Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-07-14
Topic: Law and Crime
Alan Thomas Howarth (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, this amendment is intended to avoid a situation in which we may find ourselves criminalising rather large numbers of young people. I am not sure that that is what the Government really want to do, and I myself would not at all like to see it happen. The Bill provides that it is not an offence to possess a psychoactive substance, but all means whereby people might obtain psychoactive substances would be made illegal. I do not know whether Ministers expect people to come into possession of psychoactive substances rather as if they had descended like manna from heaven—or perhaps, as some people would see it, surfaced from hell At all events, very many young people use psychoactive substances. I do not think anyone knows what the scale of use is in this country. The report on new psychoactive substances that the Home Office commissioned and published last year indicated that the data are extremely thin and inadequate. That is no one’s fault; it is a very widespread problem and it is hard to monitor the reality of it. Still, a lot of people are using psychoactive substances, just as a lot of students are using substances that they think will enhance their cognitive powers, and I do not think that a ban is going to stop them doing so The question is this: if a group of people club together, in the words of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs in its letter of 2 July, and one of them supplies a psychoactive substance to a circle of friends but does not do so for the purpose of financial gain—it is a shared social activity that they have agreed to undertake—should that become a criminal offence? I suggest that it should not. More significant than my suggestion is the urging of the ACMD in its letter to the Secretary of State, in which it says: "The Bill has the potential to both criminalise and apply disproportionate penalties to many otherwise law abiding young people and adults…An example is a young person being prosecuted for ‘supply and importation’ in a case of ‘social supply’ where a young adult has bought small quantities of Novel Psychoactive Substances on-line on behalf of a group of friends who have ‘clubbed together’. The ACMD believes that criminal justice sanctions would be disproportionate to the harm caused by such acts", and I think the ACMD is right. In her reply to Professor Iversen’s letter, the Home Secretary offered some reassurance when she said that, "the Bill contains both criminal and civil sanctions which will enable law enforcement agencies to adopt a proportionate response to offending behaviour. In addition, the police and Crown Prosecution Service will exercise their professional discretion taking into"— I think the next word is "account" but it has been missed out— "all the circumstances of the offence and the offender" So that is good Oddly, she also says in the preceding paragraph that the expert panel, "did not suggest excluding social supply" That is not how I read the expert panel’s report. Page 33 of that report, at the beginning of the section entitled "General prohibition on the distribution of non-controlled NPS", in which the expert group set out to state the principles that should apply, said: "Legislation of this type … can exclude … social supply" It did not recommend that it should exclude social supply, but contemplated that it should. I hope that the Government, in the light of that, might be prepared to think a little further about this issue.