Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2015-06-09
Topic: Health
Archibald Kirkwood (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, whose experience is of service to the House. I hope that he will take an active interest in the remaining proceedings of this Bill. I concur particularly with his point about the alleged lack of consultation. If that is true—I hope the Minister will find time to reassure us about this—it is seriously worrying. The advisory committee on medicine and drugs has been a well-established, much-respected part of the environment since 1971. If there is any suggestion that they were deliberately body-swerved in order to get a political outcome by resorting to an expert committee, that would leave some of us of a more sceptical disposition more worried than we might need to be. If the Minister could make that clear, it would leave me sleeping slightly easier in bed at night Attached to that, the lack of a regulatory impact assessment is also a mistake. In the course of further proceedings in Committee, I hope that we get a chance to explore why there was no regulatory impact assessment. The point was made powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, that these substances are important to research and to industry. This is a vast category of substances and it is a blanket ban, so we need to be really careful about who is and is not affected. I am not sure that we have done enough work, certainly to satisfy me, that that was the right thing to do I have two loci in this important subject: I am from Scotland and this Bill applies to Scotland. It is more important now for this House to ensure that anything we do that has a United Kingdom reference takes account of what it is doing in other parts of the devolved legislatures. I have some concerns that can be pursued at a later stage about the way the criminal justice system, which my noble friend expertly explored, will fit with the other criminal justice processes and systems. The culture and approach can be quite different. My noble friend knows a lot more about this than I do, and I hope to talk to him over the course of the Committee stage to see whether I understand this properly, but anything that we do we must do in concert with our colleagues north of the border. The Minister will know that the Scottish Government had their own expert committee and made recommendations that are entirely sensible and that I think work with the grain of his approach, which I will seek to avoid doing in a moment. My point is that whatever we do, we must stay in step with other legislatures The other thing that I can plead by way of an interest in this is that I am a non-practising pharmacist, and I would recognise a molecule of ecstasy if the Minister wrote it down in front of me on a bit of paper—or at least I used to be able to in 1970 when I qualified. A pharmacy degree is a complete aversion therapy course against drugs. I spent a long time trying to learn how to get the active ingredient through the substrate. Colleagues need to understand this. This is not just about active ingredients; it is about dosage. Some of these manufactured substances are in pills. You can make 1,000 pills and all the active ingredient is in the last substrate, which is how my attempts ended up in the labs at Heriot-Watt University. It is not an easy thing to do; it is a very skilled thing to do. You need equipment and training This does not happen by accident, so people should not think that it is just about getting the molecules identified; it is the dosage within the distribution of the substances that are being taken that is part of the problem. I hope to be able to think about that a little more clearly and bring some of that past experience to bear. Russian roulette is an exact description of what I have just talked about; trying to get the active ingredient evenly distributed through the substrate is certainly Russian roulette—the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, is absolutely right about that. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, mentioned at the end of her remarks the important point about alcohol-related deaths. It will come as no surprise to the House that Liberal Democrats are very focused on that issue at the moment, for rather obvious reasons. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, said, we must think of all victims as we go through this legislation and try to improve the situation in the best way we can. I was also pleased to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Browning, mention the work of Norman Baker. What he achieved in his short time at the Home Office should be recognised I echo and cheer on my noble friend Lord Paddick in his approach to the Bill and I will support him absolutely. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, tried to catch my noble friend on the hop, but he failed, and rightly so. I am not the spokesman, but if it was left to me I would vote against the Bill, because the opportunity to look comprehensively at everything that has happened, including the provisions of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, should be taken now. That is why the point about consultation is so important. We do not really know how fast this situation is changing and accelerating. The circumstances that we are facing now are wholly and entirely different from those in 1971, so as a legislature we should be pausing—someone mentioned earlier the need to do this—and take a really good look at them. I would argue, as I think my colleagues on these Benches would argue, for looking at the harm rationale, which is a much better approach to these problems than a blanket prohibition It is not easy, and the public hate it because they like language like "war on drugs" and "crackdown on drugs". It makes them think that the issue is being taken seriously. Actually, much more has to be spent on prevention and research to get beneficial outcomes, and this must be treated as a health issue. I am absolutely all square with my noble friend on that, but it is a harder sell to the public. Those on the other Front Benches who attack us because we are allegedly soft on drugs will fail, because in the long run a health approach along with research and education is the way forward. If we could capture the resources that we are now unleashing—criminal justice will need a lot of extra resource to do this properly—and devote them to health and education, we would have fewer victims. That is my view. I am prepared to look at the evidence, and I hope that we will explore some of it in a little more detail in Committee, but this is my general approach to dealing with all this This is not an easy Bill to amend if you come at it with our approach, and the Minister will have to understand that. But I think that there is a majority view in the House for doing something of this kind, and I look forward to joining my colleagues in trying to make the Bill as good as it can be. However, as far as I am concerned, people need to understand that this is the wrong direction of travel. I hope I am wrong, but that is my view at the moment, and I look forward to considering the Bill in greater detail in Committee.