Misuse of Drugs Act — House of Commons, 2021-06-17
Topic: Law and Crime
Kieran John Mullan (Conservative, Centre-right): In my time both as a doctor and a volunteer special constable, I have seen up close the harms that drugs do to our society, and I have also seen this in my personal life. I wish to begin by focusing on areas of agreement with the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith), my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) and others. It is clearly right that the best outcome for an individual addicted to drugs is to be supported to overcome that addiction. It is clearly better for individuals who end up using drugs that they can do so in a way that minimises the risk of harm. It is clearly true that often it is not going to be the best use of police time to pursue individuals who are using drugs on a personal basis. Those are things I think we can all agree on, but some of the other arguments put forward today fail on a number of fronts. They fail to understand the reality of the policing of drug use in society at the moment. They fail to understand the nature of criminality associated with drug production, and they fail to understand the complexity of addiction recovery. As is so often the case with those on the left, they take for granted all the quiet benefits of our current approach to drugs that could potentially be lost in reform. Fundamentally, abstinence-based policies are stopping very many people from taking illicit drugs. The overwhelming majority of people do not take drugs. What Members have done today, without any evidence whatsoever, is to draw association with cause. An enormous number of social ills have exploded over the past 30 years. We cannot say that, because our approach was X, it has been the cause of that. There are many, many factors that drive drug use and we have no idea what drug use would have been had we taken a different approach Let me ask a question of the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington, who I know DJ-ed in nightclubs that I frequented a long time ago in Leeds and Manchester. How many times were his nightclubs raided by police bent on catching everybody who was taking amphetamines? How many times has he seen police with their sniffer dogs outside a festival desperate to catch people taking these types of drugs? As I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming majority of people who are caught with cannabis are charged only with possession if they are an adult. If they are not causing any other problem for the local area, such as smoking it publicly or being involved in criminality, they will end up with a warning notice and a fine. Very few of the people who have been talked about for being in prison for drug offences are there for consumption. Overwhelmingly, they are in there for dealing. If they are there for consumption, it is usually because they have had a string of other interventions—whether it be a suspended sentence, a community order, or other things. Ultimately, it is fair that, if they continue to cause misery in their local communities, they face a prison sentence for that. They are not there because we are sending people away to prison because they smoke cannabis or because they take ecstasy. That is just not the reality of the situation The question that we might ask ourselves is why do we not just decriminalise these drugs, especially if people are relatively able to use it in proportion. It goes back to what I said earlier. First, I do not endorse that situation. My strong view is that criminalisation deters an awful lot of people from using drugs. Members cannot have it both ways. They cannot say on the one hand that there is all this stigma around drug use, that people cannot get treatment, cannot speak about it, and cannot be freely open with it, and then say that decriminalisation will not increase usage because it is freely available anyway and people can just get it. We cannot have both those scenarios; we must have one or the other. There is either a stigma, which will have a social effect, or there is not; we cannot have it both ways Let me turn now to the nature of criminality related to drug dealing. Drug dealing and drugs being illegal do not create criminal gangs. Those gangs exist because sections of our society are willing to step outside the rules and the norms, use violence, be thugs and do things that the rest of us will not do to make a quick buck. They happen to be doing that with drugs, and decriminalising them will not change that. First, they will just do more of other things. There will be more racketeering, more counterfeit money, and more people trafficking. There will always be people who will look to make money and to be violent as a result As has been mentioned, whatever limits we put on drugs—unless Members here really think that Boots will be giving out injectable heroin—there will be limits on the drugs that will be decriminalised. The evidence in Amsterdam is that it has one of the biggest problems with potent cannabis. Decriminalising the use of cannabis in Amsterdam has not stopped that, so, whatever we do, there will always be people who want that hit—it is the nature of addiction. The nature of addiction is that people want a bigger hit. They want more than they got the first time, so they will always hit those limits and want someone else to go above what the law will allow, while accepting that there will be some kind of barriers Finally, I want to draw on my experience at university. As a doctor, we had former heroin addicts come in to speak to us. There was a lady who had multiple problems with addiction. Her ongoing addiction was not as a result of not being able to get treatment; she had multiple opportunities to seek treatment. She went on some treatment courses, but, actually, it was when she hit rock bottom, having no help from anyone and having exhausted everything that was available to her, that she turned it around. I am afraid that even the very best addiction programmes are not particularly successful unless people go on them multiple times and go on a bit of a journey The idea that we will fix this problem by giving people treatment is naive I am afraid. The problem will carry on regardless because of the inherent nature of these substances, which, on balance, should be banned. We have to weigh up the costs to society of even a small increase in the number of people who take these drugs, and, of course we feel sorry for them, but they have ended up taking them anyway.