The Cocaine Trade - Home Affairs Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140 - 159)

TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2009

MR STEVE ROLLES AND PROFESSOR NEIL MCKEGANEY

  Q140  Bob Russell: I am grateful for the Professor's thoughtful response. Mr Rolles, can I return to you? This independent report, which I believe you said has gone to the Prime Minister—

  Mr Rolles: No, it is a call for an impact assessment; it is a standard tool applied to all new legislation, but has never been applied to the Misuse of Drugs Act.

  Q141  Bob Russell: So did this impact assessment have any reference to—

  Mr Rolles: No, it has not been done yet.

  Q142  Bob Russell: It has not been done.

  Mr Rolles: No; we are calling for one to be done.

  Q143  Bob Russell: I am pleased to hear that because I would welcome your thoughts on whether members of Her Majesty's Armed Forces should be dismissed if they are found to be taking any type of drug; or does your regime think that drug taking in Her Majesty's Armed Forces is okay?

  Mr Rolles: Would that include alcohol and tobacco?

  Q144  Chairman: I am asking the question—

  Mr Rolles: I am asking for clarification.

  Q145  Bob Russell: I am asking the question about illegal drugs.

  Mr Rolles: If it is illegal drugs I do not have any comment on that; it is not in my purview. If it is in your contract when you take on the job that you cannot use illegal drugs I think you can be held to that. Whether that is appropriate or not—

  Q146  Chairman: I think Mr Russell would like an answer—do you feel in your opinion that they should be dismissed if they are using illegal drugs; yes or no?

  Mr Rolles: I do not want to state an opinion on that; it is not something on which we have a position.

  Q147  Bob Russell: I will leave that one where it is and people will draw their own conclusions. Finally, are you saying that making cocaine illegal has had no deterrent effect on the number of users?

  Mr Rolles: No. I think there are a number of different variables which impact on drug taking decisions. Clearly enforcement policy and punitive sanctions is one of them, but the evidence would suggest that it is a fairly marginal one and personal considerations, social and cultural factors, considerations about health and risk seem to be far more significant. If there is a deterrent effect it is quite hard to demonstrate. The Home Office was challenged by this Committee in 2001 on that very question and produced no evidence at all. They were challenged again in 2006 by the Science & Technology Select Committee specifically on the question of punitive sanctions and deterrents, and again produced no evidence but just stated a belief that there was such a deterrent effect. It is remarkable really; if you think about it the deterrent effect is absolutely at the very heart of the whole prohibitionist paradigm and yet the Home Office is unable to produce a single piece of research to suggest that there is a significant deterrent effect.

  Q148  Tom Brake: Mr Rolles, I just wanted to ask you if this independent review of the Misuse of Drugs Act takes place and perhaps comes up with recommendations which are closer to your line of argument, how would you sell that to politicians.

  Mr Rolles: That it is the right thing to do; that it would deliver better outcomes than the current policy. I hope that politicians do not just pander to the tabloids; that our leaders would show leadership and be encouraged to do the right thing. Maybe that is a vain hope but if a policy is clearly failing and someone suggested a policy and suggested it is going to deliver better outcomes then that is what politicians and our leaders should do. There is no great mystery about that, I do not think.

  Q149  Gwyn Prosser: Professor, in your article in the Guardian in September you argued very strongly against the government becoming the regulator for drugs and you said that you only had to look at the alcohol industry and the way that is regulated and the effect that that has on the streets as a comparison. Do you want to expand on that?

  Professor McKeganey: I think the circumstances in which we find ourselves in relation to alcohol is one where I think there are good grounds to believe that were we to have been aware of the likely harm associated with alcohol that it would not now be a legal drug. It is a legal drug and I think the government finds itself in a very difficult position trying to regulate access and consumption of that drug as a result. We have an escalating alcohol problem, particularly evident in Scotland but certainly not confined to Scotland, and it seems to me that if one wanted a model of failure, if you like, you could find that in relation to the difficulties and inability to limit the consumption of alcohol given what we know to be the harm associated with it. So my view is that based on that experience I would not wish to see that replicated with another set of substances which may well be even more harmful were they to be used as widely as alcohol, those being the currently illegal drugs. So I think there is very little in the experience of alcohol which would lead one to wish to replicate that in relation to the currently illegal drugs.

  Q150  Gwyn Prosser: Looking ahead, if such a regime came into place—government regulation as per alcohol—could we not argue that at least government would have some sort of control over the levers and they could increase prices to reduce consumption, although I accept it has not been a great success with alcohol.

  Professor McKeganey: You could argue that but I do not think very persuasively. I would not wish to see our government in a price war with the illegal drugs trade as to who could sell their drugs more cheaply and I think that is the situation in which we could rapidly find ourselves, where the currently illegal producers and sellers could always undercut the price that the government wished to charge because their costs are lower, and that to me would be a ghastly prospect. I do not think it would be in any shape or form appropriate for government to take on that role, even given the economic competition that it would find itself in.

  Mr Rolles: I am not sure that alcohol is a good example because alcohol is in our view very poorly regulated and we have been very clear in our calls for alcohol to be more tightly regulated. We would like to see an immediate end to alcohol promotions and advertising, sports sponsorship. We support the calls for minimum pricings per unit and all those sorts of things. A better example perhaps would be tobacco, which actually whilst alcohol has been becoming an increasing problem tobacco use has been falling since the 1970s due to a combination of effective regulation on price, packaging, access, increasing age controls, locations of use and environments and so on, combined with effective public health education about risk. And we have seen, in the same time that alcohol use and indeed cocaine use has been rising rapidly, tobacco use falling. On the same continuum of policy options you can have better regulation of currently legal drugs and better regulation of currently illegal drugs because at either end of the spectrum, whether it is complete free markets re. alcohol or whether it is unregulated markets because criminals are controlling them, it does not really matter, they are both totally unregulated and we need to move towards a central optimum point.

  Q151  Chairman: Thank you, Mr Rolles. In fact minimum pricing was one of the recommendations of this Committee when we produced our report.

  Mr Rolles: Excellent. Excellent recommendation; well done.

  Q152  Chairman: So politicians sometimes can be very brave and not pander to the tabloids.

  Mr Rolles: Not so you would notice!

  Q153  Mr Winnick: Professor, you accept that alcohol is a dangerous substance, certainly if drunk excessively; you agree with that?

  Professor McKeganey: Yes.

  Q154  Mr Winnick: And very few would disagree with that. Are there not lessons to be learned from what happened in the United States after the First World War, when prohibition was the policy? It did not succeed very well, did it? Yes or no?

  Professor McKeganey: There are some questions which I think are inexpertly answered with a yes or no response. I would be very cautious in drawing inferences from what happened in relation to alcohol during the prohibition period and applying those to the present day. The level of alcohol consumption within the United States during the period of prohibition was certainly considerably lower than it is presently and indeed probably would have been at that time had it not been for prohibition; so I do not necessarily feel that the evidence is overwhelmingly painting a picture of failure on the part of prohibition. Although, as I say, I do not feel that experiences in relation to the United States and their alcohol laws necessarily apply particularly well to the UK at the present time.

  Q155  Mr Winnick: Consumption may have gone down but there is a relevance between prohibition then and the argument over drugs prohibition now, even if, Professor, you do not see it, but while consumption may have gone down in the United States during prohibition would it not be right to say that it became a paradise for gangsters—some of course who became pretty world famous—because it was precisely the sort of policy that produced such huge profits for them?

  Professor McKeganey: I can answer yes on that. I think that is one of the unfortunate and somewhat predictable outcomes of our drug laws, in much the same way that burglary spawns a home security industry which is premised on the fact that burglars disregard our laws and continue to break into premises. But I do not think that that actually fundamentally undermines the fact that we deem burglary to be an illegal act.

  Q156  Mr Winnick: I understand and I respect your point of view; that goes without saying, Professor, and all of us, whatever views we have, want to see a vast reduction in the use of drugs—there is no dispute about that—but it is a question of how we bring that about. But can I put this question to you? A number of people have argued that if the drug barons—and we are talking up to date, leaving the United States aside—of today, the most notorious people, totally indifferent, as you know, to human suffering and could not care less as long as they get their profits—if they had a vote in Parliament on whether they were for or against prohibition, is it not pretty obvious that they would vote for the continuation of the present policy?

  Professor McKeganey: I agree. I think that as long as they derive enormous financial gains from the present set of circumstances they will no doubt be very enthusiastic supporters of it, up until the point at which they are arrested and their assets are seized and the consequences of their actions are brought forcefully to their immediate attention and those of everyone around them. But up until that point I think that they will be ardent supporters of restrictive drug rules.

  Q157  Mr Winnick: Presumably you would also agree that the drug barons are very much in favour of the present policy?

  Mr Rolles: Yes. I would not disagree with Neil on that. What prohibition does is that it does not get rid of drug use; it just gifts control of the market to criminal profiteers and we have seen that with alcohol and we have seen it over the whole of the last century with cocaine and with other drugs. And when Gordon Brown said, "We will never decriminalise drugs" you can imagine that all the barons were rubbing their hands with glee. When prohibition of something collides with huge demand for it you just create an economic opportunity—it is simple supply and demands economics—and illegal criminal entrepreneurs will inevitably exploit the opportunity that it creates, and it is incredibly destructive; it destabilises entire countries. I think it is important that we do not focus too much on cocaine use and we do not lose sight of the issues around the illegal market and the destructive influence it has on countries like Mexico where 10,000 people have died in the last three years in the drug war; in Columbia, civil wars; the terrible effects in places like Guinea Bissau in West Africa, which is becoming a transit country. It is incredibly destructive; and we do need to start debating the alternatives, which I should remind you is something that the 2002 HASC drug inquiry specifically recommended that we have a debate on alternatives, including legalisation and regulation.

  Q158  Mr Winnick: I know; I was around then.

  Mr Rolles: And some of you were on that Committee then.

  Q159  Chairman: Mr Winnick remembers it fondly.

  Mr Rolles: So does David Cameron, interestingly, who supported our recommendations.

  Mr Winnick: Yes, he was a member of our Committee.

  Chairman: He is not here today, so let us not go into that.


 
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