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Lady Olga Maitland: The hon. Gentleman somewhat goaded me into asking him this question when he referred to soldiers being dismissed for taking drugs. Does not he understand that, in the armed forces, one must have an utterly disciplined force or people would be incapable of carrying out their duties? Surely he is not saying that he would tolerate serving soldiers going out on their duties high on drugs?
Mr. Flynn: I would say that it is a disciplined force and that the persons involved deserve to be disciplined. They deserve the slap across the knuckles; they deserve whatever punishment may be meted out. I doubt whether they deserve exactly the same sentence from the Army as the three soldiers who beat to death a defenceless Danish girl with a spade in Cyprus.
Lady Olga Maitland: There is no parallel between the Cyprus sentences and drugs.
Mr. Flynn: That was what the Army's sentence was. There were other sentences available.
Let us reflect on that case. Those three soldiers had been drinking wine or beer that night. The result was that they ended up lecherous and violent and attacked that poor girl and took her life from her. Let us put it another way. If they had been among the three soldiers in my constituency who had been on cannabis, they would have been, not in a violent or lecherous mood, but in a benign, passive mood as many of the prisoners are in this country, and that girl's life would have been spared because they
would not have been in that mood. That is a case that one can contemplate about the way in which the Army treats people.
The hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Lady Olga Maitland) talks about a disciplined force. I remember my father telling me vivid stories about the first world war, where only two things were in supply in special abundance--alcohol and cigarettes. The troops were short of food of all types, but they had an infinite amount of alcohol and cigarettes. So many of those soldiers who came back suffered from alcohol problems all their life, including an uncle of mine, and my father died of lung cancer at the age of 43, not coincidentally.
Our society is now soft on the major problems that those drugs cause. We have a Minister who is not present at the moment. He complained because I intervened on him so often, but I anticipated that he might well not be here for much of my speech, because there are people in the House, of all parties, who use this awful drug called cigarettes. I speak with some sympathy, as an ex-addict, and I use the term rightly because nicotine is the most addictive of all drugs.
Dr. Goodson-Wickes
indicated dissent.
Mr. Flynn:
I will refer the hon. Gentleman to a table published in The Guardian some months ago and the British Medical Journal articles, which show that tobacco is the most addictive drug.
Let us consider the harm done by the pharmaceutical drugs. I wonder whether the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Dr. Goodson-Wickes) read New Scientist three weeks ago, which gave an account of the causes of a simple problem that most people have--headaches. It suggested that the main cause of headaches was painkillers taken to cure headaches. That is an entirely respectable scientific opinion--that we are conditioned to take drugs in large quantities to great excess.
I rejoiced yesterday when Asda Group plc was told that its campaign to make some drugs, principally paracetamol, available at cut price in its supermarkets had been frustrated because the Independent Television Commission had decided to forbid its advertisement being shown on television. There are murmurs coming from Conservative Members. Let us consider paracetamol and the minimum accepted number of deaths--250 a year. It is normally young girls between the ages of 15 and 18 who die of that drug, often at a time in their lives when they have taken two or three tablets as a pain killer. The pain does not go away, so they take two or three more; the pain still does not go away, so they take a handful and irreversible damage is done.
In Pontefract a group of people involved in health decided to send a 12-year-old girl to buy a specific drug. It asked her to buy 50 tablets. She visited, not just chemists, but supermarkets and garages. She had no difficulty buying 50 tablets--a fatal dose that would have been enough to kill her three or four times over--but had difficulty in not buying 100 because several of the outlets tried to persuade her to buy 100.
So many drugs are killers and are now freely available. If one believes the Government, paracetamol kills twice as many people every year as heroin, if one believes the Library, it kills about six times as many people. I have long advocated that that medicinal drug should be
available only on prescription. The Government will not adopt that policy and, as recently as one month ago, they refused to do so again. That illustrates the confusion about drugs that exists in the House.
Why does not prohibition work? It never has worked. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have made speeches that were full of the schemes, including education schemes, and activities that exist and that they want to introduce. I do not question their sincerity today and their feeling that they want to take the right action. I asked the hon. Member for Wimbledon, but he failed to answer, to tell me of occasions when such schemes had worked and had led to a reduction in drug use. There are plenty of activities and schemes.
I had similar correspondence with the Minister of State for Education and Employment. He said that the answer lay in education. I asked him to supply me with details of any education on illegal drugs anywhere in the world that had ever resulted in a reduction in drug use.
Mr. Spring:
The hon. Gentleman is making an extraordinary point. If people prevent themselves from falling ill through eating sensibly or not drinking excessively, there is no way in which one can determine the number of heart attacks or strokes that would otherwise have occurred--that is the nature of prevention.
Canada has been operating a national strategy for a number of years. The Canadians feel that, during that time, as a result of the emphasis that they have placed on prevention, they have been able demonstrably to measure the decrease in the consumption of illegal drugs.
Mr. Flynn:
The hon. Gentleman's evidence is pretty weak. He says that the Canadians believe that they can demonstrably measure. I do not know those figures, but I have challenged the Government to produce figures and they have not produced any in a long time.
I can provide examples--the major example involves what occurred in America in the 1950s--of drug education causing harm. In the 1950s the Americans decided to confine illegal drug abuse to major cities. Their answer was to send teams of anti-drug campaigners out into the plains; those teams consisted of mostly long-haired, ex-drug users with guitars. They went round the schools in America singing attractive songs about not taking drugs. The young people saw those ex-drug users as role models--as people who had gone through the system and come out the other side. As a result, the young people found that they had a way of challenging their parents' generation and a means of expressing their wish to flirt with risk--as all young people do. Drug misuse by those young people followed the campaign as surely as night follows day.
Hon. Members on both sides of the House have said that we have wonderful campaigns--I agree that they are far better than imprisonment. But cannot the hon. Member for Bury St. Edmunds see that what is mocking today's speeches--as it mocked last year's debate on the subject and will mock next year's--is the fact that drug use is greater now than it has ever been. It was greater last year than the year before that and it will be even greater next year. Everything that we do does not work--the British Medical Journal is absolutely right: prohibition is not working.
I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North (Mr. Howarth) about cigarettes. We all know the evils of cigarettes--anyone who has smoked cigarettes
knows, from the effect on their bodies, what that does to them. The statistics show that 100,000 people a year die from cigarettes. We know the problems caused by alcohol--3 per cent. of cancers are caused by alcohol. We can consider the differences between the effects of different activities: seven deaths a year are caused by Ecstasy; there are eight deaths from alcohol every two hours, but we carry on using it and we try to control it. If my hon. Friend believes in prohibition--if he thinks that it is working and it is the way to tackle all drug use--why not prohibit cigarettes? We all know what would happen. There would be a repeat of what happened in America: when alcohol was prohibited for 13 years, the statistics showed reductions in consumption in the early stages because alcohol was not available, but within a short time, there were 20,000 speakeasies in Chicago alone. The result was increased drunkenness, increased amounts of adulterated, poisonous alcohol, increased deaths from alcohol and increased problems because of its unknown strength and quality. That is precisely the current position with illegal drugs.
Mr. Fabricant:
What is the hon. Gentleman arguing? Is he saying that the condition of all drugs, both illegal and legal, is the same? He is saying, is he not, that tobacco smoking is just as dangerous as the use of other drugs--I agree with him on that. Is he saying that, as he believes that there is no effective way of stopping people taking drugs and that prohibition of drugs does not work, he would legalise all drugs? Is that what he is saying?
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