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Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (Amendment) Order 2010

My Lords, I want to intervene briefly at this point, because while we on these Benches understand the pressure for the Government to intervene at this juncture, it seems to me that the Minister himself has acknowledged that the advent not just of this drug but of this way of synthesising drugs effectively changes the picture. It is a little bit like a difficulty that the Minister will be well aware of: in the old days, terrorist groups tended to be consistent and to last for a long time, and so on, but now they fragment and split and grow up, so banning them simply by name, for example, is not particularly effective and we have had to look at other things. Can the Minister confirm to us that the Government are not depending simply on banning particular new synthetic drugs when they come up, but rather that they are looking at what is at the back of all this, so that we have a more effective process for trying to deal with this whole problem of a developing drug culture? In that, one will not simply be satisfied by saying, "Well, we’ve banned this drug", or even, "We have banned this group of drugs", as the Minister has indicated. The whole way that we deal with this problem needs substantially needs more attention. I wonder whether the Minister can give some indication that that is the Government’s wish and intention.