That this House has considered the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.
I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting us the time for this debate, to the cross-party Members who supported the application, and particularly to the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) for co-sponsoring it.
This May marks 50 years since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 received Royal Assent. Back in 1971 there were three television channels; smoking indoors was normal everywhere from schools to doctors’ waiting rooms; and women could legally be sacked for being pregnant. Our culture and society now are completely different from that time, but our drugs regime remains the same, focusing on prohibition, criminalisation and punishment rather than looking at the evidence on what reduces harm to individuals and to society.
The 1971 Act was intended to prevent the use of controlled drugs, eliminate illegal drug markets and reduce the harms of drug use; it is not working. The data suggests that in 1971 there were fewer than 100 drug-related deaths in England and Wales; in 2019, drug-related deaths in England and Wales rose for the eighth year in a row to 4,393. There has been a 52% increase in drug-related deaths over the past 10 years, and 2,883 deaths resulted directly from drug misuse. These people mattered and many of their deaths were preventable. If there were better laws and properly funded treatment services, many could still be with us today.
In the late 60s, around 1% of adults had used drugs at some point in their life; the proportion is now 34%. While the drug market remains in the hands of criminal gangs, drugs are getting stronger and more adulterated. People are dying because they do not know what is in the drugs they are using. Even the Government acknowledge the failings. A 2014 Home Office report reviewed the evidence and said that
“there is no relationship between tougher/punitive sanctions on drug possession and the level of drug use in a country.”
Last year, Carol Black’s review of drugs for the Government said that the evidence suggests that
“enforcement crackdowns have little…impact on the overall drug supply…and can often have the unintended consequence of increasing violence, for example by creating a gap in the market for dealers to compete over, or increasing distrust in the drugs market.”
The police force in County Durham published evidence in which drug users were interviewed about a large-scale undercover police operation, which lasted six months, cost more than half a million pounds, and resulted in the arrest of over 30 people involved in the supply of class A drugs. When users were asked how long they thought the operation had strangled the supply of heroin for, one estimated four hours, and another just two hours. If people want more evidence than that, I recommend the books by former undercover cop, Neil Woods, who gives a graphic illustration of how the market is there and how, even if that market is interrupted, people come in and fill the gap. We cannot arrest our way out of this problem.
Through county lines, dealing and exploitation, more and more young people have been pulled into drug supply and a life of crime. In 2017 alone, 38,000 people were criminalised for possession of drugs in England and Wales, almost 3,000 of them under the age of 18—people unnecessarily criminalised, limiting their future life chances and their educational and employment opportunities.
A third of the prison population are there because of drug offences or offences relating to drug use. Putting people in custodial settings as a result of their substance use punishes those who need help, does not address the root cause of their issues, and is, more often than not, counterproductive All those things add up to part of the human cost of our drugs policy, but what about the financial cost?
According to the Home Office, in England alone, policing and enforcing current drug policy costs £1.4 billion annually. Half of acquisitive crime is related to illegal drug use. A different Home Office-commissioned report said that the failure of drug policies costs the taxpayer £10.7 billion a year in policing, healthcare and crime. The total societal costs of harms relating to illegal drug use is now £19.3 billion.
Another consequence of the 1971 Act is how it has held back scientific and medical developments. Drugs in schedule 1 such as Psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and DMT are showing real promise as potentially life-changing treatment options for conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addictions. While it is technically possible, it is slow, difficult and expensive to do medical research into schedule 1 substances. Under this policy regime, we are wasting money, wasting the resources of the criminal justice system, wasting the chance to do better research and to find evidence to inform our drug policy and our medical interventions, and wasting lives.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for setting out the scope of the impact of the drugs scene today and the implication that it has on residents, including in my constituency of York Central where there is an incredibly high level of drug deaths. This is how I got involved in the issue. I have been on a journey and learned how a public health approach can be transformative in diverting people away from crime, in ensuring that there is no exploitation, in providing good treatment, including engagement with drug consumption spaces, and in taking that full public health approach. Does he agree that we need a sea change now to see harm reduction, as has been tried and tested elsewhere, which has incredible outcomes that he, too, has seen.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This anniversary is surely the time to take stock, to change our approach to one that is rooted in evidence, and to do what is best for public health.
In 2019, the Health and Social Care Committee recommended such an approach. It called for
“a radical change in UK drugs policy”
moving
“from a criminal justice to a health approach.
It said:
“Responsibility for drugs policy should move from the Home Office to the Department of Health and Social Care.”
It supported a consultation on decriminalisation of drugs for personal use. By the way, decriminalisation is supported by the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society for Public Health.
The Government published their response earlier this year, saying that they had “no intention” of decriminalising drugs. They said:
“Drugs are illegal because scientific and medical analysis has shown they are harmful to human health”—
apart, of course, from alcohol, a drug that is more harmful to the user than most drugs aside from heroin, crack and methamphetamine. It is certainly not less harmful to the user compared with cannabis or ecstasy, for example, and it is legal.
Let us think for a minute, following the Government’s logic, what would happen if we made alcohol illegal because it is harmful to human health. People would not stop using it. They would get it from the black market, as they did during prohibition in the USA. People would die from badly produced moonshine, as they did in the USA, and the profits would go into the pockets of criminal gangs. Instead of that, we mitigate the harm from alcohol use by legalising it, regulating it, making sure that it is not poisonous and making it safe, and we can invest the tax raised from its sale in the NHS and public messaging. No one has ever given me a convincing argument as to why we do not take the same approach to cannabis, as many US states and increasing numbers of countries around the world are now doing. There is simply no logic to the Government’s approach.
On the issue of diversion, I was told a powerful story about how young people, instead of getting a criminal record, were given the opportunity in life for someone to invest in them. As a result, they got apprenticeships and then got a job instead of a criminal record. Surely that is a better way forward for these young people’s lives.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have the evidence in the UK. There have been some very good diversion schemes in Durham and the west midlands, and there are others. We do not need to look at the evidence abroad; we can look at the evidence in the UK.
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, particularly in relation to cannabis, the initial warning and the fixed penalty notice that we use at the moment do not prevent in any way, shape or form people from also being given a diversion scheme and other steps being taken? There is no barrier to that at the moment, for example, in relation to cannabis.
That is true. My problem with cannabis is that the supply is still in the hands of organised criminal gangs. That, for me, is not a sensible way to approach our drug policy.
We can explore models of decriminalisation, and we know that those are associated with reduced risks of recidivism, a reduced burden on police resources and savings to the public purse related to social costs, or we can look at models of legalised regulation. Whatever happens, we need a wholesale, new approach to this problem. The Government need to be honest that the last 50 years of drug policy have been a failure and have come at a terrible human, societal and economic cost. We need to commit to a public health approach rather than a criminal justice approach to drugs policy—one focused on saving lives and rooted in support and compassion for those who abuse drugs.
Among the MPs who want to speak in today’s debate, there will not be a single view on the way we go forward and what an alternative to the current approach to drugs policy should look like, and there will be different approaches for different substances. I look forward to hearing the views of Members, but I suspect that we probably mostly agree that, on the 50th anniversary of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, it is worth looking honestly at the legacy of that 50-year-old legislation and considering what needs to change to better serve our constituents and our communities. We should take this opportunity for political parties and the media to stop weaponising drugs policy and have a grown-up discussion about how we protect our communities. Today I am calling on the Government to launch a full, open-minded review of this legislation to learn from our mistakes, because we cannot afford another 50 years of failure.
I will leave the final words to Anne-Marie Cockburn, who is a campaigner for Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control. Anne-Marie’s daughter Martha, like people through the generations for thousands of years, just wanted to have a bit of fun and get high. She researched on the internet how to get high safely. She was 15 years old when she took an overdose of MDMA that killed her. Anne-Marie says: “As I stand by my daughter’s grave, what more evidence do I need that UK drug policy needs to change?”
This is a very important debate and we have another important debate following. I will not introduce a time limit at this juncture, but I ask Members making contributions to be mindful of the length of those contributions in order that we can get everybody in.
I draw the House’s attention to my unremunerated interest as chair of the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group Ltd.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith), my co-chair on the all-party parliamentary group on drug policy reform, on securing this debate. I commiserate with him on his promotion from Whip to spokesman on local government. It has been a real pleasure working with a decent and humane colleague with a very different career background from mine. I hope this can continue despite his new Opposition policy responsibilities. I appreciate his leadership in delivering today’s debate.
Fifty years ago, this House passed the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Its laudable aim was to deter unlawful controlled drug use and stifle supply. This followed what happened in 1961 when the United States persuaded UN members to sign up to a global narcotics ban. Had the House then seen through the clouds of both excitement and worry about the Woodstock generation—magnified by a popular press which then, as now, was prone to more than a modest amount of exaggeration—to the evidence of the extraordinary success of what was then known as the British system in addressing problematic drug use, by comparison with the American system, it would surely have thought twice. It perhaps also should have paused at the American invitation to follow the same principle towards all other drugs that the USA had deployed, with such disastrous consequences, towards the drug alcohol in 1919. Perhaps we should not be surprised at the global disaster that has now overtaken us.
If the House had known then what we know now, passing that Act would have been an appalling betrayal of its duty to the public interest. In the UK we have invested countless billions in the approach put into law by the MDA, with what success? Illegal drugs are today cheaper, and more available, potent and widely used, than ever. Most of all, victims of drug policy-related crimes are off the scale. They range from exploited children, to young, usually black men knifed on our streets, to half—half!—of acquisitive crimes in the UK. As the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington said, we have seen a 40-fold increase in drug deaths in this period.
I wish to associate myself entirely with all of the comments that my two colleagues have just made from either side of this House. I wonder what it says about our ability to function as a body that makes and reviews legislation that such a significant piece of legislation, dealing with such a major social problem, can lie on the statute book for 50 years without review or amendment. That is all the more incredible when we consider that by any conceivable measure it has been an abject failure in trying to achieve what it set out to achieve. As we have heard, back in 1971 just 1% of the British population said that they used the drugs that the Act would go on to criminalise, whereas today the figure is 34%. We are facing the biggest social policy catastrophe of our generation. Thousands of people are dying every year needlessly because they do not know what they are taking and help is not available for them when things go wrong. Tens of thousands of people every year get a criminal record because of the way in which we try to tackle this problem. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, living in communities up and down this land, have their lives blighted, not just by the misery of people dependent on those drugs in those communities, but by the brutal violence used by those involved in organised crime to enforce their regulation and supply of these products.
By any measure, this policy and this legislation ought to be reviewed. It is not just the fact that the legislation has not been able to do what it wanted to do; it is worse than that, because the legislation is now an active cause of the problem, because the entire area is looked at not as one of public health and wellbeing, but as one of criminal activity. The centre of the Act is about criminalising people who use drugs, and that does a number of things. First, it immediately means that the state has no role in the supply and regulation of these products, and that responsibility is given to the private sector and to organised crime within it. That is the first consequence of the Act. The second is that if people are getting into trouble and need medical help because of their substance addiction, many of our health and social care staff working in our public agencies are unable or unwilling to put themselves at risk of criminal prosecution by offering that help.
I will come on to look at that concept and drug consumption in a minute, but what I am talking about is the fact that people have no ability to come to a health professional and say, “What is this?” They have no ability to ask for clean needles, because these actions are prohibited under the 1971 Act and the schedules to it.
The third thing, which has already been remarked upon, is that the Act stigmatises, big time, those who use drugs and puts them in a position where they are unlikely, because of social opprobrium, to ask for help. We surely need to have a review and a fresh think about a problem that is so manifestly out of control and where the existing legislation is so manifestly unable to provide any assistance.
I always like to try to see the other side of the argument, so I want to ask: why are people resistant to review? Why do they want to hold on to things as they are? I can only conclude that it is because they fear the consequences of decriminalisation or of changing the law. They must somehow think that if we were to do that, we would open the floodgates and unleash supply into communities where there are not already drugs, and that many more millions of people would get caught up in the problem, because we would not have the criminal mechanisms that we have at the minute. I say to any colleagues who think that: wake up and see what is happening on the streets of your constituencies.
Those colleagues should come with me to any medium-sized town in this country, stand in a bar and make their intentions known as to what they would like. Within one hour they will be offered any drug of their choice. If they do not want the personal contact, they could order in advance. If they go on the internet, they will find a mobile phone number on which, through the county lines network, they can order whatever they want and it will be delivered to their door. Sometimes people will even get a customer service message asking for feedback on the supply. That is the extent of what we have at the moment.
I ask every Member to focus on not speaking for more than five minutes, if they could. I will not put a time limit on yet, but I may be forced to in order to protect other business.
Politicians are often most criticised for sitting on the fence. While I am sure that Whips across the House like to believe they are skilled in the power of persuasion, there is no hiding the fact that, often, many MPs made up their minds on issues long ago. However, it is clear that the time for an open and honest debate on the future of the UK’s drug policy is desperately needed, not least because the current strategy does not appear to be working.
When I speak to individuals from South Yorkshire police, the problem is self-evident. While time spent catching dealers temporarily reduces supply, there appears to be no lack of criminals. An ex-police officer told me recently about a huge drugs bust in April, in which everyone from the top ring leaders to the small dealers were arrested. After thousands of hours of police work, millions of pounds-worth of drugs were discovered, yet according to the former police officer I spoke to, the raid managed to keep cannabis off the streets for a whole two hours. Being tough on dealers does not seem to be working. The gains made by the police are small, and for this reason I have concluded that enforcement alone will never get us to a solution.
Every time someone buys drugs, they become part of the criminal supply chain; put simply, it links them directly to dealers who have no problem with carrying a knife or a gun. Because suppliers operate outside the law, they do not have the police to protect them, so instead they protect themselves with weapons. They do not pay taxes either, nor do they give a receipt. Equally, they are not held responsible if their product leads to hospitalisation or even death. While we are talking about drug reform, decriminalisation where users are not penalised for possessing drugs will not fix these issues.
The answer may be to totally legalise cannabis and, potentially, other drugs. I have heard some say that putting drugs in the hands of the Government or a legal partner takes the production and supply chains and any customer transaction out of the hands of criminals. I have also heard that such a policy makes sense as it would ensure that the quality of products will be controlled, leading to fewer deaths from consumption. Taxes could be raised and we could get consumers out of the supply chain.
20 of 70 shown
There would be different approaches to different drugs, but what is common is that the current regime is not working. Over the last half a century, there have been calls for reform from a wide range of parliamentary Committees and public bodies. We have an increasing body of evidence to look at on how things could change for the better. The evidence from countries that have liberalised their approach to drugs does not suggest an associated increase in use.
The example of Portugal is worth highlighting again. In the early noughties, Portugal was in the grip of Europe’s worst heroin and drug death crisis. In 2001, it ended the criminalisation of people who use drugs and established a health-led approach instead. Since then, drug-related deaths have fallen and have remained below the EU average. The proportion of the prison population sentenced for drug offences fell from over 40% to 15%. The number of annual drug overdose deaths reduced from 318 in 2000 to 40 in 2015. There was an 18% reduction in the social costs of drug use in the first 10 years of decriminalisation. Problematic use and school-age use both fell, and rates of drug use in Portugal remain consistently below the EU average.
Even within the current regime, the Government could stop blocking some proven harm reduction measures, such as overdose prevention centres and drug safety testing, and they could ramp up and even out the provision of naloxone and heroin-assisted treatment. They could have encouraged more diversion schemes and more deferred prosecution schemes and could properly reinvest in the treatment budgets that have been cut in recent years.
This is a policy choice we have made. In 2001, Portugal implemented a policy that has the key aspects of the British system from the 1960s. Portugal has dropped its drug deaths, in some years, by up to 90% as a consequence. We listen with proper attention to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) when she reads out the list of names of women killed by men each year: 125 in 2016; 113 last year. If I did that in respect of women, men and children dead as a consequence of the way in which successive Governments have implemented this Act, I would need to read out an equivalent list of names—killed by law and policy, accountable to this House—every single week that this Parliament sits, and still that would not be enough.
In the late 1960s, about 1% of adults had used drugs at some point in their lives. Now it is 34%. In 1971, heroin use was below 10,000 people. It is now more than a quarter of a million. In 1971, less than half a million people used cannabis. It is now more than 2.5 million people, and users of cannabis supplied by criminal gangs today also consume a much more potent drug, which is of real danger to growing young minds.
There are those who say that we just have not implemented the powers in this Act hard enough. One of those people is Peter Hitchens. To his credit, he is prepared to debate, but to my astonishment the last time that I debated with him, he referenced a collection of relevant newspaper headlines. Does he have no idea of the harm that his industry has done through these lurid, fear-mongering headlines that so mislead about the pathetic lives put beyond rescue by this Act that creates the innocent victims of our policy? Rather more academic research and experience take us to a much more reliable conclusion.
Last year, part 1 of Dame Carol Black’s review of drugs stated that, even if enforcement agencies
“were sufficiently resourced it is not clear that they would be able to bring about a sustained reduction in drug supply”.
She went further, stating that
“enforcement activity can sometimes have unintended consequences, such as increasing levels of drug-related violence and the negative effects are involving individuals in the criminal justice system.”
As soon as I can, I want to ask Dame Carol whether she could also have said “almost always” or simply “always” instead of “can sometimes”, as I am unaware of any evidence to the contrary—ever, anywhere.
Thirty-four per cent. of UK adults admit to having consumed an illegal drug at some point in their life. Having debated this with the then chief constable of Durham, Mike Barton—the most authoritative operational police chief on the issue—when 80% of an audience of hundreds of fresher students make the same admission in front of a serving police officer, I rather expect that proportion is growing fast. Our policy has a third of the British population potentially facing a two to seven-year sentence, including senior members of the Government. I am now convinced that this is precisely why so few colleagues are really prepared to engage in this debate; it is personally politically dangerous—ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
We represent the population in this matter as much as anyone else, and I would be surprised if most Members of this House had not enjoyed what a former Prime Minister dismissed as the “normal university experience”. The Leader of the Opposition implied as much about himself, but even he was not prepared to be candid. This issue is far, far too important for colleagues to take a pass on. We have a duty to engage and personal experience should not be used to drive colleagues out of considering the wider evidence about the success or failure of this policy. My advice to colleagues is, do not answer the personal question; you have a wider duty to the public, so that all parliamentarians can contribute to the consideration of what is in reality an appalling policy failure, with 50 years of evidence to draw on.
We wait for the publication of part 2 of Dame Carol’s report. Dare I hope that the Government have run into someone prepared to state the inconvenient truth? Only yesterday she reported at a meeting of the Criminal Justice Alliance her shock at finding so little research and science to underpin policy making, commissioning and practice in the UK. The Government might point to the role of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, yet its members are overworked, unremunerated and supported by a very limited secretariat. They are also appointed on the basis of political vetting, which inevitably compromises their necessary objectivity, and of course they have the example of Professor David Nutt’s inconvenient truth in 2008, which had him sacked.
The damage done by this Act to public health and its devouring of the criminal justice system is only half the story. What opportunities have we also missed? The powers to schedule drugs under regulation derived from the 1971 Act. Those 2001 regulations should allow for the lawful possession and supply of controlled drugs for legitimate purposes such as research and medicinal use. Yet our drug scheduling plainly lacks scientific validation and has not been subject to analysis or any recent official analysis of harm. The Home Office has no plans to commission a comprehensive review of the relative harms of the drugs that have been put in schedule 1. This evidence-free approach must change.
Cannabis-based products for medicinal use were rescheduled only because the mother of one child with a severe form of epilepsy was prepared to challenge the system for confiscating her son’s medicine, which had been prescribed overseas. Billy Caldwell duly became seriously ill, and to his credit the then Home Secretary returned the confiscated medicine to Billy under special licence and asked the chief medical officer if there was any evidence for this medicine’s efficacy. In two weeks, which is a record-breaking time in medicine assessment, she confirmed that there was. There is rather a lot, in fact—it appears to go back about three millennia. It should hardly have been a surprise to the House—a House of Lords Committee had recommended it 20 years earlier—but the system is still broken today for patients to get access to medicine from cannabis. Only yesterday, we witnessed a wretched plea to the Prime Minister from a sick child’s brother for his medical cannabis. That should never have had to be the case.
We are not just talking about cannabis, where our approach has denied us 50 years of research into, among other conditions, multiple sclerosis, pain control and, it seems, all too probably a significant advance in cancer treatments, because evidence is emerging of a number of substances that find themselves in schedule 1 that also have great potential. The current scheduling of substances such as psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and DMT now appears to have prevented a probable step change in more effective mental health interventions for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, anorexia nervosa, addiction and depression. We continue to hinder medical research at a time when there have been no new pharmacological treatments for depression since the advance of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors 30 years ago. With a mental health crisis in waiting following this pandemic, we must immediately remove barriers to research.
If we want an example of why we should do that, we should look no further than the experience of our recently active service veterans, 7,500 of whom have returned from active service in Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. The charity Supporting Wounded Veterans believes that 2,400 of them are beyond available current treatment. So many of them turn to alcohol and street drugs to manage their service-inflicted pain—destroyed, in our estimation, from military hero to alcoholic and junkie because we have not enabled the research that would break their spiral down to death by their own hand or otherwise.
Finally, given what she said yesterday, Carol Black will ask for accountability and co-ordinated delivery across Government that acknowledges drug dependency to be a chronic condition. Drug policy, owned and led by the Home Office—vainly trying to enforce the provisions of this Act over decades through a criminal justice enforcement approach—must change to a public health, cross-Government approach. We have tried and tested 50 years of policy based on instinct and what now appears to be prejudice towards drug users, whom we have put outside the law. Meanwhile, we knock back our alcohol and smoke our tobacco as drugs inside the law. Prohibition of either would clearly drive drinkers and smokers underground, with all of the accompanying wider cost to the overall public good. We have accommodated their undoubted harms, which are massively greater than those we have criminalised, and we can and are starting to control them to a better degree inside the law, as the recent substantial public health progress over tobacco consumption shows.
The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed. It ended the British system towards drug users of the 1960s. Our oldest ally, Portugal, faced with its own drug crisis of the late 1990s, returned to it in 2001, with conspicuous success over the past two decades. Its politicians climb over each other now to claim responsibility. After 50 years, it is about time we all took up our responsibility to understand the evidence and how we can best mitigate this policy disaster which arises from a law passed 50 years ago here in the United Kingdom.
It is just fantasy to suggest that there are loads of people out there who are somehow prevented from getting into drugs by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. That is not the case, so we surely need to have a grown-up conversation about what we should do given that potentially a third of our citizens could be made criminals by legislation that is so manifestly unfit for purpose.
I hope that the Home Office and Ministers can begin that process of review with an open mind, rather than just defending the status quo. They should be prepared to look at an evidence-based approach, drawing on international comparisons, and to try to work up a better system that is grounded in protecting public health and wellbeing, rather than trying to criminalise behaviour. I and my party would support—I think there would be support in all parts of the House—any bold Minister who wanted to take that initiative and begin that dialogue. I am not saying prescriptively what should be in such a review; I am not saying how it should be done. I simply want to have the dialogue, the discussion and the debate, because too many people are dying for us not to do so.
While we are doing that, there are some things that ought to be done immediately. I want to turn for a moment to the question of drug consumption rooms—probably better called overdose prevention centres. These are medical facilities, and I have been in them and seen them working in Portugal, Germany and Canada. These are medical facilities where someone can use their own drugs under medical supervision. Such places are not going to make the overall problem any better; what they do is drive a focus into the very sharp end of the problem—the point at which people are dying.
At the moment, people do not voluntarily overdose because they are fed up with life and want to commit suicide. That is not the case at all. People are taking substances and they do not even know what is in them. Sometimes these substances contain a lethal concoction which is much, much stronger than they thought it was going to be. Because it is all criminal activity, it has to be done behind closed doors. It is not something that someone does in the open. By the time someone realises they have a problem—by the time they cannot breathe, they have a heart attack or they need medical help—it is too late to call for assistance. For the limited number of people in those circumstances, being able to satisfy their immediate addiction under medical supervision would literally be a lifesaver. That is what happens in other countries.
It is blindingly obvious that we ought to try to consider having such places here, but the law forbids it. Even pending a change in the law, by regulation the Home Office should allow pilot centres to emerge so that we can see for ourselves whether they would work here. After all, what is there to lose? There is nothing to lose and everything to gain—there are lives to gain.
This idea does not stop people using drugs; it does not get rid of the problem; it does not make people get their life back together; it does not get people the medical help or social services help that they might need; it does not get them a job if they have not got one—of course it does not, but it keeps them alive long enough so that those interventions can take place further down the line. We cannot give help to a dead person, and that is why it is so vital that we have a sensible discussion about drug consumption rooms and supervised facilities. The Scottish Government stand ready and have been pressing the Home Office to allow them to go ahead and do that in Glasgow, which brings me to my final point; I know you did not want people to go on too long, Mr Deputy Speaker, so this will be my final point.
We have a bit of a disjuncture in the interrelationship between the devolution of political authority and Administrative action in the United Kingdom and this particular problem, in that the whole criminal framework—the 1971 Act and others—is a reserved matter for Westminster, which sets the problem, if you like, but dealing with the consequences of that, including the health and social care and the economic fall-out from that policy, is a matter for the devolved Administrations. Without getting into the arguments about Scottish independence or whatever, it seems to me a matter of ultimate sense and grown-up policy to have the same part of government responsible for the regulation as is responsible for mopping up the consequences of the problem. That is why, when the time comes, we need to urgently look at devolution of the controls currently in place in the ’71 Act, and whatever replaces it, to the devolved Administrations, and to locate them within a health and social care context, which is already devolved.
In advance of that, I have spoken with the Minister several times on this matter, and I trust that he is thoughtful about it. I think he is prepared to consider other points of view and evidence, but I think he feels himself mightily constrained by tradition, convention and, perhaps, political pressure elsewhere. However, he has now received a letter from the Drugs Policy Minister in Scotland, Angela Constance, asking for a four nations summit to consider, among other things, establishing pilots of these types of medical facilities. I hope very much that he will today confirm that his reaction to that is positive and that, if we cannot change things overnight across the whole UK, he is prepared to let us employ the apparatus of devolution to allow one part of the UK to go beyond where other parts are perhaps willing to go at the minute and to collate the evidence to point a way to the future, which could then lead to best practice being adopted throughout.
We have a responsibility not to continue to stick our heads in the sand on this matter; there has been a collective exercise of ignoring the blindingly obvious for far too long. We are not voting on this today, but I appeal to colleagues to do what they can through the various structures of this place and within their political parties—this matter should not divide us on party grounds—to consider why we need a review after this half-century and why things are so clearly wrong that we must do something. We cannot continue to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that things are okay. Now, 50 years after the passage of the Act, is the time to admit that it is not working and to do better. The citizens of this country deserve that.
Yet I am not convinced that adopting these policies would be trouble-free. For one thing, are we to believe that the persons involved in drugs would simply leave and go to find employment in a regular job? I am not convinced. After all, research from the Institute of Economic Affairs concluded that the current black market in cannabis is worth £2.6 billion per year, with 255 tonnes sold to 3 million users in 2016. Any movement to Government-controlled legalisation of cannabis would be a huge loss for current criminals, and I fear they would simply move into selling harder drugs, which it would be grossly irresponsible ever even to consider regulating.
Secondly, the legalisation of something like cannabis may lead to an upsurge in usage. There is conflicting evidence, but a recent peer-reviewed study conducted in the United States concluded that cannabis use has increased in states where the drug was legalised. With cannabis use increasingly being linked to psychiatric disorders, including depression, anxiety and schizophrenia, what toll would liberalisation have on our NHS and its mental health services?