Drugs

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and the all-party group on this excellent report and on bringing this debate before the House today. When I was doing some research in this area, the thing that really encapsulated the problem for me was a United Nations report saying that, in 1998, the decision was taken to work towards the “elimination or significant reduction” of illicit drug production and abuse by 2008. We are, of course, five years on from that. The United Nations decided to extend that programme for 10 years but I guess it had no confidence whatever that there would be any greater success over that following decade either.

One of the things that strikes me about this debate is that there is a psychology in the back of people’s minds that the drugs problem, and drugs themselves, can somehow be uninvented—that we can hide them away and they will disappear. However, the reality is, as the report says so well, that we now have multiplying types of drugs and that these products will not go away. There is also the fact that any debate seems to forget that where there is a demand, there will be a market and there will be supply. That is the way that human beings, human society and global society work.

I spent most of my professional life in the freight industry, where I was very much involved in supply chains. One of the things on which I want to concentrate is the even more difficult area of the international global supply chain for illicit drugs. It is different for different drugs categories. Cannabis is now the most consumed drug but is often produced within the nations where it is consumed. Synthetic drugs, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, has said, often come through the post or through the internet. However, there is still, regrettably, huge international global traffic in cocaine and opiates. We do not know the exact figure of course, but that market is worth something like $500 billion per annum—1% of global trade. We are handing that 1% of global trade to organised crime; to people who are out there to make money and are not worried about the consequences. We have to find a way of making that supply chain part of an established route, which is far more difficult than legalising or regulating the consumption side.

Why is that important? It is important because of the countries, nations, peoples and communities that are destroyed by the 90% of the drugs market that is driven by North America and Europe. In Mexico, there have been some 60,000 deaths and murders directly related to the drugs trade, a number of them mass killings. In Venezuela, between 1990 and 2008, the murder rate per annum increased from 2,000 to 16,000. In the United Kingdom, we have roughly 500 homicides a year, which puts that somewhere in context. In Colombia, 300,000 refugees moved from that country to Ecuador. The whole problem here is that this illicit trade is undermining developing countries and even some countries that are moving up towards developed status.

I have the privilege of being chair of the All-Party Group for Guinea-Bissau, a west African state which used to be a Portuguese colony. I shall conclude by quoting two passages from a recent publication, Guinea-Bissau: Lessons from Africa’s first Narco-State. It states that,

“trafficking networks have coopted key political and military leaders and transformed Guinea-Bissau into a hub for illicit commerce, particularly the multibillion dollar international trade in cocaine. This has directly contributed to instability in Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa … Drawn by the lucrative revenues, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other militant groups in West Africa have also been linked to Guinea-Bissau trafficking … While narcotics traffickers initially targeted Guinea-Bissau because of its weak oversight and governance capacity, the drug trade has dramatically compounded these drivers of instability while spawning others”.

It further states:

“Meanwhile, economic growth has been episodic, human development indicators have been stagnant, and a humanitarian emergency imperilling 300,000 people looms”.

That number of people represents a major proportion of the country’s population.

The result of our not tackling that trade is the wasting of a number of developing countries. If we solve the problem in one country, it moves to another. We have to make that trade part of the establishment. It is difficult, but we have to take that challenge forward.