Psychoactive Substances Bill [Lords] — House of Commons, 2015-10-19
Topic: Law and Crime
Lyn Carol Brown (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Lady is absolutely right; I completely and utterly agree. Education is the key to this. We need to reduce the demand for the supply Thus far, a mere £180,556 has been spent on education programmes on new psychoactive substances, as the Minister told the House in a written answer on 2 June. Sadly, the Government rejected Labour’s amendment to the Bill in the Lords which would have placed a statutory duty on the Secretary of State to increase public awareness and help schools to educate children about the dangers of these drugs. Let me say gently that that is a wholly inadequate response given that the Government themselves recognise that these drugs are a serious problem. If we want young people to have the resilience, the confidence and the knowledge to say no, we have to be fully committed to a comprehensive education programme across the UK The next area where the Minister needs to exercise care and caution is proportionality of sentencing. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, sentences are linked to the harm caused by the drug possessed, supplied or produced—the more harmful the drug, the harsher the maximum sentence. Of course, there is judicial discretion in applying individual sentences, but the general approach of linking to relative harms is important The Bill represents a radical departure from previous attempts to control drugs, because it legally decouples controlled substances from an independent and objective assessment of the harm they cause. We understand why that may be appropriate. The process by which the ACMD determines the harm of a substance can be lengthy and resource intensive, which is precisely why the Home Office cannot keep up with the illicit market. It is difficult to introduce the concept of harm to the Bill without denying the Home Office the tools it needs to deal with that central problem It is because this Bill suggests such a radical change that we need carefully to consider the impact it will have when implemented. I am worried that we might end up in a situation where someone who is prosecuted for selling a weak psychoactive substance faces the possibility of the same seven-year custodial sentence as someone who sells a very dangerous substance. The Bill contains no classification system to differentiate between those two crimes. I fear that the proposed laws could lose the confidence of the public and the judicial system if the issue of proportionality is not looked at carefully. As the Minister will be aware, the issue has exercised the Home Affairs Committee I am particularly worried about the proportionality of sentencing for young people involved in social supply. It is not unusual for a number of young people to club together and for one person to buy substances off the internet and distribute them among friends, or even for one individual to sell a small amount to a friend. The Bill makes no distinction between those people and large-scale importers. We need to look at that Has the Minister considered providing credible measures for a relatively harmless substance to be excluded from the controls, if that is deemed appropriate? Conversely, if a new psychoactive substance proves to be particularly harmful, surely it should be removed from the scope of the Bill and controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Reviewing that may be an appropriate responsibility of the ACMD Another issue that needs careful consideration is how the police and prosecutors can both determine and prove that a substance is psychoactive. I am sure the Minister is aware that Professor Iverson, chair of the ACMD, has previously written to the Home Secretary warning her that we will have to rely on proxy measures of psychoactivity, such as in vitro neurochemical tests, in order to prove psychoactivity, but that they may not stand up in court We should take Professor Iversen’s warnings seriously. Although similar legislation in Ireland appears to have been broadly successful—given the statistics I quoted earlier—there have been only five successful prosecutions. Police in Ireland have admitted that that is because they find it difficult to prove the psychoactivity of substances. We want sellers to stop selling psychoactive substances voluntarily, and for consumers to stop purchasing the drugs. However, it is hard to imagine that that would work without any prosecutions at all. The law simply would not provide a credible deterrent.