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Dangerous Drugs

There is agreement, at least between the two Front Benchers who have addressed the House so far, that the Government have done the right thing in the current circumstances. I will not be sure what the Liberal Democrats' position is until we hear from the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris), but there is agreement about the decision that has been taken. I join the hon. Member for Hornchurch (James Brokenshire) and the Minister in accepting that it was the right course of action for the Government to take. They acted speedily in respect of the recommendation from the ACMD. The decision was speedy in that the report went to the Home Secretary on Monday, and on the same day he decided that the drug would be reclassified. It took the Government only a few hours to make that decision. However, I am concerned about the time it took for the advisory council to get to the position to make that recommendation to the Government. Well done to Ministers and, in the last instance, to the Home Secretary for making the decision quickly, but I am worried about the time it took for the recommendation to come before the Home Secretary. The concerns raised by the Minister, the hon. Member for Hornchurch and others in the House were first brought before Ministers a year ago. Those concerns—about how dangerous the drug was—were raised with the previous Home Secretary. So I praise the Government on their decision, but lament the fact that it took 12 months to get to the position to make it. We have to look at how these decisions are made, and the purpose of the ACMD is central to that. The hon. Member for Hornchurch, in an election period, obviously makes hay with the fact that members of the council have been resigning over the past few months. I would be astonished if he did not use that fact for party political advantage in the current climate. Indeed, it is embarrassing that only last week another member resigned. So it is an appropriate time to look at the entire structure of how these decisions are made. As I said to the Minister in my brief intervention, in the end it has to be up to Ministers to come before the House, and to make and defend such decisions, and they must rely on expert advice. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) is, of course, much more experienced than probably anyone else in the Chamber today in these scientific matters—I do not want to disparage anybody else—because he is a bona fide scientist. He is a doctor, so he must be. If we can divorce ourselves from the fact that we are experts in certain fields, we have to rely on the expert advice of people who have impressive titles, such as professors and doctors, to give us the advice and expertise that we do not possess. We should look at the structure of the advisory council. We must not get to a position where such an important body, which makes representations to the Government on a very important area of policy, should have acting chairpersons, committee members resigning and members who do not understand that, at the end of the day, decisions have to be made by Ministers. It would not be right if such decisions were all made by experts. There is absolutely no point in a Government having a drugs policy as part of their portfolio if Ministers are not prepared to act. I hope that we can use the current episode to look at structures. Of course, it is difficult to do that in the middle of a general election campaign, but whichever party is in power—obviously, I hope it will be Labour—the Government need to look at those structures and ensure that the system is improved. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) is in his place, and the Government will have noted the last report of the Home Affairs Select Committee on cocaine and the increase in the amount of it entering the United Kingdom. We suggested that it is vital that there be better co-ordination of Government drugs policy. The hon. Member for Hornchurch rightly raised the point that even if mephedrone is reclassified, in various parts of the world—I do not know if it is just in China—people are sitting down, as we speak, to try to concoct the next drug for the market. We are, in a sense, powerless to deal with the fact that, whatever we do in this place and regardless of decisions made by Ministers, at the end of the day, in order to circumvent the reclassification of this drug, somebody somewhere on this planet will be devising the next drug to be made available to young people and others. The hon. Gentleman is also right to mention the importance of the internet, and although I am not sure whether people in China will be able to buy such drugs on the internet, given what has happened with China and Google, the fact is that people in this country might be able to do so. That is something that we have to look at. That brings me to my penultimate point, which is about the European Union and its failure properly to grasp this as an important policy issue. I am not sure whether my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North came with us when the Committee visited Lisbon as part of our inquiry into the cocaine trade, but we came across the European research and drugs agency. We were treated extremely well when we went in, as I am sure parliamentarians from across the European Union are. There were half a dozen experts—or perhaps even up to a dozen—sitting before us telling us what the agency was doing on drugs policy. However, what concerns me is that although we have all those experts sitting around in Lisbon talking about policy issues, we still have an unco-ordinated policy in the EU. Mephedrone is banned in Sweden and Denmark, which are in the EU, and in Norway and Israel, which are outside it, but in France and the United Kingdom—until this order goes through, of course—there is no ban, and anyone who goes to Spain can buy it there, too. The European Union prides itself on co-ordinating policy on serious and organised crime, counter-terrorism and so on, and here we have a policy that is crying out to be co-ordinated at a European level, yet there is no co-ordination. That is why it is important that Ministers, shadow Ministers and alternative shadow Ministers should look at the European Union's drugs agency and ensure that it does the work that was intended when the Government supported its creation, by providing research, information and expertise, so that the work can be done on a Europe-wide basis—the very issues that the hon. Member for Huntingdon referred to. The fact is that there are people in different parts of the world trying to second-guess the decisions that we are making and trying to create the next internet drug. Those in the European agency are the kinds of people who have the resources to ensure that we remain one step ahead of the people who wish to create the next-steps drugs. If we work in a co-ordinated way, that will make the policy easier to implement and absorb. Finally, to return to my earlier point, I said right at the beginning that we should welcome what the Government had done, but lamented the fact that it had taken so long. There is no excuse when concerns are raised with Ministers and when Ministers say to the advisory council, as they did last November, "This is a serious issue. Please get on with making a decision as soon as possible." Let us look at the referral time. The Home Secretary asked the advisory council to look at the issue in November. Resignations aside, it is now April. We have had five months since the original referral. The process has taken far too long. Leaving the structures aside, we need a measure that will allow an interim decision to be taken, at least in the short term, because since the matter was first referred to my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith), after the concerns raised by parliamentarians and our Committee—we have written to Ministers about the issue on a number of occasions, most recently a couple of weeks ago—some 25 young people have died. They include Louis Wainwright and others, and teenagers and young people go to nightclubs, where they have been able to buy mephedrone, every Friday and Saturday night.