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Drug Strategy

As we know, 80 per cent. of seizures are of super-strength cannabis. We therefore urgently need to change the classification and send out the message that the Prime Minister said that he wanted to convey. I will deal with treatment, which the hon. Gentleman has mentioned, shortly, because it is a fundamental issue and one of the failures that we must tackle. The Home Office does not appear to know the scale of the problem. Its strategy document states:"““Cannabis factories represent a worrying development. It is clear that serious, organised criminals are investing in the production of cannabis on a commercial scale.””" The document continues:"““Intelligence from the community will be used to target drug markets and the sources of domestically-produced drugs such as cannabis factories.””" Yet, when we ask for a breakdown of the number of cannabis factories detected by each police force, the Home Office simply replies that that information is not kept centrally. So much for intelligence. The flawed approach applies not only to enforcement. Drug treatment is mired—under the latest plan, it will stay mired—in muddled and ineffective thinking. It is telling that the latest policy document contains only two references to ““recovery””. Neither relates to recovery from drugs—they both refer to asset recovery—and I will say more about that shortly. Fundamentally, the Government's approach is not about ridding people of addiction, but switching people from an illicit drug to a substitute prescribed drug. The necessity of abstinence, which is recognised as the key step on the road to recovery in other European countries, is notably absent from the approach. As the prisons and addictions forum of the Centre for Policy Studies says in its critique of the latest strategy:"““The harm reduction techniques that are espoused to achieve this goal, when stripped bare, seem to rely almost entirely on replacing one substance with another as a way to manage and solve dependency without addressing the issues underlying it. Government policy in the treatment domain is revealed, like the emperor's new clothes, as not being treatment at all.””"