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Drug Strategy

I will not go into the details of why the speech that the hon. Member for Hornchurch made was superficial, but he missed the point. Cannabis is a minor part of the problem, and reclassification is of no importance whatever. There are much more serious problems, which the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) well understands. We need to get to the heart of them, and that is happening elsewhere. There are two, or possibly three, optimistic signs. One is at the United Nations, which has recognised that world opinion is changing. There was a time when this country had very few drug users—fewer than 1,000 addicts. We became tough and had a zero-tolerance policy, doing all the things that the Opposition spokesman in this debate wants to do, but sadly we did not become intelligent about drugs. We had that policy in 1971. The result is that we now do not have 1,000 addicts; we have 280,000 addicts. We have a problem that is permanent and a great scourge among our young people. We did not show an example to the people in eastern Europe, who effectively said, ““When the iron curtain fell and drugs came into our countries, we looked to you guys in the west to tell us how to deal with them.”” What they heard was a babel of conflicting voices and advice. The result is 5 million addicts in the Russian Federation. I had the experience of visiting a hospital in Moscow—I can feel the emotion churning up as I think of it—that was filled with thousands of patients, every one of whom was a child of a drug user or sex worker born with AIDS. Those things have happened because of our failure to tackle poverty and because of the self-gratification of the politicians. We want popular policies that give us good headlines in the daily papers, which do not tell us that we will go to pot if we are found in possession of an intelligent idea or something that works. There is a new European convention, which was presented by a British rapporteur in the Council of the Europe in September and is supported by all parties in the House in the Council and by all 47 countries there. The convention is similar to another document called ““The Rome Consensus””, which enjoys the support of more than 120 nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Those two documents—““The Rome Consensus”” and the new European convention, which is yet to go to the Council of Ministers—say a great deal, but the basic argument is that our reliance on the criminal justice system for solving the problem of drugs has not worked. Substitution has worked. Every £1 that we spend on substitution, treatment, needle exchanges and so on is worth £12 that we spend on the criminal justice system. The situation in our prisons is tragic. I had the awful experience of visiting the family of two young people my constituency who would be classified as two of the great successes of our system, because they went into prison as heroin users and came out clean. The system was working—what a triumph; how wonderful. Indeed, I am sure that those young people are named somewhere in the figures. The young man who came out lived a day; the woman who came out lived a week. They went back to their drugs because they did not have the chance of being looked after. That is an abject failure. We are now in an awful position. The hon. Member for Hornchurch said that we are the worst country in Europe for drugs, which is as it is. Every one of the countries that have shooting-up galleries and have taken a more compassionate line, treating drug users not as criminals, but as patients, have less harm. We are missing something and we are failing. We need to get to the point where we recognise that, despite all our self-satisfaction as politicians—our desire to get good headlines to get ourselves re-elected—we are failing a generation whose lives are being destroyed by drugs. That is the lesson of today. I believe that there will be a change. The atmosphere is changing in the United Nations, which determines everything. The United Nations went along with the myth that we can control drugs at the supply—we tried that in Colombia for nearly 30 years and in Afghanistan, but it has been an utter, abject failure. After £250 million of taxpayers' money being spent on drug eradication in Helmand province, the result is that the drug crops there are the highest in history and the price of heroin on the streets of London is the cheapest that it has ever been. That is failure from both angles. Let us stop congratulating ourselves on what clever politicians we are, on what great successes we have enjoyed or on the press supporting us, including on the completely foolish idea of reclassifying cannabis, especially when all the evidence is that reclassifying it probably made very little difference, because fashion and many other things were involved. Indeed, the use of cannabis went down, and everyone admits that. There is another demand to reclassify it upwards, but the whole of drug-taking policy, in my 20 years in Parliament, has been an evidence-free zone that is rich in prejudice, ignorance and denial. We are all drug users in many ways. We should look to a policy that puts the emphasis on education, the truth and the things that work. They include drug substitution, which has been mentioned, not some idiotic idea about zero tolerance, which does not work, or the other foolish idea, about khat. Khat is a drug with its own dangers, but if we decide to prohibit it, we will immediately drive a wedge between the Somali and Yemeni communities and the police, and drive the trade underground. Khat is currently legal, but if it became illegal, Somali areas would be divided up into territories that were guarded with guns. If we want to create another minor crime wave, we should prohibit khat, because people will keep using it—they have used it for centuries as part of their tradition. Prohibiting khat is another instant solution that appeals to politicians. I urge the House to consider the position in the real world. We have a terrible record as politicians, but when I saw the parents of the young man who died in my constituency, did I blame myself for what I had done? I know that if the policies that I and others advocated in this place 20 years ago had been put into practice and come to fruition, those young people would probably still be alive today. We have taken a path that is not based on the truth or on the practical ways of dealing with the problem. One of the best examples from other countries is from Portugal, which has already been mentioned. In 2001, the Government in Portugal decided to de-penalise all drugs. It was not a popular policy—the Government there were howled at by the press and the public thought that the politicians had gone mad—but the result was a reduction in the total number of deaths from drugs in Portugal of 50 per cent. in five years. That is the most spectacular result of any drugs policy anywhere in the world. Other countries have adopted bold policies—the shooting-up galleries, for instance—that have been unpopular with lots of people, but that is not the path of popularity, which is increased drug use and the continuing scourge of drugs that is affecting the whole world. I know that many hon. Members wish to speak in this debate, so I will draw my remarks to a close by begging everyone from both major parties—indeed, from all parts of the House—to look at what was said here in 1998 and at the ambitions that were announced. None of them has been achieved. We have had 10 years of utter, abject failure from all angles—from the waste of money involved to the fact that not a single prison in this country is free of drug use. One Conservative Member told me that he went into a prison and was told by a prisoner, ““I've got a toothache that I'd like to get an aspirin for, but I have to wait until tomorrow morning to see a doctor, yet I can go from my cell and get every illegal drug you'd care to mention within a quarter of an hour.”” That is the reality of life in prison. If we cannot keep drugs out of prison, what hope is there for all the brave policies of zero tolerance working in the community and in clubs in our society? We needed to look at this issue through new eyes and to read the evidence, which says that the harm reduction techniques work. We need to concentrate on those techniques and end our reliance on the criminal justice system, which has increased the problem so tragically over the past 35 years.