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Mrs. Gillan: Is my hon. Friend alarmed--as I am--that the Minister did not instantly leap to his feet to rebut those rumours? By his acquiescence, he contributes to the rumour of forthcoming cuts among Customs and Excise personnel.
Dr. Jack Cunningham: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Mrs. Lait: May I answer my hon. Friend?
Dr. Cunningham: I should like to answer the hon. Lady too.
Mrs. Lait: I was about to suggest that, as the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department was looking so absorbed and intrigued, it meant that we would receive a definitive answer on the subject in his summing up. However, if the Minister for the Cabinet Office wants to make a point, I am happy to give way.
Dr. Cunningham: I merely remark on a significant change of tune on the part of the hon. Lady and her hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan). They supported a Government who actually did cut the number of front-line Customs and Excise workers--it was no rumour. They had prepared to cut several hundred more jobs, but we prevented that. Perhaps we should deal with facts rather than rumours.
Mrs. Lait: The rumour comes from the customs workers' unions. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman can discuss that with them. I point out that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, was doing something positive to reduce the incentives to smuggle
tobacco and alcohol. The current Chancellor, however, is exacerbating that smuggling by increasing taxes on those commodities.
Mrs. Gillan: I thank my hon. Friend for her generosity in giving way again. Does she agree that it is rather poor that the Minister for the Cabinet Office should rush to his feet, not to deny the rumoured cuts, but to attack the previous Government? Was that not a poor intervention? It adds fuel to the point made in my first intervention on my hon. Friend.
Mrs. Lait: Given the exchange that has taken place, I am sure that the Minister will either confirm or deny the rumour in his reply. If he does not, we shall draw our own conclusions. However, one hopes that the customs unions will be reassured by his answer.
We have talked a great deal about the systems that are being set up--the co-operation between the police and health and social services; the new teams; the bureaucracy and the processes. However, it is striking that few contributions so far have focused on how we try to help those who are addicted to drugs--apart from that of the hon. Member for Erewash (Liz Blackman), who briefly mentioned that matter. If we cannot help those people, then those systems are no more than an enormous and expensive superstructure.
I am sure that, in all our constituency surgeries, we have seen people with their sleeves rolled up showing the blisters and scars from injections. That is a most off-putting sight, to say the least. When people have been injecting for a long time, there is not an inch of their arms that has not been destroyed in some way. We have to deal with that reality; we should not have to satisfy the bureaucrats who have set up a nice process that helps them, but may not help the addicts. What concerns me about all the Government's proposals is that they would try to make addicts fit into the system. That is why I intervened on the Minister for the Cabinet Office; I am concerned that there is too great an element of coercion in the system.
Liz Blackman:
Does the hon. Lady accept that we are talking about two sides of the same coin? We need to teach young people who are not yet on drugs to say no. That cannot be done by lecturing at them; we need a process whereby they feel able to say no. At the same time, we need to deal with people who are dependent on drugs. The one does not negate the other; both are important.
Mrs. Lait:
That is absolutely right. Indeed, I could talk at great length as to the need for the effective education of young children. In my own family, young boys aged 5 can talk knowledgeably about drugs, but they have a built-in self-esteem because they have learned about those matters from an early age. They also have fulfilled lives; they are busy and happy and that is the key to giving them the self-confidence to resist drugs. However, from our surgeries, we all know that unfortunately not everyone is as lucky as that.
As we all know, the problem is that addicts often turn to crime. I was myself the victim of a drug addict when, in Portugal, my handbag was stolen. The Portuguese police handled the matter brilliantly; within two hours, I had
everything back, including my passport and my cards--which I had, unfortunately, cancelled. The thief was a drug addict, and the police knew where to go to find my belongings, because they knew who the drug addicts were. I am sure that we should find that it was the same in our constituencies. The police are well trained; they know who the drug addicts are and how to find them.
In many cases, the police try to get the addicts out of the system. However, unless the addicts are deeply convinced that they want to give up drugs, we shall never succeed. That is where the problem of coercion comes in. While drug addicts are feeling remorseful--should they ever feel remorse--they may agree temporarily to try detoxification. They may agree that their life style is chaotic and that they do not like what they are doing--mugging people and shoplifting. They will agree to anything to get themselves out of that predicament, but then the element of coercion comes in. They are told that they must attend a residential course--if they can get on to one; they must see a social worker; they must do this and they must do that. From my experience of addicts--whatever they are addicted to--I know that, unless they own the treatment, and it is not dictated to them, at some point they will rebel. They may go through the treatment and be detoxified, but they will go straight back on to the streets, if they do not own the belief that they want to stop being an addict. That is my concern about some of the systems that the Government are setting up.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. George Howarth):
I had not intended to intervene, but since the hon. Lady has been courteous enough to say that she will not be here for the end of the debate, I think it would be as well to respond to her point now.
I ask the hon. Lady to reflect on the fact that the motivation behind much of our approach, which she thinks is slightly coercive, is that the criminal justice system--from arrest to sentencing to serving the sentence--offers us a good opportunity to deal with people who are afflicted both by drug addiction and by the criminal activity that often accompanies it. I hope that she agrees that that opportunity should not be wasted.
Mrs. Lait:
I would not disagree for a moment that the opportunity should not be wasted; I am not saying that those programmes should not be in place. However, unless addicts themselves genuinely believe that what they are doing will help them, they will simply be going through the motions and they will not succeed, with the result that there will be relapse after relapse.
I dearly want the Minister to tell me that the Government will not be too prescriptive. A constituent of mine attends a clinic in the east end of London. The clinic is finding life extremely difficult because of the Home Office presumption that its method of treatment feeds drug addicts' habits, rather than stabilises them. The clinic's approach is different--it does not fit into the neat and tidy pattern that characterises so much of the Government's action.
The clinic has 865 long-term addicts, many of whom have been injecting for 25 to 30 years; they have been in and out of prison, detoxified, and have repeatedly gone back to the streets. The clinic's method of treatment does not fit easily into Home Office prescriptions, but it gets
the addicts stabilised by providing the social and emotional support that so many of them need. A number of those treated by the clinic are now almost drug free and they have re-established good relations with their families, so they are now less of a problem to the rest of society. I do not want clinics that offer adventurous treatments to be closed down because they do not fit into the neat pattern that the Home Office has decreed is the best way to deal with the problem.
Finally, there is a pressing need for general practitioners to have greater skills in the treatment of drug addicts, and for GPs to be able to fit drug addicts into their practice without other patients feeling that they no longer want to attend the practice. Because of drug addicts' chaotic behaviour, many GPs feel that they cannot treat them in their surgery. More training of GPs in how to treat drug addicts and the options available for that treatment is needed.
Dr. Brian Iddon (Bolton, South-East):
I congratulate the Government on allowing this morning's debate on an issue that affects the lives of millions of our citizens.
I first became interested in brain chemistry in the early 1960s, when I carried out research for my PhD on serotonin agonists and antagonists. Serotonin is a chemical that helps to maintain brain balance: an excess in the brain leads to excited states, whereas a shortage produces depression. Many other chemicals can either alter the levels of serotonin in the brain, or emulate or antagonise its behaviour. From that time until the general election in May 1997, I was responsible for synthesising thousands of new compounds with potential biological activity. Therefore, my background gives me an interest in the subject of today's debate.
In early summer 1997, Dillon Hull, aged five, was tragically shot dead in my constituency in a drug-related attack on his father. That event rocketed me into the politics of drugs. At that time, I called for a royal commission to discuss that complex area of social policy; I still believe that such a commission is needed. Later this year, the Police Foundation will deliver the results of its two-year inquiry, and I hope that the Government will seriously consider the conclusions, whatever they are. Other important reports have been published since the 1997 general election--for example, the report of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on cannabis for medical usage.
I believe that the Government are seriously committed to dealing with the problem of misuse of drugs. In addition to the £1.4 billion already committed to that area of expenditure, £217 million has been allocated from the comprehensive spending review, to which the proceeds of seizure of dealers' assets can be added. The Government have appointed two people to have direct responsibility for this issue and they report directly to the Cabinet Office. The document "Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain" was published in April 1998 and, more recently, the first annual report and national plan was published; it sets some very ambitious targets for the future.
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