Drugs Policy — House of Commons, 2017-07-18
Topic: Mixed Topics
Paul Phillip Flynn (Labour, Centre-left): It has been a splendid afternoon. May I offer my congratulations to all those who have made maiden speeches? How refreshing it is and how grateful we all are to the Prime Minister for organising this fresh injection of new Members into the House—and so many of them are women. Goodness, there has been a great change in this place since I came in with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), who is on the Front Bench. It was thought remarkable then that there were four Members from ethnic minorities here. It was a place that was crude and macho because it was dominated by males. We have seen it civilised and become more sensible and more representative of society We heard the passion and sincerity of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), who is depriving education but enriching us. I am sure she will go far. What a joy it is to see a member of the Sikh community here, with their great history and their marvellous contribution to this country. Are we not coming to a stage where Parliament represents the nation more fully than it ever has before? Many congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi) I also congratulate the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). The Liberal Democrats have done so much to introduce sanity into the drugs debate. I will not say too much about the Minister, who has the misfortune of presenting the nonsense that civil servants have been writing, in my experience, for the past 30 years on this subject. I remember two people who have had that job with great affection. Mo Mowlam would send me letters with a little handwritten note on the bottom saying, "See you in the Strangers tonight to tell you what I really think." When we got together after she stood down, she intended to write a book urging the end of drug prohibition. She could not do it in office and, sadly, she died before the time came. Bob Ainsworth was another person who had the hideous job of trying to defend the failing policy that is the prohibition of drugs. As soon as he stood down, he was campaigning on the other side The House has been marred by culpable cowardice for the last 46 years on this subject and countless people have died or suffered as a result. I had an email last night to tell me about a drama documentary to be based on the life of Elizabeth Brice. I gave a little whoop of joy at the news. Elizabeth campaigned under the name of Clare Hodges. She was a wonderful, vibrant woman, a television producer who translated the "Noddy" tales into Latin, among her many achievements. She suffered severely from multiple sclerosis, and she came to the House and collaborated with me in a terrible crime on the Terrace. I supplied her with a cup of hot water, with which she made and drank cannabis tea. According to the rules of the House, and the policy approved by the Government—and, sadly, the Opposition too—she would have been liable to go to prison for seven years, and I would probably have been accompanying her We have to call on those who put up with the barbaric stupidity and cruelty of a Government policy that denies seriously ill people their medicine of choice to perform acts of civil disobedience. Elizabeth Brice spoke to the Parliament in Belgium and within months it changed its policy. Most other countries allow the use of this most ancient of medicines—it has been used for 5,000 years on every continent—for medicinal purposes. I know that Members are not supposed to do this, but I call on people to break the law, to come here and use cannabis and see what happens—to challenge the authorities to arrest them. That is the only way to get through to the Government’s mind, which is set in concrete. The law is evidence free and prejudice rich In another example of the fact that the Government are in denial, I tabled a simple question to ask how many prisons were free of drug use last year. The answer came back that 83 were free of drug use for one month. That was not the question. I asked again how many were free for a whole year, and the answer came back, "One". Which one? It was Blantyre House. How many prisoners were in that prison? None—it was closed. The Government have cracked the problem—the answer to drug use in prison is to get rid of the prisoners, not the drugs If anything mocks the stupidity and futility of our drugs policy, it is the fact that there are more drugs in prison than outside. There is not a drug-free prison in the whole of the United Kingdom. We also fool ourselves about how the drugs get in—it is not through the visitors or drones. If we look at discipline in prisons and the poor wages paid to many staff, we can quickly work out how drugs get in. There is conspiracy and corruption there We need to learn the mountainous lessons of prohibition, which only happened in 1971, with Jim Callaghan following what the United Nations had done under the influence of President Nixon. The world said it would get rid of all illegal use of drugs, but they were not a problem here. There was virtually no use of marijuana/cannabis in this country. Some people had become addicted through morphine to heroin, but there were no deaths. We had fewer than 1,000 users. Every year since then, under harsh prohibition, we have created an empire of crime and ended up with 320,000 addicts in this country. That is an enormous burden We cannot ignore what has happened in the rest of the world. I despair of any change in Government policy, because the Government are stuck in the foolish idea that prohibition works, as was clear when we debated what is now the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. The thinking is that psychoactive substances are a hideous problem, and anyone is very foolish to put anything in their body that has never been ingested by a human being before. The nearest to an intelligent policy came from New Zealand, which said that it would license psychoactive substances if the producers could establish that they were safe. Otherwise, it is just a jungle out there Last year, when we debated the Psychoactive Substances Bill, the Government fell into the old trap of saying that "something must be done", which is the greatest error in politics. Governments cannot think of anything that is going to work, but they have to seem to do something. That was the argument then, and that is where we have ended up with this damaging Act. It was said that Poland and Ireland had virtually the same Bill. Those countries closed the headshops, and the result was not a decrease but an increase in drug use. When the drug trade is on the streets, people have a vested interest and can get more money out of it. In Ireland the use of what were then called legal highs among young people rose from 16% to 22%, and the same thing is happening here. Why on earth do the Government not recognise that prohibition does not work? In America, 13 years of alcohol prohibition did not work for the same reasons I have never taken an illegal drug in my life, but I consider the medical use of cannabis to be of immense benefit, and that should be our first step. I believe that the rest of the world will leave us behind; they are laughing at us now. Canada is leading the way, but there is no doubt that the system works in Portugal. The people in Portugal to whom I have spoken did not have the support of any great number of Members of their Parliament, and they did not have the support of the press, but they charged ahead, in a very courageous way, and said, "This is going to work." That was 16 years ago, and there is every indication, given the number of deaths and the incidence of disease since then, that it has been successful in every respect I think that we will follow—as, indeed, we must—the example of half the states in America, and of Uruguay and other countries in South America, and legalise drugs, because that is the only way in which to reduce harm and reduce the number of deaths.