| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Flynn: I can give examples going back to the people who built the pyramids, who recorded in their hieroglyphics that they used cannabis for eye problems. They did not know what it did, and nor did we until about 20 years ago, when we discovered its effect on pressure on the inner eye. The hon. Lady offered three examples, but I could give her 100. Better still, I invite her to meet a group of people who came to the House a while ago. Most of them were in wheelchairs. Some said that they could not have a night's sleep without cannabis. One person had an aching arm for which everything had been tried, and nothing eased the pain but cannabis.
Is the hon. Lady simply saying to those people, "Sorry, we have rules and regulations and you must wait until scientists come out of their labs in five, 10 or 20 years from now"? Is she telling them that in the meantime, they must carry on suffering? Are we telling those people that we will put them in prison? Two such people are in fact in prison for cannabis use.
The hon. Lady mentioned smoking, and that raises another problem. People who are suffering must buy their cannabis on the criminal market. They do not know how pure it is. They do not know whether it is contaminated. They do not know its strength. They must also use it in the most dangerous way possible--by smoking it. If cannabis were legalised, it could be taken in perfectly safe forms--a tincture, a patch or an inhaler.
My cause is a humanitarian one. Tens of thousands of people suffer. In addition to the pain of their illnesses, they must suffer the constant anxiety of knowing that they might go to prison for using their medicine of choice. I appeal to the Government to change their mind and to allow the private Member's Bill to pass on 23 July.
I have a scientific background, and I am interested in all drugs. I have spoken many times about medicinal drugs and others. Our society is obsessed with drugs, and future generations will judge us for it. We believe in the myth that every moment of boredom, grief or pain can be solved by resort to a drug. We do ourselves great harm by that belief. I have never used an illegal drug, and I never will. I have not used a medicinal drug in 25 years. I am very much opposed to the use of drugs.
The major problem is prohibition. There is a shared feeling in the House that we do not face up to the issues. With one exception, I am the only Member who has spoken in every drugs debate since 1987, and I have heard the same themes from both sides of the House. I have heard complacency. I have heard expressions of shock. I have heard: "Isn't it terrible, and we don't know what to do." In 1989, the then Minister of State announced 40 new schemes. We are full of schemes. He said that his policy was a striking success and, to our shame, the then Opposition congratulated the Government, giving them an alpha plus for their work. It is quite amazing that the Minister of State said:
We were here discussing this subject again in 1996--not long ago--when we heard about a strategy for substantially different benchmarks to assess programmes. It was said that there had been excellent work with all concerned, especially all the politicians, and the Opposition agreed. The previous year, we had had something new: drug action teams with drug action plans. It was said that the solution was in our hands.
That is what has happened every year since I have been in this place and hanging over this House, like a great accusation, is the fact that in every one of those years more people have died and more lives been ruined through drugs. Why? We conveniently say that it is the wicked drug traffickers and those who grow drugs in far-away countries who are responsible. We must look to ourselves and ask what is our responsibility.
Why has the debate bypassed this place as far as those on the Government and Opposition Front Benches are concerned, when it has even got as far as the editorial in the Daily Mail, which has said that the Government's policies are mere "empty window dressing" and that itis time for us to take the risk of considering decriminalisation? We are neglecting our job here as Members of Parliament to find new policies.
I do not want to be rude to the hon. Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton), who is speaking for the Opposition. Clearly, she is at the embryonic stage in developing her views on the subject if she takes her feed from the internet. However, I will have to withdraw my invitation to go to Amsterdam with her. I said that I would never take an illegal substance, but her Mary Poppins approach might well drive me to it if I had to spend a few days with her. She should have a long conversation with the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan), who has said that he wants to pursue the policies suggested by my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Bootle (Mr. Benton). There are Conservative Members who are willing to think anew on this subject.
Many matters have been mentioned in the debate. I have the great joy of serving in the Council of Europe. I am a member of its committee to deal with drugs and I am in regular contact with people from all the countries, in particular Holland, Switzerland, Italy and Germany, where all those changes have taken place.
Those on both Front Benches should go to Holland. I beg them not to read the propaganda on the internet and what the American drugs tsar has said, but to consider the experience of the group that was sent to Holland by Fulcrum Television. It was the equivalent of a citizens' commission--a television commission. It comprised eight people--a broad section of society--who went to Holland without any vested views either way. In fact, the majority of them were against decriminalisation when they started. They investigated and went to jails. They met people from a cross-section of society, met the police and read the
literature thoroughly. They interviewed Members of Parliament, both for and against. It was a thorough three-month investigation.
The group spoke to the Christian Democrat mayor of Amsterdam and gave him a list of the things that this Government have said about Holland--they are exactly the same as the untruths told by the previous Government. That conservative mayor of Amsterdam said that every one of those claims was nonsense.
In Holland, the two markets have been separated. The great achievement of the Netherlands is that the use of heroin has been reduced, and for good reason. The Dutch did that by de-glamorising cannabis, which is the first stage--people talk a great deal about the step from one drug to another. In this country, we know that cannabis has a great attraction. The figures show that the majority of young people have used it. In Holland, use is down to about 3 per cent. and the reason is that it is boring and unglamourous. Where is the thrill in going to a cafe with one's grandmother and using cannabis? There is no fun in that.
Fun is part of the attraction of cannabis for the young. I have more up-to-date figures from the Dutch embassy than those of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon)--I am not being party political. In 1980, the average age of heroin users in Holland was 28; it is now 44. It will become a geriatric problem; young people are not moving towards heroin, so the total number is going down. If the hon. Member for Congleton does visit Amsterdam, I suggest that she goes to a needle exchange in the Nieumarket--a marvellous place where they dealt with 500,000 needle exchanges five years ago. The number has gone down to a third of that figure, because the use of heroin has gone down. I suggest that the hon. Lady sees for herself what is happening in Holland, instead of believing the propaganda.
We have heard a great deal about education. I appeal to anyone to show me any drug education policy that resulted in decreased drug use. There was a celebrated programme in Wales called Smokebusters; it was a highly intelligent, cleverly designed programme to persuade young people not to take up cigarettes. It went on for four years. During that time, the largest increase in young women smoking occurred in Wales. It was larger than anywhere else in Europe--more than 50 per cent.--and it coincided with that campaign.
A further example of the futility of drug education programmes is shown by what happened in America in the 1950s. They decided that there were drug problems in the great cities, so what did they do? They sent out teams to the plains to tell people not to do drugs. The teams were made up of young people--young hippies--who had been through everything; they had been through drugs and had had a terrible time. They were attractive role models who went out with their guitars to talk to adolescents; they said, "You mustn't do drugs because they're wicked--yeah! You mustn't do drugs because they're dangerous." That is exactly what young people want. They all know that they are immortal--they are going to live for ever. Being young is about risk taking. As those drug education teams moved from town to town, hard and soft drug use followed them as surely as night follows day. That was the US experience.
In this country, we have made a great fuss about Operation Charlie. I thought that it would be a wonderful scheme because so much emphasis was placed on it;
it was an entirely British scheme that would prove that drug education worked. Even after a series of parliamentary questions, it was difficult to find out exactly what the operation was. Would it be for 25 years and involve teaching tens of thousands of children, beginning when they were young, so that when they became adults they would not use drugs? No, no; it involved 44 children. They were given a lesson of one hour a week for 38 weeks a year--not even for all 52 weeks. Four years later, that group was compared with one that had had no lessons; there was only a slight difference in their opinions. It will be another 20 years before we know whether that programme was any good. "Charlie" means chemical abuse resolution lies in education; that title shows that the result of the research was decided before the research began.
In the House, we suffer from the shared myth that prohibition works and that it reduces drug use. All the evidence shows the opposite. In America, the prohibition of alcohol produced--among other things--a crime empire. Furthermore, it meant that the alcohol on sale was the most damaging form; people were drinking distilled spirits. It is the same with all the illegal drugs in this country at present; we are using all the most dangerous forms, with the additional problems that they are adulterated and sold in an uncontrolled market.
We can do something about that. Earlier, the Minister for the Cabinet Office asked whether people really believed that the market could be collapsed. That is the only way to solve the problem. The only way to reduce drug harm and to reduce the market for drugs is to collapse the black, illegal market. How do we do that? We replace it with a regulated, licensed, policed and controlled market. The harm will not go away overnight--of course not--but at least there will be some controls. If the illegal market sells a drug to a child or a schizophrenic, it is the same offence as selling the drug to a well-balanced 50-year-old. If we had a legal market like the one in Holland, people who sold hard drugs along with soft drugs would be closed down, as would those who sold drugs to minors.
A legal market offers a way of controlling supply. Overnight, we could effect change on an army of young people. People speak contemptuously of drug dealers, as though there were only a few of them, but there are hundreds of thousands of young people who are part of the pyramid--kids selling drugs to school friends, older children selling them to other children. Overnight, we could change those young people who are drug dealers, many of whom are on benefits and are registered as unemployed. We could change them from being criminals and scroungers to being business men--surely the Opposition can understand that. We could have our drugs in order and we could say which are the most dangerous to society.
Sometimes I feel like addressing my colleagues here, with some justification, as right hon. and hon. drug users, because there is a strong note of hypocrisy in our utterances on this subject. In this place, with all its bars, it is common to see Members from both sides of the House with a glass of whisky in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a packet of paracetamol in their top pocket, denouncing young people for using drugs. Since I came here, the majority of the premature deaths among Members of Parliament have been drug related: those
drugs are alcohol, tobacco and, in one case, medicinal drugs. We cannot tell young people that their drugs of choice are necessarily harmful or the worst possible.
We have a debate such as this every year and there is a fair degree of cross-party consensus, but we are moving away from public opinion. The public know that almost nothing that we have done has worked and that nothing that we will do in the next two years will work. To have a 10-year programme is to evade responsibility and to escape any sort of scrutiny, because in 10 years time, the drugs tsar will have retired and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will be Lord Sedgefield. By the end of this Parliament, the Government will be in the same position as every other Government for the past 30 years: when they leave office, there will be a greater degree of drug use and a greater number of drug deaths than when they entered office.
The change must be made here--we have to face up to our responsibility. Now, we are saying that we willnot consider any alternative; we will not consider decriminalisation, even though it has worked elsewhere; nor will we consider the example of Switzerland, where crime related to the use of injectable heroin has been cut. We will not go outside this place and look at what other people have done; instead, we will carry on in the way we always have done, because it is comfortable. If we continue on that path, in 10 years time, there will have been at least 1,000 deaths among young people that might have been avoided.
"We can take some comfort . . . from the fact that heroin has moved towards its peak".--[Official Report, 8 December 1989; Vol. 163, c. 593.]
We were all back here again in 1993, when a new Minister of State announced 200 new anti-drug projects in London alone, which the Government would evaluate
with careful research. In 1995, the Minister of State said that education policies were working and effective, as were publicity campaigns. He said that they would have a real effect on young people and that the central drugs co-ordination unit had performed massively successful work. After the 1989 debate, drug use and drug deaths increased, as they did after 1993 and 1995 debates.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |