Dangerous Drugs

Debate between Dan Poulter and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dr Poulter]

If the House divides this evening I will be voting against the measure for the further reasons I am about to outline.

I think it would be helpful to remind the Minister what the ACMD actually said with regard to legislation:

“Based on this harms assessment, the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 remains the appropriate drug legislation to tackle supply of nitrous oxide for non-legitimate use. There is, however, a need for enforcement of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 to be supported by additional interventions designed to reduce health and social harms. Based on this harms assessment, nitrous oxide should not be subjected to control under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 for the following reasons”.

Those reasons have been drawn out to some extent during the debate, but they are neatly summarised by the ACMD in its recommendations to the Government in its report.

First,

“Level of health and social harms”,

which is relatively limited, and

“current evidence suggests that the health and social harms are not commensurate with control under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.”

Secondly,

“Proportionality of sanctions: the offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 would be disproportionate for the level of harm associated with nitrous oxide and could have significant unintended consequences.”

Thirdly,

“Impact on legitimate uses: control under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 could produce significant burdens for legitimate medical, industrial, commercial, and academic uses. The current scale and number of legitimate uses that stand to be affected is unknown but is estimated to be large.”

I think it is fairly clear that the Government did not carry out a proper impact assessment before bringing this measure to the House.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank my good friend for allowing me to intervene. Does that mean that he thinks we should do nothing at all?

[Dr Poulter]

No, I do not think it means we should do nothing. I think that if we believe, as I think many of us do, that we should control the illegitimate supply of nitrous oxide, we should look at existing legislation, such as the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, which was designed and taken through its stages by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning). This point was discussed at some length during its passage. The focus was not on criminalising use and the potential users, but on controlling the supply: a clear distinction was drawn. The Minister may correct this view, but the ACMD made it clear in its report that better enforcement of that existing legislation to control illegitimate supply would be a much better and more proportionate way of dealing with the issue at hand, and the same was suggested more broadly in the evidence supplied to the ACMD while it was compiling its report.

So there is already a legitimate means of dealing with this, but unfortunately there is the potential for unintended consequences, and I was not reassured when the Minister said earlier that the Government would introduce another measure—which no one in the House has seen as yet—to ensure that there would be no such unintended consequences. If a Government are introducing two good pieces of legislation, they should introduce both of them together so that the House can consider them in the round. My concern is that primary legislation such as the Misuse of Drugs Act is tightly drawn, and unless it is amended, it is difficult to introduce another measure to sit beneath it and mitigate its provisions. I am therefore not reassured by the Minister’s comments, but in any event it is not good or effective government not to present the two measures at the same time so that we could consider the issues in the round.

Because I believe that there is already legislation in place which needs to be better enforced to deal with illegitimate supply, and because I do not believe that the Government have given adequate weight or consideration to the potential unintended consequences for legitimate users of nitrous oxide—which the Minister effectively admitted in his opening comments—I believe that the Government are in the wrong place at present, and that it would have been better to produce a proper impact assessment of the legitimate uses to sit alongside this measure before bringing it to the attention of the House. For all those reasons, I will vote against the order if it is put to a vote.