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Mr. Flynn: The Dutch Government claim in a letter to me that their policies have reduced soft drug use among Dutch people and reduced the number of hard drug addicts. Can the hon. Gentleman give any examples of the policies that he has described resulting in a decrease in drug use?
Dr. Goodson-Wickes: I link the hon. Gentleman's question to the position of the editor of the British Medical Journal, which is not an organ that I would normally criticise. His editorial of 23 December last year is headed, "The War on Drugs: Prohibition is not working; some legislation will help". I suggest that the hon. Gentleman and I discuss this during a health debate, but I put on record that I wholly reject that editorial and all it stands for. I endorse what my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said earlier to my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland).
Dr. Goodson-Wickes: I shall not give way again yet.
The education of potential consumers and the victims of drugs will never be the whole answer. The production of crops, their processing and distribution of the resultant drugs will continue as long as there are markets anywhere in the world. In the past few months, I have found it increasingly depressing to visit countries that grow coca and poppies, where I have heard about well-meaning, fashionable but flawed schemes of crop substitution. It is all very well to spray vast areas of Pakistan or Peru to kill the crops on which workers on that land depend, usually at subsistence level, and then to try to persuade them to grow other products with the help of subsidies or otherwise. The truth is that the more one asks about the financial viability of those substitute crops, the less firm evidence one gets of any sustained as opposed to short-term success.
I never cease to be amazed at the adaptability of agricultural practices. In many parts of south America, for example, the most likely example of crop substitution--the ultimate irony--is poppies for coca plants. That is paradoxical in the extreme and hardly the intent of the Drug Enforcement Agency and other well-meaning organisations. How very convenient that, as the demand for cocaine decreases in the United States, heroin is now more readily available on its doorstep instead of coming virtually exclusively from Asia.
I visited Lagos a few weeks ago. In the 1980s, the Nigerians were renowned for spearheading and employing high-risk-taking couriers, the so-called swallowers and stuffers. They have now set up their own sophisticated distribution organisations, with increased emphasis on maritime routes rather than air routes. Those new organisations stretch almost from the fields of Bolivia to the streets of Europe. A few years ago, who would have thought that one of the most profitable routes would be from Sao Paulo in Brazil to Moscow, of all places. Consider what opportunities lead from that.
The collapse of the Soviet empire has provided drug traders with enormous opportunities. Lorries can now pass westwards across Europe, unfettered by tiresome border controls and security checks. As if they wished to give them a fair wind, some of our continental partners set up Schengen-land, a licence for easy smuggling, if ever there was one. One of the great issues of the next few years will be ever-increasing economic migration in western Europe. Any parallel movement of drugs could hardly be more unwelcome and dangerous. I trust that the Government will continue to resist with great vigour any lowering of our historic and geographical frontiers, which act as some defence against those unwelcome trends.
Mr. Paul Flynn (Newport, West):
The great heresy of our age and of our generation is the belief that all the problems of boredom, pain, discomfort and grief can be answered by the use of drugs. Humankind has continued for thousands of years without their use, but we have accepted the great heresy implicit in the use of not just the illegal drugs mentioned today, but all drugs.
Dr. Goodson-Wickes:
I find that a most extraordinary statement. As the hon. Gentleman knows I am a physician and for thousands of years drugs have been used for medicinal purposes. To begin his thesis with such a statement is a rather bad start to his speech.
Mr. Flynn:
The hon. Gentleman speaks for Upjohn, the pharmaceutical company, which provides part of his income, as he has rightly declared.
Let me cite the example of a drug that has been used for 5,000 years, a drug that was used by the people who built the pyramids. They discovered, by experiment, that it helped their eye problems. It has only been in the past 30 years that scientists have discovered that that drug in its natural form--not in its chemical form--reduces the pressure on the inner eye and thus gives great relief to the sufferers of glaucoma. That drug is cannabis and yet its use is forbidden to those who suffer not just from glaucoma but from multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and the nausea associated with chemotherapy. The House has decided that that should be so.
During our previous debate on this subject, I brought with me to the House three such notorious criminals. One was Carol Howard, who gave cannabis to her daughter Sara. I should stress that that is spelt without an "h"--the Welsh way--because her mother was rather upset to see the anglicised version in Hansard. Sara, aged 28, was dying from a rare form of cancer and the only drug that gave her any relief from the nausea caused by chemotherapy was cannabis. I accept that there were plenty of other drugs available on the national health
service, but they turned her into a zombie, whereas cannabis allowed her to express her thoughts freely in her dying days. Her mother rightly gave that drug to her, as any of us would have done, but she was exposed and could have been thrown into gaol and fined £2,500.
One of the other criminals was a lady suffering from multiple sclerosis who found that the only relief for her terrible problems came from cannabis. The other lady was in her 60s and suffering from cerebral palsy. She finds that cannabis gives her great relief. She grows it in her garage and keeps her spliffs in a silver cigarette box near to a picture of Queen Victoria, who used cannabis every month of her adult life to ease her menstrual cramps.
We are now in the silly position of telling young people that there are two sorts of drugs. There are those that are bad, wicked and do a great deal of harm, and others that are somehow acceptable and legal, although harmful. That is not true. We have opened a great gulf between our generation and young people. There is as much truth in what we are telling them about drugs as in the myths that we and previous generations were told about masturbation and blindness, and stories about the tooth fairy and Father Christmas. We are lying to young people and we are not doing any good in reducing the amount of drugs that they take.
I speak as a chemist, and the only drug that I take is a glass of wine or a pint of beer. All hon. Members know that I am a lifelong sufferer from arthritis, but I have not used any medicinal drug for 25 years. I hope to end my days without using any such drugs because, as my own Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) has said, we take far too many of them.
What we have said about Ecstasy is misleading and must be corrected. We should know the truth about it. Ecstasy deaths are a peculiarly British problem. There may have been isolated deaths in other countries, but no other country has witnessed as many deaths as we have. If we wish to understand why Ecstasy deaths occur, we should look at the results of post-mortems. I advise any young person to steer clear of Ecstasy and never to use it. It marinates the brain in serotonin and it destroys receptors in the brain for a long period, although they will be corrected. If people use it, they are carrying out a dangerous experiment with their brain.
A month ago, I spoke to an audience of some 500 young people in London and I said those very things. Of that audience, 98 per cent. put up their hands and said that they had used Ecstasy. They will continue that because of the culture behind it and the fact that they like the companionship in the use of Ecstasy, which many people have spoken about movingly.
What is the truth about Ecstasy's dangers? We do not know the long-term danger. It is a chemical drug that has been around only for a short time in our experience, but deaths have occurred for two reasons. The first deaths occurred because of over-heating. The post-mortem results were the same as post-mortem results on death by heat stroke. There was damage to the liver and so on.
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