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12.44 pm
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset): I am grateful to the hon. Member for Newport, West (Mr. Flynn) because he has brought my comments into starker relief than might otherwise have been the case. The whole debate has been extremely interesting and I have learned a great deal, for example, from the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe) who spoke about prisons.
There has been a common theme, evident even in the speech of the hon. Member for Newport, West, that everybody seems to disapprove of drug use. The hon. Gentleman and those who agree with him say that the best way to get rid of drug use is to decriminalise it, whereas others say that the best way is to keep it criminal and take some measures.
This is a most interesting phenomenon. Everybody disagrees about one level of the question but agrees about another level. I do not think that that represents the state
of mind of either the House or the country. I think that we face a much more fundamental question: do we disapprove of drug use? The House must wrestle honestly with that question and, until we do so, we will not be able to decide the second question.
I do not accept the arguments advanced by the hon. Member for Newport, West and other hon. Members that decriminalisation is likely to lead to less drug use. None of us have any way of telling that. As the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) pointed out, the laws of economics suggest that if the price falls, demand will increase. The evidence on the use of the drugs that the hon. Member for Newport, West fears most--tobacco and alcohol--is that because they are decriminalised, they are widely used.
I admit that they are not robust arguments, but my instinct--which I suspect is shared by most of the country and of the House--is that if illegal drugs are decriminalised, their use will, on the whole, tend to increase rather than decrease. That is certainly the view of those concerned most closely with the problem such as the drug advisory service and the police, many of whom are very sympathetic to drug users, but not drug pushers, in my constituency.
We should accept that as a hypothesis. We must then ask the really hard question. Many of us disapprove of substances when they are used to excess. Some people--I do not count myself among them but they certainly include the Secretary of State for Health and his primary Ministers--disapprove violently of drugs, such as tobacco, when they are used at all. Why do we not criminalise those drugs and criminalise the drugs that are currently illegal? Can we defend that position?
I pose that question partly to myself but also to my hon. Friends and to Labour Members who consider themselves to be proponents of liberty. How do we feel competent--as a House and a Parliament--and how did our predecessors feel competent to prohibit the use of such substances when no one suggests that their use amounts to an imposition by one upon another? It is not like driving a car and knocking someone down; it is not like murder or like theft. If I take drugs, I may harm myself but I do not directly harm another. I am referring not to drug pushing--that is another matter--but to using. It is self-harm. I may destroy my life, but how do we feel competent to decide that we should pass laws to prevent people from harming themselves? Should we not also pass a suite of laws to prevent people from harming themselves in other ways?
Mr. Letwin:
Indeed. Arguments of that variety could be advanced.
I have wrestled with this question for the better part of the past couple of decades since I started thinking about it in a juvenile way as an undergraduate. I have always wondered why this is so. Being rather pusillanimous about it and not being inclined to destroy my life in this particular way--although I do so in other ways--the question has never been at the top of my intellectual agenda. However, I have always worried about whether there was a proper justification for preventing the use of some drugs.
I have come slowly--and perhaps wrongly--to the conclusion that there is a justification. I think it is worth exposing that reasoning briefly--in three or four minutes--not least because I will be interested to hear, in this and in subsequent debates, whether others share my view. Unless we have a robust justification, I am sure that we should not criminalise these activities. We should start from the point that, prima facie, activities that do not harm others should be allowed and we should ban them only if we have a robust justification for so doing.
Dr. Cable:
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the House has grappled in the past with this problem with less difficulty than he is experiencing? For example, it has long been agreed that we should require individuals to protect themselves by wearing seat belts because that is in the best interests of their families and of our socially available health system.
Mr. Letwin:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because I am a profound opponent of the law on seat belts and, for reasons that I shall expose in a moment, that is entirely consistent with my views on drugs. The hon. Gentleman raises the question in exactly the form in which it first presented itself to me. I was an undergraduate when the noxious law on seat belts was passed. I knew that I hated it, and I still do. I wear a seat belt, even in the back seat, and I did so before it was law. I wear a crash helmet when I cycle, but I have always thought that a law requiring cyclists to wear crash helmets would be noxious.
I am absolutely clear that the prima facie case is that things should be allowed if they do not harm other people. I wholly reject the argument that things should be banned if they cause a cost to the national health service. If we accept that argument, tyranny beckons. Instead, measures should be taken to ensure that people who choose to act in certain ways have to pay a higher insurance premium or so on.
I utterly reject the argument for banning things. How, then, can I possibly defend the laws on drug use? The question is clearest if we consider the contrast between drugs that are illegal and drink. There is no doubt that drink is the most difficult case. One can drink to excess and, in doing so, one threatens society in many respects. I am not referring only to drinking and driving--that is a special case. Yet we permit drink, but we do not permit drugs. That is the most acute form of the question, "How do we justify allowing people to drink?"
If we are to justify it, we must start with a concept of the kind of society in which we want to live. We must be willing to argue--it is not easy to do so--that we want to live in a society in which people are able to engage in civilised conversation with one another and to engage in specifically human activities. I refer to cultural activities of a kind that animals cannot engage in and that cannot be engaged in by people who are in a state that prevents them from exercising their minds, as we are able to do in this House. In other words, we must have a concept of a human existence that is beyond merely existing.
Mr. Flight:
Beyond the animalistic.
Mr. Letwin:
As my hon. Friend says, beyond the animalistic.
To my mind there is no doubt that a person in a state of extreme drunkenness and a person in a state engendered by probably all the drugs that are illegal are not in full possession of their faculties. To justify the desire to eliminate drugs, one must have, first, the concept of a person in full possession of his faculties and, secondly, a doctrine that we want to live in a society in which other people are in full possession of their faculties. That is a kind of imposition or tyranny. I espouse, as one must be willing to do if one wants to justify the elimination of drugs, a doctrine that says it is not enough to let people lead their lives as they like because we want a society in which people have to lead their lives in such a way that we are enable to engage in a continuous, civilised conversation with them when they are in full possession of their faculties.
That means that there is a difference between drink and illegal drugs. When people have a bit to drink, which is mostly what they do, they are in full possession of their faculties. Ultimately, we must draw the distinction between substances whose very purpose is to make people, effectively, drunk, and those which, if occasionally abused, make people drunk. We must, therefore, have not only a concept of a society that consists of people in full possession of their faculties, but a concept of substances that are designed precisely to produce the opposite result. Without those two premises, we cannot justify to ourselves the continuation of the illegality of those substances.
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