We are looking forward to the year of the general election, 2010, but there will be another major event in Newport in that year: the Ryder cup. There is so much activity going on in the town. Newport is being reborn; it will be Newport nouveau. There is a big new boulevard running through the town. The other day, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, East (Jessica Morden) saw the plans for its new rugby stadium. The railway station is undergoing a major makeover. There are great things happening in our city and it is a chance to be very optimistic about it. Yesterday a new 10-year drugs strategy was announced. It is unfortunate that we have not had a debate on it or even a statement. We had a statement in the House 10 years ago, when the previous drugs strategy was supported by all major parties. There was only one Back Bencher who objected. Before we embark on a second drugs strategy, we should look at the result of the past 10 years, acknowledging that the treatment target is the only target that has been met. We have not come anywhere near reaching the targets that were set for the reduction of drugs use, the reduction of drugs-related crime and the reduction in drugs-related deaths. We should look at the experience of other countries. Portugal had a five-year drugs strategy in 2001, the result of which is that the number of drug deaths was halved in that country. In other countries, too, spectacular results have been achieved. Let me speak about my experience, as one constituency MP. Two people living in my constituency would be recorded in the statistics of the past 10 years, and both had similar experiences in the past 18 months. They went to jail because they were stealing to feed their addiction. They will be marked up as great successes because they went in as drug users and came out clean. That is the end of the happy story. The woman lived for a week after she came out of prison. The man lived for a day after he came out of prison. They both went back to taking heroin, at the normal dose that they had tolerated before, and they died. When we look at the continuing scourge of drugs throughout Wales, we largely ignore the remedies that are available. There has been a slight decrease recently in the number of deaths, and there have been improvements, which I would argue have come from treatment—from the health outcomes. There is also optimism in Europe that we are moving away from the policy that we are all signed up to as members of the United Nations—a 10-year strategy that was designed to eliminate or reduce substantially all drug cultivation and drug use. That policy was adopted in 1998 and comes up to be examined this year. There has been no progress whatever anywhere on the planet in achieving that end, yet we are still in denial. When the tough policies fail, we go on to other policies that continue to fail. A Bill that is to come before the House proposes that we should go for more policies based on the criminal justice system. There is one lesson that stares us in the face when we look at the experience of the past 40 years, since we started to get tough on drugs in 1971, when there were fewer than 1,000 addicts in Britain. We have had tough policies, we have imprisoned many people, we have done everything to eliminate drugs use, but there are now 280,000 drug addicts and that number is rising. Other countries have achieved great success in reducing drug addiction. One reason to be optimistic is our realisation that we can no longer rely on the criminal justice system. That is counter-productive and wasteful. There is not a prison in the country where all illegal drugs are not used. However, schemes for needle exchanges, injection rooms and substitution are cheaper and they work. They produce good results and reduce drug crime and the number of users. A new convention will come before Ministers in a month or two, based on changing from the criminal justice system to health outcomes. There is another splendid document produced by the same group of people, called the Rome Consensus, which has been approved by the Red Cross and Red Crescent in 130 countries and there is a chance of that going through the United Nations. There is hope that we can change our view, but it will be by changing our attitudes. When the barriers came down in the Soviet Union and the drugs flowed in, the authorities had no way of dealing with them, so they turned to us in the west. What they got was not a strategy that worked but a babble of voices giving them different advice, with the result that there are now 5 million addicts in the CIS. A hospital outside Moscow, which I do not recommend anyone visits, is filled with children all born with AIDS, all the children of sex workers and drug users. We have seen that scourge spread across the planet. We can change our policy. In 2005, shortly before the election, the House decided to reclassify magic mushrooms in the same category as heroin. No main party opposed that because they did not want to be pilloried as being soft on drugs. Because of that lack of courage and failure to recognise the problem, we are acting as agents in continuing the scourge.