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The EU Drugs Strategy
Oral and written evidence
Contents
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence ............................... 2
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207) ....... 13
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence .. 14
Rev Eric Blakebrough – Written Evidence ......................................................................................... 19
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117) ........................................ 22
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177) .................................................................... 49
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294) ........................................................................................................................................... 67
Europol – Written Evidence .................................................................................................................. 98
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154) .......................................................................................... 104
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence ..................................................................................... 121
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24) .............................................................................................................................. 125
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)....................................................... 146
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence ....................................................................... 157
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361) .................................................................................. 161
Lord Henley – Supplementary written evidence ............................................................................ 181
Home Office – Written Evidence ...................................................................................................... 182
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)...................................................................................... 188
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence ........................................................................... 210
Axel Klein – Written Evidence ........................................................................................................... 221
Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ1-24)................................................................................................................................ 227
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)228
Baroness Meacher, Lord Mancroft and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)247
Baroness Meacher – Supplementary written evidence ................................................................. 248
Lord Ramsbotham, Lord Mancroft and Baroness Meacher – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)249
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238) .................................................. 250
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257) ................................................................................ 262
Professor Alex Stevens, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24) .............................................................................................................................. 272
Mike Trace and Rev Eric Blakebrough – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117) ...................................... 273
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written
Evidence
Introduction
The All Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform (APPGDPR) is pleased to
make a submission of evidence to the Select Committee on the European Union, SubCommittee on Home Affairs – Inquiry into the EU Drugs Strategy (2005-12). The
APPGDPR was formed at the beginning of this year in response to widespread criticism
of current ‘war on drugs’ policies at both national and international levels and to
promote evidence based, health focussed approaches to the formation and
implementation of drug policy. Accordingly, our comments focus on these issues.
1. Summary conclusions
1.1 The EU Drug Strategy represents a balancing act between divergent approaches to drug
policy by member states. It is also guided by the single UN Convention of 1961 on drugs
and subsequent amendments. As such it is currently a reflection of many of the problems
with national and international drug policy and has not fulfilled its potential as a vehicle
for change. Examples of this include:
1.1.1 Acknowledging a failure to impact on the availability and levels of use of drugs yet not
revisiting the crime focussed policies associated with that failure;
1.1.2 Claiming to promote a balanced approach to drug policy across Europe when, on
average, it is estimated that public spending on drug related public order and safety is
almost 3 times as much as on drug related health;
1.1.3 Developing extensive monitoring frameworks with standard indicators for demand
reduction measures yet after seven years the challenge of developing and
implementing Europe-wide indicators for the effectiveness of supply side
interventions remains;
1.1.4 The EU’s drug related aid programme to developing countries is dominated by supply
side initiatives;
1.1.5 The EU response to challenges such as new ‘legal highs’ emphasises the use of
criminal law despite clear indications from member states that they wish to consider
other regulatory options.
1.2 As part of its Strategy, the EU undertook the development of the evidence base to
improve understanding of the drugs problem across Europe and develop tools for
evaluation. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Abuse (EMCDDA)
continues to be a valuable resource in encouraging the sharing of data about drug
problems, improving their quality, building the evidence base and opening the debate on
drug policy. However there are worrying examples where the EU has failed to fully
engage with the evidence.
1.2.1 The EU appears to be unwilling to promote contested practice even when it is
strongly indicated by evidence. For example heroin assisted treatment does not
appear in the EMCDDA treatment or best practice databases despite being
successfully implemented in several member states and being indicated by research
evidence as successful for those with problems in engaging with more mainstream
forms of treatment.
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
1.2.2
A major area of competence for the EU is in the field of information and prevention.
However, the evidence base for effectiveness in this field is extremely limited. Such
evidence as there is can be found in the EMCDDA’s online resources but an
enormous amount of prevention practice occurs within Europe without reference to
the known evidence and, unfortunately, poor practice is promoted by other EU
institutions.
1.3 The EU has an important role in arguing for good practice at international level and it has
been an important advocate for harm reduction approaches. However, the level of harm
reduction provision is concerningly low in some member states and as far as high risk
groups in prisons are concerned concerningly low across Europe. Although these issues
are featured in the current EU strategy and Action Plan they need to be given a stronger
priority.
A future EU Strategy
1.4 The UNODC discussion document 'from coercion to cohesion’ spells out clearly that
drug addiction is a health problem and not a crime and represents a sign of potential
change at UN level. The EU strategy needs to highlight and reinforce this new approach
and actively promote evidence based health oriented practises such as the Swiss Heroin
Treatment clinics and Portuguese decriminalisation of drug use combined with tough
treatment requirements.
1.5 The EU should be in a strong position to promote change in drug policy. Its Member
States have a broad and varied experience to draw upon in tackling drug problems, good
data and relatively strong public institutions. In this it will have a much more useful role
in being robust and assertive to member states about evidence based policy rather than
continuing to try and represent the average of the 27 national approaches. Accordingly
the EU Drug Strategy should include the following commitments:
1.5.1
To build and strengthen data and intelligence on drug use and policy responses, to
improve understanding of policy impact and to be clearer and more assertive about
good practice. This should include evidence of the efficacy of preventive, treatment
and harm reduction policies but also incorporate firm recommendations about
minimum levels of service;
1.5.2
To take opportunities for widening the debate about drug control. For example,
responding to the call by member states for a ‘wider range of control options’ for
new psychoactive substances;
1.5.3
To develop, as a priority, transparent monitoring systems by which to assess and
review the impact of supply side interventions;
1.5.4
To adopt a critical and questioning role with respect to the continuing failures in
supply side interventions at national level and be prepared to take a harm reduction
approach to tackling drug supply. As a minimum priority the EU should take note of
and act on guidance from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to ensure that
enforcement practices do not impede the implementation of harm reduction
services;
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
1.5.5
1.5.6
1.5.7
To examine, as a priority and report on prospects for different forms of regulation
for psychoactive substances;
To build on its role as a potential world leader in developing drug policy by being
assertive and proactive in world forums such as the UNODC, in disseminating good
practice globally and ensuring that EU drug-related aid programmes to the
developing world are based on evidence and harm reduction principles and represent
a truly balanced approach.
To reflect the importance of a health focus in EU drug policy it should be made clear
in a future Strategy that the lead role for Drug Policy should be transferred from the
Justice to the Health and Consumers Directorate.
2. Scope of the submission
2.1 An assessment and discussion of the current EU drug strategy could be extremely wide
ranging and take in a general critique of the role of European institutions in policy areas
where substantial national responsibilities remain. Also the consultation paper invites
comments on a number of points of detail about the strategy. The All Party
Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform was set up this year in response to
widespread criticism of current drug policies at both national and international levels to
promote evidence based, and health focussed approaches to the formation and
implementation of drug policy. Accordingly, this submission will limit itself to a
consideration of whether the EU drug strategy could have, actually did and could in the
future support these general aims. The submission will summarise our understanding of
what the EU Drugs Strategy is and then address 3 main questions.
• What could the Strategy expect to achieve in terms of impacting on drug harms given
the levels of subsidiarity remaining in key areas of drug policy?
• Was the Strategy successful in meeting the goals and targets which it set itself and
what lessons are to be learnt from that; and
• What would be necessary to get a strategy at European level to encourage evidence
based and health focussed drug policies across Europe.
3. Our understanding of the Strategy
3.1 The period covered by the strategy is 2005-2012 with two supporting action plans
covering 2005-2008 and 2009-2012. It is monitored by means of an annual report and it
is currently being independently evaluated by Rand and Ipsos Mori with the report due
in 2012.
3.2 The Strategy is based on the founding values of the European Union including respect for
human dignity, equality and human rights. The Strategy is also based on the UN
conventions stemming from the UN single convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961). The
EC sets out its main areas of competency to complement the work of member states as:
• In public health - information and prevention to reduce drug related harm;
• Providing a framework for controlling international trade in precursors;
• Providing a framework to limit the laundering of money from the drugs trade;
• Co-operation between police, customs and judicial authorities to combat the drugs
trade; and
• Dialogues on drugs with other regions of the world and its international
development programme.
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
3.3 Overall the Strategy aims to provide added value to the work of member states. The
strategy has as its overarching and general objectives to reduce availability of illicit drugs
and to reduce the harms arising from drug use. The Strategy aims for a ‘balanced
approach’ between demand reduction and supply reduction. The inclusion of support for
harm reduction policies in 2005 represented a key development for Europe by
comparison with the rest of the world. The two action plans are performance
management devices to pursue the objectives of the strategy and are meant to include
specific actions. That is:
• ‘Actions at EU level must offer clear added value and results must be realistic and
measurable.
• Actions must be cost-effective and contribute directly to the achievement of at least one of
the goals or priorities set out in the Strategy.
• The number of actions in each field should be targeted and realistic.’ 1
4. The European Policy context
4.1 What is the European policy context within which the Strategy has operated?
4.1.1 Wide variation in policies and practices in respect of drugs between the 27 member
states within the European Union.
4.1.2 An evolving relationship between the EU and member states following the Lisbon
Treaty and continuing enlargement of the membership
4.1.3 For the institutions of the European Commission (EC) drugs is a cross-cutting issue
with many directorates having an interest. These interests are reflected to a degree
within the EU Drug Strategy (2005 -2012) and its two underpinning action plans.
Nevertheless, drug policy (as for the UK and the UN) is seen first and foremost as a
crime issue and the co-ordinating body for drugs within the EC is located in its
Justice and Home Affairs Directorate
4.1.4 Europol is meant to co-ordinate co-operation and information exchange in the
policing of drug supply across Europe
4.1.5 Discussion between member states on drugs issues is via a ‘Horizontal Group’ of
government representatives
4.1.6 The European Parliament has a role in scrutinising and commenting on the Strategy,
Action Plans and EMCDDA reports
4.1.7 Public Expenditure on drug policy is estimated as 34 billion euro. 2
4.1.8 Drugs are an important issue for the citizens (particularly young people) of Europe as
evidenced in ‘Eurobarometer’ surveys.
5. What could the strategy expect to achieve?
5.1 The main responsibilities for drug policy and implementation remain at the level of
member states. So the policing of drugs possession and supply in local and middle
markets and the health response to problematic drug use are national phenomena. The
EU has a clear competency in co-operation with respect to transnational, organised
crime and (to a lesser extent with) public health issues. This is arguably then reflected in
the dominant concerns of the EU strategy on questions of trafficking. However it is
unclear why the EU strategy should take upon itself the responsibility within its strategy
1
2
EU Action Plan 2005-2008, pp2
EMCDDA (2008): Towards a better understanding of drug related expenditure in Europe
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
for having an impact on the prevalence of drug use across Europe (see below) when it is
not in its gift as an institution to deliver on it.
5.2 A problem with the kind of performance management framework set out in the EU Drug
Strategy is that it is not sufficient to give clear specific and measurable high level
indicators (eg ‘measurable reduction in the use of drugs’). The indicators need to be
accompanied by an understanding of the interaction between the measures deployed and
the phenomena being targeted plus an awareness of any other influencing factors.
Without these it is impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from trends in monitoring
data either positive or negative. For the EU a further problem is that the impact of the
EU contribution cannot be disaggregated from that of the member states. To try and
ascribe responsibility between EU institutions and member states for any trends would
also be extremely difficult.
5.3 Under the principle of subsidiarity each state determines its own policies, priorities and
budget. A Strategy linked to the sum of national outcomes must therefore be broad
enough to capture the divergent approaches of Sweden and Portugal say and facilitate a
means for them to co-operate within Europe where commonality between their
approaches can be identified. The consequence of this balancing act is that the EU does
not address issues that might appear controversial. For example, 11 countries within the
EU have or are developing policies which effectively decriminalise the possession of
small amounts of drugs (usually cannabis) 3 and others such as the UK use police
discretion to rarely prosecute for possession of small amounts. But decriminalisation as
such is currently not part of the discourse at EU level. The EU is prepared to publish
reports of examples such as the Portuguese decriminalisation policy but not to open a
debate about decriminalisation in a systematic way.
5.4 An area where the EU clearly has a role is in public health (see 4.2 above). In this area it
could be reasonable expected that the EU would take a lead in promoting good practice
in drug prevention with young people. The EMCDDA has, in the ‘Resources’ section of
its website a considered and research-led assessment of the spectrum of prevention
programmes being used. On the highly contested US ‘Drug Abuse Resistance Education’
(DARE) Programme it takes a cautious approach referring to negative research findings –
‘Several evaluations of programmes such as DARE (or similar), which are delivered by
uniformed police officers, have shown the ineffectiveness of this approach…’ 4. By
contrast, the European Crime Prevention Network (ECPN) has on its website, as an
example of ‘good practice’, the Hungarian ‘DADA’ project which has no outcome
evaluation but - ‘was developed on the success and basic concept of the US D.A.R.E.’ 5
The ECPN is an institution founded by the EU in 2001 and funded by member states
following a Council decision in 2009. It is accountable to the Council of the European
Union in reporting on its activities and effectiveness. Taking the EMCDDA and the
EUCPN together it appears that different parts of the EU are presenting different
messages on good practice in an important area of drug policy. Also, significantly
Release (2011): A Quiet Revolution: Drug Decriminalisation Policies in Practice across the Globe (unpublished)
http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/perk/resources/step3/theory . The sources for this comment are given on the
website as links - Ennett et al., 1994; Lindström et al., 1998. Unfortunately the links don’t work. It is likely that the first
refers to: ‘Ennett, S. T., N. S. Tobler, C. L. Ringwalt, and R. L. Flewelling. 1994. "How Effective is Drug Abuse Resistance
Education? A Meta-Analysis of Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Evaluations." American Journal of Public Health 84: 1394-1401’
and that a similar conclusion to the second can be found in Lindstrom, P.; Svensson, R. Evaluacion del programa preventivo
D.A.R.E. en Suecia. [Evaluation of the Swedish school prevention program D.A.R.E.]. Adicciones 1999, 11, 373-385.
5 HUNGARY-DADA project.pdf - 8 janvier 2007; on http://www.eucpn.org/goodpractice/showdoc.asp?docid=156
3
4
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
different systems for assessing the quality of examples of good practice are in place.
These anomalies should be addressed via the governance and implementation of the next
EU drugs Strategy.
5.5 The EU has a clear role as a leader and influencer both in Europe and globally. For
example, it has been a progressive force in international debates on drug policy and
promoted harm reduction measures in world forums. Also it has had a role
disseminating good practice in demand reduction around the world. However, it could
be more assertive in addressing poor practices and unacceptable levels of key health
services (including harm reduction provision) within member states. For example,
according to the EMCDDA annual report 2010 – ‘ … only around 2 % of substitution
treatments occur in the 12 Member States who joined the European Union since 2004.’ 6 This
demonstrates markedly different levels of treatment services available in different
member states and represents an important challenge for the future drug strategy.
5.6 A much more universal problem for Europe is the health risks to those in prison.
EMCDDA figures7 indicate that for most member states between 10 and 30% of
sentenced prisoners are convicted of drugs offences; of those in prison half had
previously used drugs and over a third had injected drugs. Although the health risks for
those in prison (and immediately on release) are higher than the general population the
health and harm reduction response across Europe is completely inadequate. 8 Out of
the member states (+ Norway and Turkey) only 12 have substitution treatment available
in the majority of their prisons, 2 have full or extensive prison needle exchange
programmes; 2 have full or extensive pre-release counselling for overdose risk; and 8
have full or extensive individual counselling on infection risk. 9
5.7 The problem is acknowledged in the EU Action Plan (2009-2012) Objective 9 (out of 24)
which states ‘Provide access to health care for drug users in prison to prevent and
reduce health-related harms associated with drug abuse’. 10 Also, the EMCDDA have
done valuable work in assembling the data which highlights this problem. The next step
via the forthcoming EU drug strategy should be to prioritise action to tackle the health
risks for this vulnerable group and to reduce the numbers placed in the riskier
environment of prison. The EU could take a clear lead on this issue, based on its
competency for public health and making full use of the mechanism of ‘Commission
Review’ 11 to influence national policy.
6. Was the strategy successful in its own terms?
6.1 We can identify successes in terms of the implementation of certain initiatives. However,
the Strategy set itself a major target to reduce the prevalence of drug use but has
dramatically failed to meet it.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (2010): Annual Report 2010: State of the Drugs Problem in
Europe: Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010
7 Montanari L, Hedrich D, Bo A, Guarita B, Carpentier C,Giraudon C, Royuela L, Wiessing L (EMCDDA)(2009):Monitoring
drug use, health problems and responses in prison population in Europe: Presentation at ‘Good prison health, better public
health, safer society’: Oslo 2009
8 ibid
9 ibid
10 NOTICES FROM EUROPEAN UNION INSTITUTIONS AND BODIES: COUNCIL: EU Drugs Action Plan for 20092012: (2008/C 326/09)
11 ibid
6
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
6.2 The period covered by the current EU drug strategy (2005-12) has been one where
there has been a significant increase in the numbers of those entering drug treatment. It
is now estimated that there are over a million in treatment across Europe . This is chiefly
due to national initiatives but it is arguable that a contributing factor has been the work
of the EMCDDA with national focal points particularly those in new and applicant
member states. This is one of the major positive developments for drug policy in Europe
but has very little to do with the work of the Justice Directorate which is where the lead
for drugs policy currently lies.
6.3 The creation (in 1994) and work of the European Monitoring Centre for Drug and Drug
Abuse (EMCDDA) has been a success and good progress has been made in improving
understanding of drug use, drug problems, and the impact of policy and programme
responses. In particular, the EU have commissioned valuable reports which among other
things have – ‘found no evidence that the global drug problem had been reduced in the past
decade, but judged that the enforcement of drug prohibition had caused substantial unintended
harms’ 12
6.4 It is however, unclear why heroin assisted maintenance is not included in the EMCDDA
database of treatment options or best practices even though it is being successfully
delivered in Switzerland and member states Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the
UK. Further, a Cochrane systematic review has concluded ‘heroin prescription should be
indicated to people who (..) currently or have previously failed maintenance treatment’. 13
6.5 The EU strategy document also recognised that in 2004 previous policies had not had a
significant impact. According to the final evaluation of the EU Drug Strategy and Action
Plan 2000 – 2004 ‘the available data do not suggest that there has been a significant
reduction in drug use prevalence or that the availability of drugs has been substantially
reduced’ 14 However, the Strategy did not seek to change the policy emphasis on
prohibition and enforcement. Unsurprisingly, recent reports indicate that there has been
little or no impact on prevalence since 2005. According to the EMCDDA annual report
2010 15 - ‘Overall, the data suggest that cannabis, in its various forms, may be becoming more
rather than less available on the European market.’; ‘Data from a range of sources point to an
overall stable to increasing opioid problem in the European Union since 2003/04’
6.6 After so many years of repeated failure to impact on the drugs problem surely it is time
to take the obvious step to question and review current policies. Compare the EU role
in public health focussed work on tobacco – ‘Since 1989 the European Community tobaccocontrol strategy has produced:
• three directives on tobacco taxation;
• three directives on tobacco advertising;
• two directives on labelling;
• one directive on tar yields;
• a re-casting of three earlier directives into one directive called the Tobacco Products
Directive;
12 EMCDDA Monographs 10 (2010): Harm Reduction - Evidence, Impacts and Challenges: © European Monitoring Centre
for Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2010
13 http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003410.html (5/9/11)
14 General Secretariat, Council of the European Union: EU Drug Strategy (2005-2012): Brussels, 22 November 2004
15 Idem 3
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
•
•
•
•
eight health and safety at work directives restricting smoking in the work place;
five non-binding resolutions and recommendations; (…..)
adoption of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC);
and effective action against tobacco smuggling in some Member States.’ 16
6.7 The list above demonstrates a clear role for the EU within its competence for public
health. The Eu initiatives contributed to a persistent reduction in the use of tobacco up
to 2009 17
6.8 The EU has seemed unwilling to tackle the poor monitoring of and lack of data for
assessing supply side interventions. Originally, the objectives for ‘Measurable reduction of
the use of drugs, of dependence and of drug-related health and social risks …’, set out in the
Strategy were linked solely to demand reduction. Those for supply reduction were
limited to processes eg ‘A measurable improvement in the effectiveness, efficiency and
knowledge base of law enforcement interventions and actions by the EU and its Member States
..’ The Strategy was criticised (Roberts et al 2006) 18 for not having clear objectives
against which progress could be measured. Despite this and the greater ability of both
the EU and member states to deliver on such outputs it has taken until October of 2010
for the first European conference to be held to develop indicators for drug markets,
drug related crime and drug supply reduction 19 By contrast a monitoring framework and
standard indicators for drug treatment are well developed at European level.
6.9 The EU’s lack of success in developing means by which supply side interventions can be
assessed has been, in part, balanced by its preparedness to support research which has
begun to tackle the issue of drug supply. Accordingly, the Rand Corporation and the
Dutch Trimbos Institute were commissioned by the EU to provide an assessment of
global drug markets. The report 20 published in 2009 commented that it had found no
evidence that the global drug problem had reduced between 1998 and 2007, that drug
policy had only a marginal positive influence on the problem, enforcement against drug
markets in most countries failed to prevent continued availability at a lower price and
that enforcement of drug prohibitions has caused substantial unintended harm. 21 In the
absence of the EU being able to assess the impact of enforcement against drug markets
across Europe the report provides a clear indication of the need for a thorough review
of current drug policies.
6.10 The EU Strategy claims to pursue a balanced and evidence based approach. In this it
reproduces the rhetoric of many national strategies. However, ‘balance’ is taken to mean
having elements of supply reduction and demand reduction within a strategy no matter
how large or small. It doesn’t mean that there is a balance between the two. So, across
Europe EMCDDA have provided estimates that combining estimates of ‘labelled’ and
‘unlabelled’, drug related expenditure on public order and safety has been almost three
http://www.fph.org.uk/European_Health_Policies
http://ec.europa.eu/health/tobacco/docs/tobacco_ia_rand_en.pdf
18 Roberts M, Bewley-Taylor D, Trace M(2005): Facing the Future – The Challenge for National and International Drug Policy;
Beckley Foundation Drug Policy Programme Report Six (2005):
19 ‘In October 2010, the first European conference on drug supply indicators initiated work on the conceptualisation of
technically sound and sustainable indicators in this area of key importance for European drug policy’ Drugnet Europe 75,
EMCDDA, Lisbon, July 2011 http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/drugnet/75
20 Reuter P and Trautmann F (eds) (2009): A Report on Illicit Global Drug Markets 1998 – 2007: European Communities
2009 http://ec.europa.eu/justice/anti-drugs/files/report-drug-markets-full_en.pdf
21 Ibid
16
17
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
times more than drug related spending on health. ‘Labelled’ expenditure is that which is
explicitly set out as drug related in national budget headings. ‘Unlabelled’ expenditure
occurs within broader budget headings such as policing or prisons and represents a far
higher proportion of drug related expenditure than ‘labelled’ expenditure. 22 The
situation has improved during the life of the EU drug strategy with an overall increase in
treatment availability (see 7.2) and a much wider acceptance of the need for harm
reduction measures 23 but there is a long way to go before the balance in drug policy
favours health interventions.
7. The EU and new ‘legal highs’ – a case study in problems and possibilities
7.1 How do the main actors at EU level see their role? An illustration is provided by their
response to new ‘legal highs’. It comprises three essential elements - It involves the
exchange of information (early warning system) between Member States on such substances,
their risk assessment and, if necessary, their submission to control measures and criminal
sanctions across the EU 24. In the first place there is an entirely laudable role based on the
sharing of intelligence about the emergence of new psychoactive substances and their
potential harms.
7.2 However, there is a suggestion of inevitability about the need to use criminal sanctions
to control such drugs. This is underpinned by a reminder in the references to Member
States of their obligations under UN conventions - ‘under Article 3 of the 1988 UN
convention against illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances: ‘Each Party shall
adopt such measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic
law, when committed intentionally’ the production, manufacture, distribution, sale, delivery,
transport, importation or exportation, the possession or purchase of any narcotic drug or any
psychotropic substance.’ 25
7.3 Nonetheless, the assumption of the predominance of criminal sanctions is somewhat
undermined by an acknowledgement later in the report that in response to a survey
about EU policy on new ‘legal highs’ a large number of member states wanted to
consider alternative methods of control 26 - ‘The survey showed that a large number of
Member States see the current lack of alternatives to criminal control as inadequate and point
out that a wider range of options should be considered …’ 27 The Report concludes - ‘The
Commission sees the need for a comprehensive response at EU level, closing gaps between
drugs control and other types of legislation, including food or product safety. In addition to
criminal justice control measures, alternative risk management options would need to be
assessed with a view to a faster response, at EU level, to the emergence of substances that raise
concerns.’ 28
Idem 2
Idem 16
24 EC: REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION on the assessment of the functioning of Council Decision 2005/387/JHA on the
information exchange, risk assessment and control of new psychoactive substances: Brussels, 11.7.2011 COM(2011) 430
final : http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/drugs/docs/com_2011_430_en.pdf
25 ibid
26 EC: Commission staff working paper on the assessment of the functioning of Council Decision 2005/387/JHA on the
information exchange, risk assessment and control of new psychoactive substances: Brussels, 11.7.2011 SEC(2011) 912 final:
http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/drugs/docs/sec_2011_912_en.pdf
27 Idem 10
28 ibid
22
23
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
7.4 For the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform the question of assessing
alternative risk management options is a matter of urgency and it recommends that this
is given priority in the forthcoming EU Drug Strategy.
7.5 Europe is the largest donor to third countries providing 60% of all development
assistance so has the potential to be a key influencer in drug policy. 29 The EU Drug
Strategy identified assistance to third countries as one of its ‘External Relations’ priorities
– ‘3. Assisting third countries, including European Neighbourhood Countries, and key
drug producing and transit countries to be more effective in both drugs demand and
drugs supply reduction …’ 30 The 2009/12 Action plan undertook to assess progress
against this objective by establishing a ‘a monitoring mechanism on EU drug-related
assistance given to third countries’ and the production of an annual report. 31 This has
been abandoned; the reason given being lack of data provided by member states on
national (as opposed to Commission) assistance programmes. The fact remains that the
EU currently provides no monitoring of EU assistance programmes. Such information as
has been provided by the EU 32 indicated (where budgetary information was available)
that in 2010 there were no assistance programmes purely for demand reduction, 35.55m
euros worth of programmes comprising a mix of demand reduction and enforcement
initiatives and 82.7m euros worth of purely enforcement programmes. The emphasis
clearly remains on supply side enforcement and the EU objective to encourage third
countries to adopt a balanced approach to drug policy is undermined when it remains a
net exporter of inbalance.
8. Towards a future EU Drug Strategy
8.1 The UNODC discussion document 'from coercion to cohesion’ spells out clearly that
drug addiction is a health problem and not a crime and represents a sign of potential
change at UN level. The EU strategy needs to highlight and reinforce this new approach
and actively promote evidence based health oriented practises such as the Swiss Heroin
Treatment clinics and Portuguese decriminalisation of drug use combined with tough
treatment requirements.
8.2 The EU should be in a strong position to promote change in drug policy. Its Member
States have a broad and varied experience to draw upon in tackling drug problems, good
data and relatively strong public institutions. In this it will have a much more useful role
in being robust and assertive to member states about evidence based policy rather than
continuing to try and represent the average of the 27 national approaches. Accordingly
the EU Drug Strategy should include the following commitments:
8.2.1
8.2.2
Not only to build and strengthen data and intelligence on drug use and policy
responses and to improve understanding of policy impact, but to be clearer and more
assertive about good practice in prevention, treatment and harm reduction provision
but also in recommending appropriate minimum levels of service;
Within its reporting mechanisms (which should be clear and transparent) the EU
should adopt a critical and questioning role with respect to the continuing failures in
Europeaid annual report 2008: European Commission 2008
Idem 14
31 Idem 10
32 COMMISSION STAFF WORKING DOCUMENT (2010):accompanying the REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION on the
Mid-Term Review of the implementation of the EU Drugs Action Plan (2009-2012)
29
30
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform – Written Evidence
8.2.3
8.2.4
8.2.5
supply side interventions at national level and be prepared to promote a harm
reduction approach to tackling drug supply;
As a priority to examine and report on prospects for different forms of regulation
for psychoactive substances;
To build on its role as a potential world leader in developing drug policy by being
assertive and proactive in world forums such as the UNODC, in disseminating good
practice globally and ensuring that EU drug-related aid programmes to the developing
world are based on evidence and harm reduction principles;
Finally, to underpin a health focus for drug policy, the Strategy should make clear that
the lead role for Drug Policy should be transferred from the Justice to the Health
and Consumers Directorate.
September 2011
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Oral
evidence (QQ 178-207)
Please see under Lord Mancroft
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform –
Supplementary written evidence
Introduction
Following the verbal evidence given by Baroness Meacher and Lords Mancroft and
Ramsbotham to the EU Select Committee it was felt by the All-Party Group that a number
of important issues were raised that could benefit from a further and more detailed
consideration. We would therefore like to submit supplementary evidence in response to
three of the questions posed by the Inquiry before the verbal evidence session namely:
• Does European anti-trafficking policy operate within international human rights law?
• In its written evidence, the APPG for Drug Policy Reform supports the view that, for the
regulation of newly discovered psychoactive substances (‘legal highs’), the forthcoming
EU Drugs Strategy should look at alternatives to criminal sanctions. Can you explain
what alternatives should be considered?
• Controlling and limiting the supply of illegal drugs has proved to be an area in which EU
Member States can reach some agreement. How far has this agreement led to a
successful European drug policy in this area?
1. Supplementary recommendations
1.1. Ensuring that EU drug related aid programmes foster human rights in
developing countries
1.2. There is disturbing evidence that EU drug related aid programmes have enabled
human rights abuses including the use of the death penalty. It is recommended that
the next EU strategy follows the recommendations of Harm Reduction International:
1.2.1. In keeping with Resolution 2007/2274(INI) of the European Parliament, the
European Commission should develop guidelines governing international funding for
country level and regional drug enforcement activities to ensure such programmes do
not result in human rights violations, including the application of the death penalty.
1.2.2. 28
1.2.3. The abolition of the death penalty for drug-related offences, or at the very least
evidence of an ongoing and committed moratorium on executions, should be made a
pre-condition of financial assistance and other support for drug enforcement.
1.2.4. European donor states should develop and apply similar human rights guidelines to
bilateral funding agreements for drug enforcement.
1.2.5. Donors should provide specific funding for the development of human rights capacity
within UNODC and for the development of international guidelines on human rights
and drug control 33
1.3. Meeting the challenge of new legal highs
1.3.1. We confirm that the next EU drug strategy should contain a commitment to
assess the viability of alternative regulatory systems for legal highs across
Europe as a matter of urgency
33
ibid
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence
1.4. Emphasising a health focus in drug policy
1.4.1. A health focus on substance misuse must be pursued and to reflect its
importance in EU drug policy it should be made clear in a future Strategy that
the lead role for Drug Policy should be transferred from the Justice to the
Health and Consumers Directorate. To reflect the harms focus of the future
Strategy it should also be a combined drugs and alcohol strategy.
2. EU anti-trafficking policy
2.1 EU anti-trafficking measures are a feature of the actions of member states either
acting alone or in co-operation sometimes with the assistance of EU institutions such
as Europol or with European funding. They also operate in other regions of the
world as part of EU supported, drug related aid programmes.
2.2 As far as anti-trafficking operations within the EU are concerned, the EMCDDA
(2011) has drawn attention to the number of undercover operations being
undertaken to counter trafficking. It points to the danger that, under certain
circumstances and without careful scrutiny, they may be in contravention of rulings
from the European Court of Human rights. These state that undercover operations
should not infringe the right to a fair trial and should not include an incitement to
commit an offence that would not have been otherwise committed.
2.3 The EU drug strategy (2005 -2012) set out its aims in relation to drug related aid to
developing countries as - assisting third countries, including neighbouring European
countries and key drug-producing and transit countries, to be more effective in drug demand
and supply reduction, both through closer cooperation among EU-Member States and by
mainstreaming drug issues into the general common foreign and security policy dialogue and
development cooperation. New cooperation agreements between the EU and third countries
should continue to include a specific clause on cooperation in drugs control. 34
2.4 Our first submission focussed on the issue of imbalance in the EU aid programme in
relation to drugs
Such information as has been provided by the EU 35 indicated (where budgetary information
was available) that in 2010 there were no assistance programmes purely for demand
reduction, 35.55m euros worth of programmes comprising a mix of demand reduction and
enforcement initiatives and 82.7m euros worth of purely enforcement programmes. The
emphasis clearly remains on supply side enforcement. The EU objective to encourage third
countries to adopt a balanced approach to drug policy is undermined when it remains a net
exporter of imbalance. 36
2.5 Also, the EU supports programmes in countries for the development of supply side
interventions with respect to drug trafficking where human rights abuses occur..
2.6 In the first place, the All-Party Parliamentary Group are persuaded by the detailed
and informed points set out by Dr Axel Klein in his written evidence to the
http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/combating_drugs/c22569_en.htm
COMMISSION STAFF WORKING DOCUMENT (2010):accompanying the REPORT FROM THE COMMISSION on the
Mid-Term Review of the implementation of the EU Drugs Action Plan (2009-2012)
36 All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform (2011): Submission to the SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE
EUROPEAN UNION, Sub-Committee on Home Affairs - INQUIRY INTO THE EU DRUGS STRATEGY (2005-12):
September 2011
34
35
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence
Committee with respect to the likely contribution of some of the EU’s aid
programmes to human rights abuses in Transit countries.
2.7 In the second place there a number of programmes supported by the EU and EU
member states in countries where the death penalty is retained for drug offences in
contravention to both EU and UN statements on human rights.
2.8 Amnesty International have drawn attention to the executions so far this year of 488
people including children for drug trafficking offences in Iran. Most have been
executed after trials with no access to a lawyer and no right of appeal. Iran has been
assisted in what it calls its ‘war on drugs’ by significant amounts of aid from the
European Union. It is currently providing funding of 9.5 million euros over three
years for a project based in Iran to strengthen regional anti-narcotics cooperation
between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. 37
2.9 An earlier project supported by the EU involved a bilateral agreement for Iran to
build 25 border posts to aid the Afghan Border Police in reducing the flow of drugs
across the Afghanistan/Iran border. During the lifetime of the project, sixteen Afghan
children were arrested by Iranian border authorities, convicted of trafficking drugs
across the Afghanistan/Iranian border and executed. 38
2.10
In response to these issues we would like to draw to the committee’s
attention the recommendations of Harm Reduction International in respect of aid
programmes
2.10.1 In keeping with Resolution 2007/2274(INI) of the European Parliament, the
European Commission should develop guidelines governing international funding for
country level and regional drug enforcement activities to ensure such programmes
do not result in human rights violations, including the application of the death
penalty.
2.10.1.1 28
2.10.2 The abolition of the death penalty for drug-related offences, or at the very least
evidence of an ongoing and committed moratorium on executions, should be made a
pre-condition of financial assistance and other support for drug enforcement.
2.10.2.1 European donor states should develop and apply similar human rights
guidelines to bilateral funding agreements for drug enforcement.
2.10.2.2 Donors should provide specific funding for the development of human rights
capacity within UNODC and for the development of international guidelines on
human rights and drug control 39
3 Alternative regulatory systems for new legal highs
Amnesty International (2011): Addicted to Death: Executions for Drug Offences in Iran: London 2011
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE13/090/2011/en/0564f064-e965-4fad-b0626de232a08162/mde130902011en.pdf (191211)
38 Lines R, Barret D, Gallahue P(2010) : Complicity or abolition: The Death Penalty and International Support for Drug
Enforcement: 2010 International Harm Reduction Association
39 ibid
37
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence
3.1 In our original submission we recommended that the EU: examine, as a priority and
report on prospects for different forms of regulation for psychoactive substances
(recommendation 2.5.5). We would like to offer some further supporting evidence for
our recommendation.
3.2 The APPG is beginning an Inquiry into the regulation of legal highs and the role, if any
of the Misuse of Drugs Act in this field. We have been supported in this work by
Doctor Jonathan Hurlow who is engaged in a scoping study of the potential range of
regulatory systems that we may look to as a means of regulation to minimise harms
and enable health based interventions should they be required. So far he has drawn
up a list of a possible 12 regulatory instruments from the UK and many more from
abroad.
3.3 Examples from the UK could include Trading Standards legislation; the Medicines
and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency overseeing the regulation of these
substances under the Intoxicating Substances (Supply) Act 1985. Such a control
framework would or could require the licensing of suppliers; proper labelling of
harms and adverse effects; age restrictions; control over the composition of certain
substances to reduce risks; and appropriate sanctions for breaches – criminal or civil.
Other examples can be drawn from systems to regulate the use of alcohol or
tobacco consumption and gambling. These are activities that may have associated
harms and risks but nonetheless are activities that European governments choose to
try and influence rather than prohibit.
3.4 As far as developments abroad are concerned we have been very interested in the
report of the New Zealand Law Commission ‘Controlling and Regulating Drugs’.
They have proposed that for new drugs, prohibition should be considered as a last
resort. They recommend that anyone who wishes to manufacture, import or
distribute a new psychoactive substance should apply for an approval for the
substance before doing so. The Administrator of the system would be a Regulator
who would be responsible for approving a new psychoactive drug using a number of
criteria including the nature of any harms involved; how possible regulation is with
respect to the drug; the likely consequences of any proposed regulation or
prohibition and; potential effects on other drug use. Controls would be in place re
advertising, age, sales locations etc.
3.5 The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform Inquiry will assess the
viability of alternative regulatory instruments that could be applied within the UK.
3.6 We confirm that the next EU drug strategy should contain a commitment to assess
the viability of alternative regulatory systems for legal highs across Europe as a
matter of urgency
4 Has agreement to control the illegal supply of drugs across Europe been
successful
4.1 We have already submitted evidence that in terms of controlling supply the EU drug
strategy, by the admission of the EU itself, has been very unsuccessful. It has failed to
make any significant impact on the availability of illegal drugs or the prevalence of
drug use across Europe. Drug use prevalence has remained relatively stable at a high
All Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform – Supplementary written evidence
level throughout the lifetime of the EU drug strategy and there is little evidence that
more punitive drug policy has a long term impact on drug use prevalence. There is
evidence that more liberal policies can have better outcomes in terms of treatment,
other health benefits and re-entry into employment for those dependant on
substance misuse.
4.2 According to Professors Peter Reuter and Alex Stevens (2007) 40. There is little
evidence that drug policy influences either the number of drug users or the share of
users who are dependent. Trends in the use of particular drugs are thought to be as
much to do with cultural or social influences and fluctuations in the quality and
availability of those drugs as anything else. The UKDPC report ‘Taking Drugs
Seriously (2011) draws attention to commentaries on the rise of the use of the ‘legal
high’ mephedrone which suggest that it may well have substituted for ecstasy and
BZP which had become restricted and of questionable quality. Other evidence
suggests that legal highs were possibly taken up, for similar reasons, as a substitute
for cocaine.
4.3 The situation that we face is summed up by the EMCDDA (2011) in its latest annual
report
4.4 Polydrug use, including the combination of illicit drugs with alcohol, and sometimes,
medicines and non-controlled substances, has become the dominant pattern of drug use in
Europe. This reality presents a challenge to both European drug policies and responses. A
comprehensive policy 41framework for addressing psychoactive substance use is still lacking
in most Member States
4.5 The complexity and intractability of this problem in which the distinction between
legal and illegal psychoactive substances is increasingly exposed as arbitrary suggests
that a far more sophisticated and nuanced response is needed. We certainly do not
want a drug control system that in any way encourages further use of alcohol as is
suggested by the trends described above. Last year, alcohol accounted for 945,000
hospital admissions 42 and, according to the Home Office, was thought to be
implicated in nearly half of all crimes of violence 43.
4.6 A health focus on substance misuse must be pursued and to reflect its importance in
EU drug policy it should be made clear in a future Strategy that the lead role for
Drug Policy should be transferred from the Justice to the Health and Consumers
Directorate. To reflect the harms focus of the future Strategy it should also be a
combined drugs and alcohol strategy.
22 December 2011
40
Reuter P, Stevens A (2007): A Review of UK Drug Policy for the UKDPC: London 2007
Alcohol Concern factsheet (December 2010): http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/publications/factsheets/factsheet-theimpact-of-alcohol-on-health (191211)
43 http://www.alcoholissues.co.uk/alcohol-crime.html
42
Rev Eric Blakebrough – Written Evidence
Rev Eric Blakebrough – Written Evidence
When US President Richard Nixon received reports of heroin abuse among servicemen in
Vietnam, he set about securing international collaboration among law enforcement agencies
to prevent drugs traffic out of the countries of origin. American political power and military
might have secured international agreements on prohibition and border controls; but border
controls have not proved difficult to circumvent. In the 27 years when I was in daily contact
with drug users in Kingston-upon-Thames, I was aware of frequent police action to disrupt
drug trafficking which caused temporary agitation among addicts who were kept waiting for
drugs to arrive; but deliveries were normally resumed within less than a few hours.
1. The first concern for the American administration was the prospect of thousands of
servicemen returning home after having become addicts as a result of using heroin to
relieve boredom, or relieve the symptoms of trauma. (In the event, most who had only
used heroin occasionally had no drug problems once they returned home and were
received into the loving arms of their families). Expecting an epidemic of heroin
addiction, President Nixon personally commissioned Professor Vincent Dole to devise an
effective treatment programme. The pioneer work of Professor Dole and Dr Nyswander
established Methadone Treatment used in most countries of American influence in the
world. The American Methadone Treatment Association gave birth to the European
Opiate Addiction Treatment Association (EUROPAD) in 1994, to promote the
treatment of drug addiction in the EU.
2. In the EU, public awareness of illicit drug use surfaced during the counter culture
movements in the 1960’s. Smoking cannabis became the identification mark of who was
in, and who was out, of the youth rebellion. In that context, illicit drug use was seen as a
matter of law and order. In reality, it was matter of youth culture.
3. There is a widespread opinion that cannabis is not addictive. This is a matter of dispute.
Professor Griffith Edwards argues in the Report of the Expert Group on the Effects of
Cannabis Use (1982) ‘that a possibility and significance of a dependence potential’ for
cannabis must be taken seriously. No doubt, such risks should be taken seriously, but
should this possibility at the lower end of a continuum between chronic dependence and
habit be the basis for laws which criminalise large numbers of citizens? Are the risks
greater than those associated with alcohol and tobacco?
4. Public attitudes to illicit drug use are changing. The presence of criminal gangs on housing
estates call for police action and prosecutions, but it is the anti social behaviour which is
the cause of public anger; the allegations that drugs are involved is often only an attempt
to engage the urgent attention of the police. Parents whose children use drugs complain
about the lack of leisure facilities in their neighbourhood, or agonise over the long
waiting lists for drug treatment. When the death of Amy Winehouse was reported
recently, The Sun published a whole page article by Russell Brand in which he said,” All
we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic
affectation, but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats
addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care.”
Rev Eric Blakebrough – Written Evidence
5. Recommendations for an effective European drugs policy were made by an Expert
Group under the auspices of the UN European Development Programme in 1975. That
study examined the effectiveness of law enforcement policies, medical treatment options,
and the effectiveness of education programmes. None of these responses were thought
likely to succeed unless they included community involvement in programmes for the
social rehabilitation of drug users. (SOA/ESDP/1972/7). That many US servicemen
returning from Vietnam did not have problems resulting from their occasional use of
heroin, is likely to be because they were ‘returning home’. Where a drug addict
completes a period of treatment and rehabilitation, they need a supportive community to
return to.
6. Commissions of the European Parliament in 1980, 1990, and 1994, have all recognised
the importance of health concerns in developing drugs policies, but the present EU drugs
strategy is still orientated towards prohibition and control. There is need of
collaboration among treatment agencies in the EU. Leaving drug treatment to national
governments, or regional and local decision making, has unfortunate consequences. In
the past, inadequate treatment facilities in Ireland, resulted in many Irish nationals
presenting for treatment in the UK. More recently, there was an influx of Italians seeking
treatment.
7. Drug addiction is a chronic condition where addicts who attempt rehabilitation and
successfully complete a cycle of therapy, often return to using drugs after a brief period
of time, usually within two years. Most addicts have a sincere desire to achieve
abstinence, but the majority, even after heroic efforts, in the end tragically relapse. It is
naïve to think that short periods of detoxification and rehabilitation will work, except
where the drug use has been occasional over a short period of time.
8. Methadone treatment programmes are a part of harm reduction strategies. While in
treatment, mortality rates are low, involvement in crime is reduced, measures for the
prevention of the spread of HIV can be implemented, and other health risks can be
addressed. Most people while still on methadone can achieve higher standards of
education, most can be employed, and most can be good parents. Those who make little
progress, are nevertheless cared for and are less likely to continue in anti social
behaviour. Low dosages in UK (compared with USA) result in some patients ‘topping up’
on heroin and other drugs, especially alcohol. This does not altogether negate the
positive results.
9. In some parts of the EU, heroin has been prescribed to addicts. I have had the
opportunity to observe this experiment, but the need for at least twice daily dosing and
the high cost of medically prescribed heroin, together with security issues, have not
convinced me of the advantages of heroin prescribing over methadone treatment.
10. People who have stabilised on methadone and made progress on the path to
rehabilitation can often reduce their dose and may even achieve abstinence. Others
benefit from the opportunity for residential treatment in a detox and rehab unit. Unless
this is an appropriate referral, the success rate is usually disappointing. The high fallout
rate, the likelihood of relapse within two years, and the high cost, should make this a
carefully considered option and not the main provision in any national drugs strategy.
Rev Eric Blakebrough – Written Evidence
11. The EU, and in particular EMCDDA, has an important role in identifying ‘breakthrough’
projects. By putting in the research and publishing the outcomes, good innovations and
best practice can be replicated elsewhere. Portugal’s decade of experiment with
decriminalisation of drugs needs further evaluation by the EMCDDA in order to show if
this is a way forward for the EU.
12. Many voluntary organisations, such as Kaleidoscope, have a good record in providing
treatment and reducing harm. These voluntary agencies lighten the case load of Social
Services and of Emergency and Accident Departments. They help to create a more
caring society by involving citizens in tackling problems in their local neighbourhood.
Innovation has often been stifled by the contract culture in the UK. which forces
voluntary projects to compete for tenders to meet the preconceived requirements of
purchasing authorities. The tick box system is the easiest and least useful method of
making competing projects accountable. The EU has an important role in protecting and
promoting innovative projects.
13. Drug policies are not always evidence based. The EU, being independent of national
governments, has an important role in promoting evidence based policies.
1 August 2011
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Evidence Session No. 3.
Heard in Public.
Questions 60 - 117
WEDNESDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Blencathra
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Richard
Lord Tomlinson
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
Witness: Rev. Eric Blakebrough, MBE, Minister, John Bunyan Baptist Church, Kingston,
and founder and former Chair, Kaleidoscope Project, gave evidence.
Q60 The Chairman: Welcome, and thank you, Mr Blakebrough, very much for having
come. I understand you have travelled for quite a long way to get to this session. It is very
kind of you to come and give us some evidence. Our feeling is that your professional and
general experience will be of value to us in this work that we are doing to try to help to
shape a little bit the European Union’s next five-year drugs strategy. The present five-year
strategy expires in 2012, and there will undoubtedly be another strategy. I think that what
you will tell us this morning will be one part of the mosaic that helps us put together a
report on that. Lord Mawson asked me to pass on his sadness that he was unable to be
present today. He had an engagement that he could not get out of.
Now as you probably know, this session is open to the public. The webcast of the session
goes out live as an audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the Parliamentary
website. A verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence, and that will be put on the
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Parliamentary website too. A few days after this evidence session you will be sent a copy of
the transcript to check for accuracy. We would be grateful if you could advise us of any
corrections as quickly as possible. If after this session you wish to clarify or amplify any
points made during your evidence, or have any additional points to make, you are very
welcome to submit supplementary evidence to us.
Now perhaps you could just give us a short introduction from yourself and your experience
in the field. If you wanted to say something general before we get into questions and
answers, you are very welcome to do so. If you would rather just move straight into the
questions—and there may be some supplementary questions that are not on the list with
which you have been provided in advance—then that is equally perfectly acceptable. It is
entirely up to you. Over to you.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: My Lord Chairman, thank you very much for the opportunity of
presenting a point of view from a voluntary agency. I am a Baptist Minister, and I went to my
church in Kingston in 1967. It was the beginning of the youth movement of the 1960s and
1970s, and that included quite a lot of drug abuse. My church being in that situation decided
that we ought to provide some facilities for the young people in our area who were
experiencing some difficulty in that. That is my background, and I would prefer to just
answer your questions. Thank you.
Q61 The Chairman: Fine. Thank you very much. We will move on to the questions.
The first one that I would like to raise is very general: the EU drugs strategy, which as I have
described is currently running and has been for quite a few years, has broadly speaking
accepted that different member states are free to apply different drugs policies and indeed
do so. This is therefore an area where broadly speaking that awful phrase “subsidiarity”
applies. That is to say, it is accepted that there is not an overall top-down solution, which
should be applied throughout the European Union. Do you think it is right that that kind of
subsidiarity approach should continue, or do you think it would be desirable to have a
greater degree of harmonisation of the 27 member states’ drugs policies at EU level?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I think that the drugs scene has a certain cultural element, and that
varies from district to district. Even within the United Kingdom there is room for different
approaches and different innovations. I would say the only overall need is that there should
be an acceptance throughout Europe for what is known as harm minimisation. Otherwise
you reach the situation where, if people require a methadone approach, for example, and
that is not available in their district, they will simply migrate to somewhere where that is
available.
That has resulted, from time to time, in a street agency like our own having somebody come
with a piece of paper with just our address, and they can hardly speak English. This
occurred 10 years ago particularly with regard to people from Northern Ireland, and then
later from Italy and Portugal. The facilities for methadone maintenance were not, at that
time, available everywhere, so people simply migrated. I think that some harmonisation is
desirable from that point of view, but mainly it needs to be a local response.
Q62 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Could you tell us more about what you mean
by the different cultural aspects of the drugs scene? What does that mean, exactly?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: In the 1960s, in Kingston upon Thames, where our work began, it
was a middle-class, affluent area, and the young people who were rebelling against that were
people who were not comfortable with the middle-class aspirations of their family, for
example. That was a reaction to parents who seemed over-keen on their academic
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
achievement, going to university, getting a good career or something. A small proportion of
young people rebelled against that.
Where we are working in South Wales, for example, a place like Llanelli, that is not the
situation at all. The situation there is unemployment, leading to boredom. When people are
bored, they will often seek release through alcohol, tobacco or drugs. The cultural
difference is important. In different countries, the cultural background is different.
Therefore a different approach is necessary. Whereas in one place—in Kingston—the
approach needed to be to show that the agency was familiar with the alternative lifestyle and
to some extent appreciated it, whereas in another area it needs workers who are very
aware of the problems of long-term or generational unemployment.
Q63 Lord Avebury: I find it very difficult to believe that boredom alone could persuade
people to take up drugs. If they are unemployed, presumably they do not have as much
money as others in their generation. Is there not a cost disincentive to taking up either
alcohol or drugs amongst young people who are unemployed? Why doesn’t cost have a
greater effect on people’s propensity to use these harmful substances?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: The situation is that if a person is bored, and they are offered a
substance, told it is exciting, etc, they might well be tempted to try that. With regard to the
cost of drugs, that can be met by the addict themselves becoming a low-level dealer. In
other words, your supplier will give you enough for three people, on condition that you are
selling a couple yourself. In a way, the fact of a lack of money actually promotes the
continued supply of drugs. It does seem an anomaly, but I think that is the truth. I have
never known a drug dependant who has dropped out of the scene because they cannot
afford to stay in it.
Q64 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: The EU drug strategy had three objectives: to
reduce the demand for and supply of drugs, to promote international cooperation and
thirdly to promote research, information and evaluation. Would you like to update us on
the extent to which these aims are being met? Are you of the view that a control-oriented
policy is the right way forward?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Obviously under any system, even if drugs were decriminalised,
there would be a need for some regulation, as there is for alcohol and tobacco. I can see
the point of some control. It would be a matter of some priority for the European Union to
have a policy about control. However, trying to control a drug substance is almost
impossible, because people can use a vast range of substances. I travelled the other day and
was met by a barrage of police dogs sniffing at me. That would have detected some drugs,
but it certainly would not detect pharmaceuticals for example.
The difficulty in controlling supply alone is that if that is your main strategy, it is a strategy
that has failed and will fail. I have never known, on the scene, a time when people cannot
get their supplies. There is sometimes agitation, if there has been a police action in the area,
and news has come to people that so-and-so has been busted, and that particular address
where they have been able to obtain supplies has now closed for business, as it were. There
is temporary agitation. You can see a group of people conferring with each other, but within
hours they seem to have obtained alternative supplies. We have never had people come
into the clinic in a state of severe withdrawal symptoms and pleading for drugs because they
cannot get their regular supply. I think that shows that control alone, as your main strategy,
is bound to fail.
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
With regard to research, I think that is somewhere where the European Union has been
good. The Europad magazine contains regular articles. They are, unfortunately, mainly of a
very technical, medical nature, whereas the problem of people on the drugs scene is not an
individual psychopathology, mainly. It is mainly that they have been drawn into a particular
group of people and there is a certain way of living, in the same way that alcohol is often a
communal thing. Although they do very well in publishing research, my criticism of the
research is sometimes that it is very much medically orientated and not sufficiently, perhaps,
down-to-earth. Yes, the EU does good work, but I greatly regret that it concentrates on
control, because I do not think that will be effective. I do not see how it can be effective.
We have a very long coastline. I am living in Pembrokeshire now and it would be impossible
to control all those little inlets.
Q65 The Chairman: I think what you said was that you did not see how a policy that
operated by control alone would work.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: That is right.
Q66 The Chairman: Does that mean that you do see a role for control, particularly of
especially harmful drugs, in a policy that also addresses demand and all the other aspects?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. Some element of control is very necessary. For example,
even if we decriminalise, it would be important to protect young people, for example, so an
age limit and all the usual matters of controlling a substance would have to be considered.
That would require police action, and it would have to include controlling entrance to ports
as much as possible. It serves a useful purpose, but it manifestly fails as the main plank. I
admit the police are relaxing a little more on this, but at one point, if in Kingston you
phoned the police and said, “Somebody has found some drugs,” the police car would be
there within moments. It was a top priority – more of a priority than a burglary or even an
assault on somebody. I think that priority comes from American legislation originally, and is
imposed on European states to quite an extent. As I read EU policy that seems to be a great
priority. I think it should play a part, but I would prefer that many more resources are put
towards treatment. If you can treat people effectively—and you can—you can reduce
supply, and all the harm that results from an uncontrolled industry, almost, in the hands of
criminal agencies.
Q67 The Chairman: Of course, in Portugal, for example, there has been no problem in
EU terms about their decriminalisation policy.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes, indeed.
Q68 The Chairman: It really goes slightly back to the first question, in a way.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. I certainly endorse the idea of decriminalisation, for example,
but even with decriminalisation you would have to have some regulation.
The Chairman: Yes, I take that point.
Q69 Lord Tope: Mr Blakebrough, away from this place I am still a cabinet member on
Sutton Council responsible for community safety, right next door to Kingston. I have been
aware of the Kaleidoscope project pretty well since it started. This is a question that we
often ponder here: what impact, if any, does policymaking at the European level have at local
level, on projects like the Kaleidoscope project?
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: It can have a very beneficial impact indeed. In the case of
Kaleidoscope, for instance, the expert seminar that occurred at a critical stage of our
development, which saw the importance of community involvement in the integration and
rehabilitation of drug users, was tremendously important. Up until that point, we were
asked by all strategy documents to run our agency as if we were a clinic. We were asked
not to allow people to congregate. How ridiculous. They are congregating everywhere else,
but must not congregate near your premises. We were asked to give them quarter-of-anhour intervals between appointments, so presumably we were sitting around waiting for the
next one to come in. There were all sorts of things like that.
European strategy at that point, which emphasised the importance of community
involvement, was extremely beneficial. Also, networking has been very important. Europad
conferences have often enabled practitioners to learn from each other, and it has
transformed some clinics when they have gone to one in another country, for example, and
seen an atmosphere that prompts them to think, “Is our agency as good as that?” I think
strategy that comes from the European Union is to be welcomed, but it is dominated at the
moment, in my opinion, by clinical matters. I do not think that drug abuse is primarily a
matter of individual psychopathology. It is something to do with dissatisfaction with their
own circumstances, an inability to be comfortable in their life, and that requires a much
more holistic approach than just simply dealing with the neurotransmission or something.
Q70 The Chairman: So what you are saying, I think, would tend to support the view
that, say, cities or towns in various parts of the European Union have quite a lot to both
communicate to, and learn from, each other.
Rev. Blakebrough: Yes.
Q71 The Chairman: And that processes that facilitate and encourage that are
something that you would welcome.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. Very much so.
Q72 Lord Tomlinson: I would like to ask you what you feel are the practical benefits to
those working with drug users of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction’s efforts to share instances of best practice and breakthrough projects. Do the
efforts go far enough, and are there any significant omissions? To that question, I want to
just refer to paragraph 12 of your written evidence, where you dealt with the EMCDDA.
There you say, “Portugal’s decade of experiment with decriminalisation of drugs needs
further evaluation by the EMCDDA in order to show if this is a way forward.” I refer you to
that because you seem to be very precise in your answer about decriminalisation.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. At the moment, the difficulty with the evaluation monitoring
done by the European Union is that it is not communicated very much, particularly to the
voluntary sector, which is the main provider of support for drug dependants. The difficulty
is that their conferences will take place in different cities in Europe. Funding is not available
for ordinary delegates to get to them, and when you do get to them the quality of the
conferences is very variable indeed.
If you compare that with the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid
Dependence, those conferences are supported by the various commercial interests, who
supply equipment or something like that, so the cost is kept down. The hotel is usually of a
very good standard, the speeches and presentations are excellent, whereas some of the
Europad conferences have been fairly chaotic, often a very robust, and pointless discussion
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
about whether harm minimisation is treatment or not—the number of times one has heard
that debate repeated. Yes, I think it could be improved, but nevertheless their journal is a
good quality publication; their conferences could be made more popular. Funding will be
necessary if people from the voluntary sector can afford to send members of staff for three
or four days to a city in Europe. That is a very expensive thing, and no provision would be
available in your contracts to attend such conferences, therefore you do not benefit from
those facilities. There is a weakness there in transmitting that.
Also, the evaluation of Portugal, for instance, is a very interesting thing, although it would
not apply to a number of countries. The number of people in Portugal who have been
involved in the drug scene, as a proportion of the population, is much lower than in Britain,
for example. It would have to be expertly evaluated, not just, “Well, it has worked,” or
something. We need something a little better than that. That is something that could well
be done.
Q73 Lord Tomlinson: Can I just follow it up with another question on the same area?
You spoke very clearly about what you called cultural differences and you elaborated on
what those cultural differences were. In those circumstances, is there any real utility in
having a pan-European body passing down best practice? It seems to me the logic of what
you said is that best practice for one might well not be true of the other.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I would very much endorse that. The fact that a particular country
produces a policy that seems to fit that situation, if it is simply that another country, for
political reasons, sometimes, finds that a congenial idea and simply fastens on to it and says,
“We will bring this expert over from some other country to tell us their marvellous
system,” it may well not work in another. I can testify to that very directly. I was asked at
one point by the Government in Nepal to propose a treatment modality for Kathmandu. It
was the end of the hippie trail, and they were suddenly finding themselves with people. I
went with the background of my work in Kingston, having a very definite idea of how that
would be effective, and frankly, after a few months, we found that that approach, in that
situation, was not effective. Therefore we invited some nationals to come over and to work
in our clinic, and then interpret that in their situation. It was a quite different approach.
Nevertheless, hearing of good practice somewhere else often does apply. For example, for
harm minimisation, which has sometimes not been popular in the UK, to hear of its benefits
elsewhere widens the menu, as it were, for people to consider. It does have great value, but
I do not think it can simply be taken off the shelf of another country and applied, even within
a country.
Q74 Lord Avebury: You have already talked about how citizen participation could
influence European policy, in answer to the Lord Chairman’s question about the involvement
of cities, for example. I would like to apply that to what you have said about the opinion
that research has been concentrated too heavily on the clinical aspects of drug policy, and
not enough on social and cultural factors in the etiology of drug use. If that was the general
opinion amongst practitioners, is there any way that citizens collectively in the European
Union can feed that back to those making the decisions at a European level? What
mechanisms are there for common views—if what you have said does represent a common
view—to be transmitted upwards to those formulating the policies?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. Citizen participation is essential, in my view. If a person is
uncomfortable in a community, or a whole group, often a significant group of people, are
causing a lot of harm to themselves and their community, it could be because they are not
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
respectful—that is the least important—right up to definitely in rebellion, which is very
serious. Unless the disaffected group and the main community can gain some understanding
of each other, progress will not be made. It is tremendously important that the community
and citizens at an ordinary street level are involved. That is a criticism, for instance, if
services are entirely or mainly hospital-based. The citizen does not get to know about this.
Just to give you an example, one of the volunteers in our programme is 91 years of age. She
arrives at half past eight in the morning; she happens to enjoy good health. Her hospitality,
greeting people and giving people coffee, is a great benefit to the clients who come, because
they can see that here is a middle-class lady, and a member of the older generation, who is
prepared to talk, and make herself vulnerable to them. At the same time, she goes to her
church, which is very much a middle-class congregation, and they hear that she spends a lot
of her time volunteering at Kaleidoscope. “We hear awful things about Kaleidoscope in the
press. You go down there? Are you afraid to go down there? What happened?” She speaks
at the women’s meeting, and so forth. That kind of dialogue is essential if we are to have the
possibility of people rehabilitating. Unless the main community is prepared to be
understanding of drug dependants, it will be an uphill task to be rehabilitated.
With regard to feeding back to the EU, that is a difficulty, isn’t it? Isn’t that a general
difficulty and a general criticism of the EU: how, from the lower levels, you feed back to it?
The way that could be greatly improved is by making those conferences a real occasion, as in
the American situation. The American methadone conferences have about 4,000 people
coming, and put up, and are very well organised. Lots of people get to hear each other. I
have been able to express views there, for instance, with regard to needles and syringe
exchange, views that are not congenial to an American audience immediately, but people can
consider something. Because the conferences of Europad, as it is called, are often very
restricted and medically dominated, you get top-down policy and not streetwise policy and
streetwise wisdom. There is a lot of wisdom on the street, and the best way to know how
to deal with drug dependants is to listen to drug addicts. That is different from listening to
eminent and very skilled physicians, for instance, who know about neurotransmission and
the physiology, etc. The street scene is very different from dealing with the pharmacology of
an individual.
Q75 Lord Avebury: Can I take you back to the example that I gave? That is, that you
told us that the research at European Union level was far too heavily concentrated on the
clinical aspect of drug use, and not on the social and cultural aspects. My question to you
initially was whether there was any mechanism for feeding that opinion back to the
policymakers at the European level. Can I make it more direct and specific? Have you ever
tried, in your dealings with people at EU level, to say to people that their research
programmes are wrongly structured, in that they concentrate too heavily on the clinical and
not enough on the social and cultural aspects of drug use?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I must confess, and I think it applies to all the voluntary sector, we
do not feed in as much as we should, or as would be valuable. However, the truth of the
matter is that we do not have the resources to do that. Nor do we necessarily have the
ambition to be famous for our research, or something, whereas an aspiring PhD student has
a lot of reason to want to devote time to writing up an article, sending it off to the journal,
and getting it published with the name, etc. We ought to be more active, I agree. I have not
been present very frequently, I must admit, because of lack of funding. I very much enjoy
going to foreign cities and participating in conferences but the opportunity to do that is not
common. Now with funding contracts, nowhere will you find a contract now given to a
voluntary organisation that includes sufficient money to participate.
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Lord Avebury: That is important.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: It is very important, because it deprives us of learning from each
other and contributing.
Q76 The Chairman: How do you think you would guard against the criticism that
would inevitably arise, that a lot of money was being spent on expensive gatherings that did
not have much focus or purpose, and so on? I am not suggesting that that would be a true
story, but I am asking how you would guard against that. If one was to argue that the
European Union ought to be doing more in this way, it would inevitably raise this criticism.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I agree, and I think some of the criticism is justified. There are
people who seem to fly around the world in business class, and stay in the big hotels, and
they are the same people who attend all of these things, so somewhere or other they are
being funded. They seem to enjoy doing this. I have even been in the situation where two
of these different people have given the same speech, including the same joke. It is obvious
that in some office or other there is some common pool. They have learned from each
other.
Q77 The Chairman: I am not sure everyone in this room would be able to plead “Not
Guilty” to that.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: What I am saying is that I understand the criticism, and I think the
solution to that, or at least something that could be put in place, is that the secretariat needs
to be chosen very carefully. The programme and who is invited is tremendously important,
and who is funded is important. At the moment, if you are a certain kind of organisation
that happens to attract a lot of public support, your chief executive can easily go to
somewhere. In the voluntary sector, however, that is very rare. Very few of us attend
things, and when we do, we sometimes do it at our own expense. That is quite often the
case. That is a challenge to the EU. How do you ensure that this is happening?
It is also a challenge to the British Government, because the contracts mainly come to us as
a result of Government decisions, and they are very tightly drawn. They are distorting
clinical practice, because they have fixed upon a particular approach, and your contract is
more or less using you as a retail chemist to give out methadone, or something. It is not
encouraging the innovation and holistic approach that has proved so very effective, whereas
the very narrow clinical approach has proved time and time again to be not very effective.
Q78 Lord Judd: You are making a very powerful argument, it seems to me, for the need
for creativity and imagination, and space for this in the work that is being done, together
with sensitivity. However, you are also making a very strong case for a context of solidarity
with those affected by drug-taking. If you were arguing this at European level, what specific
example would you give of how listening and talking has changed your own attitude to drug
addiction?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: For example, when our church became aware, through the local
press, of the difficulties in our area, we decided to do something about it, as churches naively
try to do. We developed the basement of our church for such a purpose, and nobody came.
In spite of our best efforts, we were making no impact at all—and they were our best
efforts. The breakthrough came when three what would have been called hippies happened
to come, looked around it, and said: “Oh, thank you very much.” We said, “Hold on, before
you leave, what is wrong?” They said: “What do you mean, what is wrong?” “Why is this
not a facility that anybody wants to come to?” They said, “Well, the whole thing is wrong.”
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
“What do you mean, the whole thing is wrong?” “The décor is wrong,” etc. The decision
was made at their instruction: the small platform with a huge Oriental rug on it, which was
threadbare, therefore obtained cheaply, but too big for domestic use. The décor had to be
quiet, and not the décor we had thought was youthful. The food had to be vegetarian,
whereas we had thought other things would be more successful. The whole thing had to
change very radically.
Listening to your patients or your clients, and learning from them, is absolutely essential,
especially as it changes all the time. The actual drugs of abuse change. There is a time when
Tuinal was the main drug of abuse in Kingston. I do not think anybody now knows about
Tuinal. Then there was a period of heroin and another period of amphetamines, another
period of DF118s when everybody was wanting DF118s, LSD. You could almost tell the
date from what people were into. They are like fashions that change for many people,
although not for some.
Sensitivity of that nature is absolutely vital in this work, because we are dealing with a group
of people who are uncomfortable and therefore are very dangerous to themselves and to
the rest of us. For example, very many of them will have sexual intercourse with people
who are not in the drugs scene. The danger of AIDS is a very good example. It is very
important for us to understand this significant group of people, many of whom are very
creative individuals. Many have degrees from our top universities. Certainly many of ours
have had an Oxbridge degree or something like that. We are in a middle-class area in
Kingston. We are mainly now operating in Wales, I may say, and there the situation is
somewhat different.
Q79 Lord Judd: I must just say, I am very taken by your non-judgmental approach. In
your own work you take harm reduction as highly relevant. While it falls short of making
harm reduction one of the central aims, the latest EU action plan on illegal drugs does
contain greater reference to the implementation of harm reduction measures. Do you think
this represents enough of a commitment to such measures? What in your view are the pros
and cons of an increasing emphasis on harm reduction measures at the European level?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I am very glad that EU strategy now increasingly understands the
importance of harm minimisation. That is a battle that has raged, and gradually it is better
understood, but it is still a very fragile situation. It is very attractive for people in the media,
politicians, and citizens to denigrate harm reduction without understanding, and talk about
people being “parked on methadone”, or something: “We want to put them through detox
and rehab.” If it was that simple, it would be marvellous. Even if it was fairly expensive, if
we could literally put people into a detox and rehab programme for a matter of even six
months, and at the end of that time they became free, that would be fantastic. However, it
is not like that. It is a chronic disease. The receptors of the brain are crying out. It is not
that they are liking these drugs, necessarily; they are needing these drugs. Otherwise they
can be ill. They can shake, and they can feel very unwell. They may not be able to function.
In that situation, it is tremendously important that we look at different options.
The trouble with advocating harm reduction is that it does sound as though you are giving
up. It sounds as though you are saying, “Well, we cannot do much about it. This poor
person, they have this chronic disease. They will relapse in six months’ time, so let us give
up.” That is what it sounds like. I am not exactly comfortable with the term, because it
sounds as though we are not wanting to work with people, which I think is the definition of
treatment.
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
To be honest, that is a very long-term job. It takes a lot of time for people to overcome
their individual traumas, which probably diverted them from normal aspirations of a career
and so forth into the drug scene, for various reasons. Now that they are there and have
developed this chronic dependency, it is a long time. It is ridiculous to have policies that are
increasingly familiar: “Here is your contract”—30 weeks, or 30 months, or some prescribed
period—at the end of which time we are obliged to discharge people from treatment.
Mortality rates escalate, HIV rates escalate, criminal activity escalates, because you are
obliged to exclude them from treatment after a certain period of time, because somebody
has worked out that no therapeutic value is achieved after two years of treatment, or
something. It depends what you mean by therapeutic value. If you mean curing people, I
agree that some people will not easily, even in the long term, be cured. We do not say to a
cancer patient, “Look here, you have had two goes of chemotherapy. This is ridiculous.
Taxpayers’ money is involved. You disappear, and if it is still there in a year’s time, come
back, and we will start the whole process of waiting for an appointment and then getting an
appointment, and then an assessment, and then take you onto treatment.” It is a ridiculous
way to proceed when you want to attract people from this hurting and hurtful scene to
become useful and pleasant, creative people in the community. That can be done, but it
does take time, and it needs persistence.
Harm reduction, unfortunately, does give the impression that we are giving up and therefore
it would be better to put people through detox and rehab. In my opinion—in my
experience; it is not just an opinion—detox and rehab is a very good option for some people
at certain stages, and is a total waste of very high-cost facilities in many cases. The priorities
are worked out on whether this person has been brought up in care, has been a criminal, or
has been admitted to a mental hospital; these are probably the very features that make it less
probable that the person would benefit from that type of treatment. There is a person who
has been in treatment now many, many years. I see him every time I am there. I now live in
Wales, and I am now more familiar with the Welsh projects; we have nine projects in Wales,
not in Kingston. When I see one of these people, I say, “How are you getting on?” “I am
getting it together.” I think that that is pretty good, to still be trying to get it together after
all these years. I would rather he were trying to get it together with our support. It is not
an expensive treatment. A dose of methadone was 29 pence. I am sure it has gone up, but
we are not talking about very expensive for a drug.
The Chairman: Lord Blencathra had a question on methadone that he wanted to put.
Q80 Lord Blencathra: Yes. It is fascinating. In terms of methadone treatment
programmes, is the medical profession a help or a hindrance?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I think on the whole it is helpful, in the sense that the medical
profession have been quicker to see that it is a realistic option, and they have used it
themselves. However, they do not like the voluntary organisation being involved, and they
can be incredibly vigorous in their opposition. We have had a consultant psychiatrist
pretend to be a client in order to see what goes on, in order to criticise.
Q81 Lord Blencathra: So do you find that when you put someone onto methadone, the
doctors take over, the person becomes their patient, confidentiality applies, and you have no
more input into their treatment?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: In our particular case, we have our own physician, which does
ensure that we do not have that problem. However, you are quite right that there is a
tendency for physicians to be jealous. The big example would be in Newport, Gwent, in
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Wales, where it was the chief superintendent of police who heard of Kaleidoscope. She was
a very dynamic police officer. She was fed up with arresting the same people, who were
creating chaos in Commercial Road, where the best shops were. She went back to
Newport and said to social services, “The hospital service at the moment has a two-year
waiting list. It is totally irrelevant. They will not take on many of these people that we are
arresting time and time again.” They invited us in, which had the cooperation of the police,
and resulted in their report back to the city authorities that it had largely cleared the streets
and this facility was very helpful. However, the hospital folk, feeling angry that the money
had been diverted to this organisation instead of their psychiatric department, could not get
hold of community money, so some of them established themselves as a charity, bid, and put
in a lower bid. We lost our contract, having invested all that effort in it. They fell down on
their contract within—I must be careful, this is on video; I do not know how long it was—
not a very long period of time, before even the people who had given the contract realised
that it was not working out very well.
Q82 Lord Blencathra: Finally, do you think that many more people could be put on
methadone than are presently being treated on methadone, and kept on it on a flexible
basis?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Yes. Many, many more could be kept on it on a flexible basis. One
of the difficulties, for example, is this silly idea of catchment areas. If Kingston upon Thames
and its retail outlet said that the only people who could be treated at Bentalls store had to
live in the Royal Borough, the place would go bankrupt. Kaleidoscope used to attract about
150 people per day. We were able to start at quarter to seven in the morning, so that
people could go to work. It was cost-effective, because of our computerised system and all
of this, if you have a large number. Gradually, however, Sutton says, “We want our own,”
Croydon said, “We want our own.” We now have a very truncated system, which has
resulted in a very much smaller number of people, whereas drug dealers do not deliver to
the doorstep. They mainly operate in a centre of population. That is why we need facilities
in strategic centres of population rather than because this is the catchment area of some
particular medical authority, or social services department, or something. There is a lot of
thinking that needs to be done, because a lot of work now is restricted, and is less effective
than it was. That is the opposite of what we want.
Lord Richard: I was going to ask about the differences between treating people in Llanelli
and treating people in Kingston, but I think that may open things up.
Q83 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Good morning. The problem of drug abuse is
obviously something that we are all concerned with. We probably all have the same
objective in trying to reduce the damage that people suffer themselves, and also that society
suffers as a result of drug misuse. People hold very strong opinions on either side of the
argument. Quite often it is just opinion, and of course it is not based on any fact. Does the
European Union do enough, do you think, to promote evidence-based policy, and is there
anything more they could do in this area?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: At the moment you are right. There are very strong feelings, for
instance, among journalists. Journalists will often give publicity to official reports, if they are
fed to them. If the European Union saw its role as a campaign on behalf of drug dependants,
or something like that, a lot more could be done. At the moment, these reports seem to be
quite dry, so I suppose they are not well reported. I would think that for an effective drug
strategy—and presumably everybody is keen on it being effective—it does need a better
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
presentation. I have not seen a report that has captured my imagination. I get these things
from time to time, and some of them I read and think, “That is good.” However, it is not
put out in a popular fashion at all. The result of that is that anybody who can get hold of the
ear of the public and the tabloid newspapers—well, they are all tabloid now, I suppose; I
mean a popular newspaper—can sway public opinion very easily.
Q84 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Are you saying that the evidence is there, but
it is badly presented?
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: I think a lot of evidence is there. The evidence for harm reduction
is very clear. I do not know now whether these statistics are being followed up. When drug
dependants used to be registered with the Home Office, there was a lot of follow-up, and I
know that the research at the time was very simple, in a sense: “These are people who have
been involved in crime, and all sorts of difficulties. When they have come onto treatment,
has crime reduced? Have mortality rates improved? Have health issues like AIDS and
damage to the community been addressed?” All of those issues were very easy for a
researcher to check up on. I do not know whether that work is still being repeated. It
certainly needs presentation to the public, because the public tend to want a quick fix.
There comes a point where you have to say to a parent, “Concentrate now on caring for
your son or daughter. You may have to care for them indirectly if you cannot have them at
home, which I understand, because they will pinch the silver, and so forth. Your efforts
should be towards seeing that this person gets messages that indicate that you actually still
own them as your son or daughter, and you are concerned with them—birthdays,
Christmases and all sorts of occasions. Give up on you trying to cure them. Concentrate
on caring for them, because that is what they need.” We do care for people with other
disabilities, don’t we, that will not be easily cured? We say, “This person is incurable,” or
something like that. Sometimes we do not like to be quite so harsh, but we know that in
fact the chances of them skipping around again are limited. Nevertheless, we do what we
can.
Q85 The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for having come before this
Committee and given us your wisdom, based on your experience. I think that has been very
valuable to us. Thank you.
Rev. Eric Blakebrough: Thank you for the opportunity.
Examination of Witness
Witness: Mike Trace, Chair, International Drug Policy Consortium, gave evidence.
Q86 The Chairman: Mr Trace, thank you very much for coming here this morning to
give evidence to us. We, I think, are broadly familiar with your very wide national and
international experience. As you know, the session is open to the public, a webcast of the
session goes out live as an audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the
parliamentary website. A verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence and that will be
put on the parliamentary website. A few days after this evidence session you will be sent a
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
copy of the transcript to check for accuracy, and we would be grateful if you could advise us
of any corrections as quickly as possible. If after this session you wish to clarify or amplify
any points made during your evidence, or have any additional points to make, you are
welcome to submit supplementary evidence to us.
If you could just introduce yourself briefly that would be very helpful to the Committee. If
you wish to say a few opening words or thoughts on the subject of the next stage of the EU
Drugs Strategy that would be fine, but equally if you prefer to move straight on into
questions, that would be quite acceptable.
Mike Trace: Thank you, Lord Chairman. I have a very brief statement of introduction,
mainly to welcome Your Lordships’ interest in this particular subject at this particular time.
As will become clear from my responses to questions, this period of review of the EU Drugs
Strategy will require a level of scrutiny from member states. This is not an era where that
scrutiny is emerging naturally, so the fact that a Lords Committee is looking at this is very
welcome from a UK perspective. The reason I say that, and obviously because I have been
involved I would say this, is that the UK has largely had a broadly positive influence
technically and politically on the development of the EU Drugs Strategy over a good 20
years.
That level of influence and interest under the current Government is at a low ebb, but we
are not alone in that. Many of the main member states of the European Union are showing
less interest in what is going on in Brussels around Drugs Strategy than they have done for
many years. That is a dangerous situation in my view, mainly because a lot of the good work
that has been done over the years is in danger of being lost—some momentum and good
principles are in danger of being lost. But generally when policymaking in Brussels happens
under the radar, it tends to be less good quality. So it is important that member states
watch it, and your interest will help the UK take a closer interest.
Q87 The Chairman: Could I interrupt you just at that point? Could you just expand
slightly on why you think that loss of interest or loss of focus by member states has
occurred?
Mike Trace: I will try to answer that briefly. Institutionally, most of the member states had
quite strong coordinating institutions through the 1990s and the early part of this century,
and therefore you had representatives in those coordinating institutions that represented
their country in Brussels. What we generally have now, and this is a generalisation across 27
member states, is departmental responsibilities. So we send the appropriate officials to
Brussels to attend the Council’s subgroups and so on and so forth, but it does not have the
broader attention and broader urgency for most member states.
One of the reasons why it does not have that broad urgency is because most member states
are not facing a drugs policy crisis, and they are also not particularly enthusiastic about being
able to solve the drug problem. My appointment to the UK Government in 1997 was partly
motivated by the idea that Government could achieve big successes in terms of drugs policy.
The feeling in most European member states at the moment is the best you will be able to
do is to make marginal or partial progress. So it does not have the political urgency or
enthusiasm that it did through the 1990s and early part of this century.
As a result you have an institutional situation where the extent to which national capitals get
involved in the complex detail of the Brussels discussions is pretty much under the radar.
That does not necessarily mean it will be low quality, because some very good quality work
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
goes on, but that is the reason for my point about welcoming higher scrutiny at a political
level.
The Chairman: Yes. Sorry, do continue if you have anything more.
Mike Trace: The only other introductory comment, to give context to what I will be saying
when answering the questions, is to give a quick autobiography in terms of Brussels. In 1997
onwards I was the UK representative who went to the Council’s subcommittees in Brussels.
So for the creation of the 2000 EU Strategy I was a key author and a key contributor.
Around that time for three years I was also the Chairman and President of the EMCDDA,
which you have already mentioned in your discussions. I have a close interest in the issues
and progress of the EMCDDA. I have been involved in each successive Strategy Review,
2004 and 2008, either representing the European Parliament, strangely enough, or on
Evaluation Committees, because each four years they do an evaluation of the strategy and
that feeds into the new one. I have been involved in each stage of review, so I will be talking
as somebody who has interests to declare.
But I am speaking now from a non-Governmental sector perspective. I have UK
responsibilities; rather like Reverend Blakebrough, I run a treatment charity. It works
generally in terms of criminal justice and abstinence-based treatment, which I heard you
discussing in the first session. I am also the Chairman of something called the International
Drug Policy Consortium, which is a global network of NGOs that try to promote a vision
for what we call humane and effective drug policies. So my answers today will be wearing
that hat as the Chairman of this international network, but I have been involved in most of
the history of EU Drugs Strategy making.
Q88 The Chairman: Thank you. That is a very valuable introduction. If I could start by
asking you a rather general question, if we have understood it rightly, the EU Drugs Strategy
accepts that different member states are free to apply different drugs policies, and that
therefore in a way this is an area where subsidiarity operates. Do you think it is right that
that should continue? Is the degree of subsidiarity about the right one, with some EU
legislation, but a lot of scope for member states to determine their own policies, or should
there be greater harmonisation of national drugs policies at EU level?
Mike Trace: I think the importance of recognising subsidiarity is absolutely correct, and I
do not think that should be changed. The European Union should have a coordinating and
principle-setting role here. I heard Eric talk about the process of gathering, communicating
and enabling discussion of evidence. Those are the proper roles of the regional body. So
subsidiarity should be protected in these terms, and individual member states should
primarily decide their on strategies and operations.
That is clearly and unproblematically true in the areas of demand reduction, health policy
and social policy. There are exceptions to that, quite correctly, in terms of law enforcement
and supply reduction policy. As the European Union quite rightly points out, the operational
effectiveness of some aspects of supply reduction cannot be effective unless you have
cross-border cooperation between law enforcement and judicial authorities. So in that area
it is quite right that there are European instruments and programmes that are cross-border,
but to a large extent, with that caveat, in my view it is important to protect the idea that the
European Union and their institutions limit their involvement in this to the development of
principles, evidence and debate as opposed to operational policy.
Q89 The Chairman: If I have understood it rightly, you are saying that the criticism we
heard, that the European drugs policy concentrates too much on control and the control of
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supply, is rather ill-placed. If I have understood what you are saying, it is because that is the
area where a single European policy is very important, and the fact they do not concentrate
so much on other areas of drugs policy where subsidiarity applies is the right thing.
Mike Trace: I do share the criticism that sometimes the European institutions and the
member states over-emphasise the potential success of law enforcement and supply
reduction policies, so I agree with that criticism. But you cannot just apply that criticism
because there is a European cooperation agreement on border control. It is appropriate
there is such an agreement, but the general criticism is one that I share.
I have written regularly that there is a temptation institutionally to put too much faith in the
ability of supply reduction to solve this problem, and the institutional and budget decisions
that flow from that can sometimes be the wrong ones. But having said that, institutionally
the EU is quite properly engaged in thinking its role is in supply reduction, whereas in terms
of demand reduction—the health and social programmes you would use to respond to drug
use in communities—there is not a role for Brussels in operating those programmes. There
is absolutely a role for them in stimulating exchange of best practice, for example, or
collecting data, but they quite rightly do not have a role in operational delivery.
Q90 Lord Avebury: Could you let us have a reference to the papers that you have
written on placing too much faith in supply reduction?
Mike Trace: I can certainly talk to the secretariat. The simple answer to that, but it would
involve a certain amount of searching, is the website of IDPC, www.idpc.net. I can point
your secretariat to specific papers.
The Chairman: Could you do that? That would be very helpful to our work.
Mike Trace: Okay.
Q91 Lord Dear: Mr Trace, good morning. We are minded, as has already been said, to
try to influence the forthcoming EU Drugs Strategy and not the current one, which has been
in place since 2005 and expires next year. The current one, which we are looking at now, as
you know better than most, has a number of objectives. There are three in particular: to
focus on supply and demand and to try to reduce that; to promote international
cooperation; and to promote research, evaluation, information and so on. It would help us
to know, in general terms, whether you think those three objectives are being met. I was
going to ask you if you thought a strong control-oriented policy is the best way forward, but
you have already addressed that in your preceding remarks. But you might want to touch
on that again, if you wanted to round that off.
Mike Trace: First of all, I was quite involved in setting those objectives at earlier stages. I
think we should be at a stage now where we need to be brave enough to say we are
working to the wrong objectives. In fact we are framing them wrong. There is nothing
wrong with reducing supply or demand, but as overarching objectives for a Drugs Strategy I
think we have framed them in the wrong way, and I will explain why I think that.
We have quite reasonably set out, this is globally, EU and national governments, our
strategies in terms of saying: we need to reduce the supply of drugs, so there are fewer
drugs coming into our country, which is how it was generally conceived; we need to reduce
the demand through the indicator of how many people want to use drugs or do use drugs;
and therefore we will reduce the damage that was mentioned earlier on.
What we found over the years is that there is not a clear and linear relationship between
those things. So simply having success in seizing drugs or reducing any particular market
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
supply does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the damage to the community, and can
work the other way. Similarly, reducing demand, clearly a good thing, is quite a good proxy
for some aspects of damage, if there are a million drug users the impact of drug use and
dependence on families is going to be greater than if there are 100,000 drug users. But
there are other aspects of harm, for example HIV infection, overdoses and some forms of
social impacts of drug use that do not have a linear relationship with the overall level of
demand. That is why I say supply and demand reductions are laudable goals and should be a
key part of what we are trying to achieve, but because we have held them as what I would
call the fetish of drug policy, we have misdirected a little bit of our thinking.
I heard the question of the previous witness around the role of harm reduction. This is
beset by a sort of intellectual or conceptual problem, because harm reduction has become
aligned with a certain view of drug use and public health. But if we call it damage reduction,
and take away the particular words, the overarching objective of drug policies, whether they
be European, national or global, should be the reduction of the damage caused by the drug
market and drug use to communities, individuals and societies. That is not massively
radically different from saying we want to reduce supply and demand, because reducing
supply and demand clearly are contributory factors to that. But it does mean a subtly
different way of thinking and setting objectives, and, as we all know from running
Government budgets, the way you set objectives dictates how you conceive of strategies
and allocate resources. So I do think there is a job to be done at European level to
recalibrate the way we articulate our objectives. It is not a radical change, but I think it is an
important one.
Q92 Lord Dear: Measuring damage is going to be more difficult.
Mike Trace: Yes, that is one of the limits.
Lord Dear: It is about supply and demand, isn’t it?
Mike Trace: Absolutely. One of the limits on achieving what I am suggesting is the
technical barriers to measure it. This is one of the big problems for the European
Monitoring Centre, which I think is a fine institution. They have tended to go for measures
and encourage European member states to go for measures and objectives that are first and
foremost measurable as opposed to absolutely correct. This is a big problem in the field for
health and social policy, but also law enforcement policy. With law enforcement policy we
measure seizures and arrests because we count them and control them. But what we do
not measure is whether we have reduced the level of violence and the level of community
harm from the drug market, which is very difficult to measure.
On the demand side, on the health and social side, we measure things like overall number of
drug users, and there was a noble attempt by the monitoring centre to measure the number
of problem drug users, which brings you into all sorts of definitional problems. The best
measure we have of problem drug users is those who attend treatment. As I am sure Your
Lordships will realise, that is an operational measure, not an absolute measure, so if you have
got a big treatment system and a lot of people go to it, you have a big drug problem. If you
have a small treatment system with bad access and you have low numbers attend it, it seems
like you have a small drug problem. So there are real definitional problems, but I do think
now is the time where we have to grapple with those because if we carry on saying, “If we
have operational success on social programmes or law enforcement programmes, that
equals drugs policy success,” I think we are repeating mistakes.
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Q93 Lord Dear: You mentioned definition, and we bumped into this last week when we
were taking evidence, so I pose the same question to you that I did there. Do you think
there is a need for common parlance throughout the EU in terms of definition? We are
beginning to see that people are defining very obvious syndromes or occurrences in different
ways, and a common definition does not seem to be there. Would you agree with me?
Mike Trace: Absolutely. One of my personal bugbears is that one of the things that limits
good exchange and good policy review, which is much needed in this area, is that people
define some crucial terms in different ways, and ascribe values to particular programmes or
particular definitions in different ways. That is a big barrier to the European norm or the
European ideal. If you talk about treatment in the UK, and I echo what Eric said, generally
treatment in the UK and several European countries is assumed to equate with what
doctors do. I think what doctors do is massively important in terms of our treatment
system, but that is just one subset of what treatment and rehabilitation is. In other
countries, if you ask them what treatment is they will say, “It is a therapeutic community”—
that is all they see that treatment is. So then you will have an international debate about
treatment and you are talking different languages.
Q94 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: I was interested in what you said about larger
treatment programmes obviously create more clients and so on. It often used to be said,
and this brings us back to the difficulty of measurement, that a police area did not have a
drug problem until it created a drugs squad, and the bigger the drugs squad the more
problems it created or found. So I think that illustrates the difficulty of measurements.
What is your comment on that?
Mike Trace: Absolutely, and in fact the UK has suffered from this. Many is the year I have
had to go to a Brussels press conference and defend the UK’s seemingly “dirty man of
Europe” figures. Of course if you are in front of the press you cannot say, “That is because
we count better,” but basically that is a large part of the reason why the UK features highly
on the drug problem figures. Having said that, I do think the UK has a significant problem,
but with the arrest figures the same dynamic works exactly.
The other one I would bring Your Lordships’ attention to is the drug-related deaths figure.
The UK is particularly good at defining and giving guidance to Coroners’ Courts to record
and measure drug-related deaths, so to work out when use of drugs or intoxication with
drugs was involved in a death. Therefore we have pretty good record and trend data on the
extent to which illicit drugs contribute to unexplained deaths in the UK. Exactly the same
applies with police figures, because we do record quite well what we do in police operations.
The same goes with treatment; we have a big treatment system that we spend a lot of
money on, and therefore it looks like we have a lot of problem drug users, so it is the same
dynamics on all of these fronts.
Another thing I would say is if you really want to get on top of the real policy dilemmas that
we have at national and European level, a commitment to really carefully defining your terms
and really carefully setting your objectives and understanding the data is crucial. To link that
back to the European area, that is why I think the most useful thing the European institutions
can do is promote that understanding of the data, promote the gathering of the evidence and
make it available to professionals in member states.
The Chairman: Thank you. I think we must move on.
Q95 Lord Avebury: Surely it ought to be easy to arrive at a common definition of drugrelated deaths throughout the 27.
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Mike Trace: You would think so. The problems that the monitoring centre has been
working on for 10 to 15 years are partly technical, partly operational and partly political.
Just very quickly, it is technical because there have been many professional debates about the
setting of definition and the understanding by a coroner of where something is a heart attack
or a cocaine-induced heart attack. Some coroners are uncomfortable with ascribing a heart
attack to the use of cocaine, for example, and some coroners are not, so there is a
professional debate. That can be got around. I agree with your analysis there. That is just a
matter of coming to professional consensus.
The more wicked issue in definitions on drug-related deaths is controlling the behaviour of
coroners and the reporting mechanisms. In the UK we have a pretty well-established
reporting mechanism for coroners, central collation, and a process for guidance to coroners
that most of them follow—I say most of them. In many countries in the EU there is not a
well-established protocol on this, and there is big institutional resistance to establishing a
protocol.
Then there is the political problem—and I have to say I was President of the EMCDDA
when this came up—that the Board of the EMCDDA is made up of representatives of the
member states, and those countries who want not to bring attention to their drug-related
deaths figures are quite happy with poor definition. I have seen it in chairing committees:
many member states deliberately obstructed the search for better definitions and reporting
because they knew it would make their country’s drug policy look negative. I do not think
they have resolved that. As I say, there are very good scientists working on this, and if you
went to the guys in Lisbon working on this, they would be able to say to you very quickly, “If
every member state did this, this, issued this guidance and administered it, I would agree
with you, Sir,” but there are institutional barriers.
Q96 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Mr Trace, you gave Lord Dear a good example of
what the EU institutions could do that would be helpful with regard to analysing data, etc.
But how good have they been generally at evaluating drugs strategy at the European level
and determining its success?
Mike Trace: This is a “glass half full, glass half empty” question, because I do think the
European Union stands out globally as the multilateral agency that has done best on this.
They have the European Monitoring Centre, they have common standards for all member
states, they apply those common standards to applicant states and new member states, and
they have a system. The data is better in Europe than anywhere else. The comparative
nature of data, with all the problems I could list—and I am sure I will through my answers—
is the best in the world, which is one of the reasons why I say Europe has a really positive
role to play if it makes sure it respects subsidiarity. That is the “glass half full” bit.
The “glass half empty” bit is that whenever the technical search for data and lessons from
data clashes with the realpolitik of the European Council institutions, you hit a problem. I
have been in the middle of this problem several times myself. There are times when the
member states, when they get together to look at this data and this learning, to some extent
have an objective and enthusiastic search for knowledge. But there are many other times
when the only reason the member states gather is to make sure nothing nasty comes out
that they are going to have to defend back in their own capital, and I have been in that
position. So there is a real tension that has limited the ability of the European institutions to
be able to say, “We have learnt this and we are going to articulate that we have learnt this.”
It is usually the problem with the articulation; there is no problem with the learning. So you
do end up with evaluations being conducted. There is one being conducted now by RAND,
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who I am sure engage with the Committee, who are evaluating the last five years’ drugs
strategy.
I think RAND will do a grand job—they usually do. It hits two technical problems. One is
that they do struggle to separate this issue we talked about in terms of subsidiarity: are we
evaluating domestic drug strategies and have we solved drug problems, or are we evaluating
the contribution of the European institutions? They usually get lost in that, and I hope
RAND come out with a study that can pick that apart. Then you hit the political problem,
which is the draft report is placed in front of what is called the Horizontal Working Group
on Drugs. The instructions of most people attending the HDG is, “We do not really care
about the quality of this document; just make sure our name does not come up with any
negative connotations.”
Q97 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: How much would you say the situation has been
affected by the description you gave us at the beginning of how the whole drug scene is not
having as much attention paid to it by the member states generally as it was, let’s say, 10 or
15 years ago, and whether this can affect the efficiency with which the institutions can
conduct their drugs strategies?
Mike Trace: That is exactly the concern I want to bring to the attention of Your Lordships.
In times when there is not an enthusiasm for getting it right there is more likely to be a
safety-first approach to the process and it will exacerbate the problem I have just described.
I deduce we are in one of those times; I may be wrong because I do not go to the meetings
anymore, but I deduce we are in a period of low enthusiasm of member states and also the
Brussels institutions, and I hope to be able to say more about those in a moment. Basically
most people who will look at the drafts of these documents will just be seeking to exclude
any negative reference to their own member state, and will not be working hard to produce
a forward-looking momentous document.
Q98 Lord Judd: You have mentioned the interplay with the UN system, but how far
does the obligation to work within the parameters of international drugs conventions and
treaties and alongside UN drug policy leave real room for manoeuvre in policymaking at a
national and European level?
Mike Trace: On a scale I would say that I am one of those people who says that the UN
global system, which involves conventions that every member state has signed up to, does
not produce too much of a straitjacket. I would make a distinction here between the tone
and the spirit of the global system and the actuality of it. To use examples, the tone and the
spirit of the convention I do think have real damaging effects, but there is nothing to stop
people debating and reviewing what we agreed in 1961. There is nothing in the convention
that says no institution is allowed to review, discuss and consider the merits of different
approaches, but it does set the tone for policymaking at regional and national level, which is
to say we put our faith in supply reduction, and eventually that supply reduction and our
deterrence-based policies will lead us to a solved drug problem. That is the spirit of the
conventions.
In international law terms the conventions themselves are very complex documents and
have an awful lot of flexibility and allow for all sorts of experimentation at national and
regional level. So I think the tone does set us into a straitjacket that we are struggling to get
out of, but certainly for European institutions and European politics at the moment, I do not
think there is much actual limits they place on the ability of European member states to say,
“We need to review what we are doing and consider options.”
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It was mentioned earlier on that Portugal has decriminalised the process of drug possession
offences, and that has no problem within the international legal framework or with the
European Union. The example I would use is in the health sector, where the dividing line
comes, and I will leave Your Lordships to judge whether this is a correct dividing line. The
international conventions in the UN system have become reasonably comfortable with the
idea of needle exchange. So it is harm reduction, it is saying, “Okay, there are going to be
people who continue to inject drugs. Our job is to protect their health.” The state should
protect their health, so we make needles available for safe injection. That has been a policy
that research-wise has been broadly proven to be effective.
What the arbiters of the UN system have said is that to go one step further than that and
provide what are called consumption rooms, where there is medical supervision of the
process of injecting an illegally obtained drug, is contrary to the conventions. There is quite
a lot of legal argument around that, which is fascinating, but by and large the UN system is
saying that particular public health measure is contrary to the international legal regime. As
a result, the European Union cannot really talk about it, or is distinctly uncomfortable talking
about it. That is the dividing line. There are areas where the international legal framework
limits European discussion, and there have been times when European member states have
wanted to go further. Several European member states operate these consumption rooms;
it is just they are not allowed to talk about them in Brussels.
So there are restrictions, but I am not somebody who says that the international regime is
an excuse for us to say, “Well we have no choice; we have to follow a particular strategy.”
Obviously the big exception to that is the creation of legal and regulated markets for drugs.
That would be directly contrary to the UN system, and if any member state wanted to go
down that line they would have to do that outside of the current convention agreements.
Q99 Lord Judd: So you would say that it would be quite wrong to overweight the UN
and other obligations to pursue prohibition in looking at evolution of policy in the sort of
way that the preceding witness was arguing?
Mike Trace: The debate on the evolution of policy should be entirely unconstrained. One
of the criticisms I make of policymakers in this area is that they assume that what we agreed
50 years ago is immutable. In your debates about how we deal with this social,
criminological and health problem in the next 50 years, you should not be constrained at all
by the current international legal framework. I have worked at the UN, and one of the
things that amazes me is that this seems to be the only area where we think that
international legal agreements we made 50 years ago should not be amended, which to me
sounds very weird. We meet every five years to amend every other international legal
agreement we make. Certainly do not take my comments to mean that I think it is
immutable. What I am saying is it is inaccurate for any European Union member state or
Brussels institution to say, “We have no room for manoeuvre; we have to do what we do
because of the UN conventions.”
Q100 Lord Avebury: Are you saying that the European Union should lobby the UN for
an amendment of the convention, or for amendments plural?
Mike Trace: No, I am a pragmatist and a small-steps social policy person—I believe you do
not change these things by seismic changes. My advice to European Union institutions would
be to take further leadership at the UN, because I think we have the data, the expertise and
the experience to take that leadership, but they should be pushing for incremental reforms
and changes of objectives and strategic priorities. Generally I am somebody who believes
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we should push much more towards health and social programmes and human rights
protections, but these can all be done within the conventions.
Q101 The Chairman: Is the European Union handicapped in the UN forums by the fact
that its member states have such different policies domestically?
Mike Trace: It is massively handicapped by exactly that function, yes. Like any grouping at
global fora, it is only as strong as the strength of its consensus. Broadly the dynamic of the
European Union over the last 15 years in its debates at the United Nations is that it has tried
to provide a bridge between the US-led view of the global system and more liberal
approaches followed by a number of European member states. It has been very hamstrung
in that because it always tries to take a position on any particularly difficult issue, and in
diplomacy it is never a good idea to have a battle with the United States. The European
Union has tried several times, but usually those attempts to make progress are undermined
by the fact there will be a small number of the 27 member states who jump ranks. As you
will know in all of your work, the ability for Europe to speak as one on any tricky issue
where consensus is hard to find really weakens your diplomatic ability in global fora.
Q102 Lord Tomlinson: We have heard what you said about supply reduction. But is
limiting supply a fetish, as you described it?
Mike Trace: I need to find a better word.
Q103 Lord Tomlinson: Or is it the main area where member states can come to some
sort of agreement? If it is the latter, are those agreements capable of being described as a
successful European drugs policy? If I can just add to that slightly, are there any international
human rights law considerations that we ought to be aware of?
Mike Trace: I think your question gets right to the point, and that gives me the opportunity
to expand on the point. It is absolutely correct, and I presume Your Lordships have seen
the communication from the European Commission last week on drug policy. They put out
a communication to clarify the perspectives of the Commission coming into the coming
couple of years, and with the review of this strategy. Broadly that communication reiterates
the commitment to a balanced approach—and I would be very concerned if they did not—
but most of the energy and activity is focused on some legislative reviews, strengthening law
enforcement capability and cooperation, and some quite big operational proposals to
improve cooperation in the law enforcement and judicial fields.
Operationally I think all of that is excellent and quite appropriate work; to have 27 member
states’ law enforcement and judicial authorities working on precursors, money laundering
and border control is a good thing that the European Union is a vehicle for. You will end up
with things like the Dublin Pact or the Paris Pact—well, those are UN instruments, but you
end up with agreements that have the objective of improving operational cooperation. I am
very supportive of that.
That very same document—and I do suggest you read it as part of this process; it is only
about 10 pages—then goes on to say that, by having that better operational cooperation, we
will eventually solve the problem. That is where I draw the distinction: it clearly is correct
for us to improve operations, to more effectively fight organised crime and try to minimise
the supply of drugs, but to say in 2011 that is the route to solve the drug problem is to
clearly contradict the evidence. So the distinction I would make is that operationally,
absolutely, but to make that the central plank of the solution to a social and health problem
is clearly misguided. I think it is very important for you to raise the human rights aspect as
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
well. This does not happen to a particularly great extent in Europe, but there are examples,
in many parts of the world where the view has been taken that the drug problem is such a
threat to society that the human rights of drugs users or communities where drugs are
grown and distributed are negotiable, and it is considered reasonable to say that for the
achievement of drug law enforcement objectives we will work around human rights
obligations. I think that is another very big mistake that is being made. Certainly it is against
the UN Charter, but operationally it is a very big mistake to be made. One of the things I
have been pushing quite strongly with Commissioner Reding, who is currently the EC
Commissioner in charge of drugs policy, is that her other big responsibility within the
Commission is human rights, after the Lisbon Treaty. She is a good advocate of the human
rights role of the European institutions, and I was encouraging her to link the two a lot
closer, so that there was a clear European vision of how we would protect human rights
through our drugs policies. She is not keen, and it is one of the weaknesses of the strategy
process we are currently going through that she is very much aligning herself with, “We will
introduce some new legislative powers and new law enforcement strategies, and we will
therefore solve the problem,” so I do worry about the direction at the moment.
Q104 Lord Tomlinson: Would that be mitigated in any way when the European Union
accede to the European Convention on Human Rights?
Mike Trace: A quick answer is that I am not enough of a European expert to pronounce on
that. I would say, though, there are plenty of human rights powers and language in the
existing European documentation to do perfectly good work on that issue. There just does
not seem to be enthusiasm.
Q105 Lord Richard: I think you touched on this issue a little earlier on, but perhaps I
can draw you out a little more on it. The third EU strategy refers to harm reduction
measures, but it is not there as an overarching measure. Do you think the EU should be
trying to specifically get harm reduction as an overarching objective? Do you think the
present situation represents a strong enough focus on harm reduction by the EU, and what
do you think we can do about it?
Mike Trace: Thank you for the opportunity to be drawn out on this, because I would like
to elucidate a bit more. The distinction I would make again is between harm reduction or
damage limitation or damage reduction as a concept, and the set of activities that help
people to avoid health problems related to their drug use, which is generally what harm
reduction is; it is where the word came from and where the movement came from.
The first thing is on the concept, the overarching concept, I am absolutely saying that the
overarching guiding principle of any drug policy—national, global or regional, as in the case
of the EU—should be guided by the overall principle of trying to reduce the damage to
society, whereas the overall principle of the tone of our international work for the last 50
years is to eradicate the drug market; if we fight hard enough we will eradicate it. We need
now to understand the complexity of that, and realign ourselves to an equally strong
campaign to reduce the damage caused by drugs markets and drug use in our societies. So
as an overarching principle, absolutely. I would not call it harm reduction because
everybody then gets confused between that and those particular public health programmes.
On those public health programmes I would absolutely say that I would wish—and I have
campaigned for this for many years—that the European Union had been clearer in its
policies and its support to say, “There is a strand of our strategy that is to reduce the public
health problems related to drug use, it is called harm reduction. It has needle exchanges,
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
overdose prevention, low threshold medical services for drug users.” I think that as a
concept is absolutely proven by the evidence and the academic analysis, and so that is an
important aspect of what any state authority should do on the drug problem.
I think this is something that is a UK debate, but also a global debate at the moment, but I
share the concern that if you make a fetish—that word again—of harm reduction, you
actually can be causing harm. So there are situations where if you are too focussed on
saying, “We must have needle exchange; we must have more methadone; we must have
more tolerance of drug use”, you can be creating circumstances where you are not reducing
damage, you can contribute to increasing damage. The classic and simplistic one is the big
debate on whether to introduce a widespread needle exchange into Africa. The judgement
you are trying to make, if you are interested in HIV prevention, is if injecting drug use is
growing in Africa, and there are many signs that it is, then is it the right thing to swamp
Africa with needles for drug users to inject safely? There is an argument to say you should
do that because you have got an epidemic in the waiting. I do not know the answer to this,
but the contrary argument is to say, “If you go to a country or a region where there is not
an established culture of drug injection, swamping it with needles could create that culture,
in which case you have created the harm”. That is a reasonably simplistic example of the
dilemma, but I use that as an example of why I do think it is important for people to say that
the harm reduction set of activities is a proven set of public health activities that every area
with a drug injection problem should implement, and that is current UN policy, and that is
fine; the EU has been a bit mealy-mouthed on it. But it is also quite right to say, “Let’s be
very careful and plan our harm reduction interventions very carefully so we do not create
unintended consequences from that”. So there is a distinction between operational
programming and overarching principles.
Q106 Lord Richard: Really what you are saying, if I can put it into a sentence, is, yes, it
is a good thing, but you have got to wrap it up.
Mike Trace: Yes. And Eric was talking quite rightly earlier about the distinction between
the circumstances under which you acknowledge that individuals are going to continue to
take risk and you help them to avoid that risk, and the judgment where you are trying to
change their behaviour so they do not take the risk. It is that dividing line that is crucial to
drug policy. I think the UK debate on how to get that dividing line right is very low-grade at
the moment. I am disappointed in that, but the European Union debate on that issue is the
right debate to have.
Q107 Lord Avebury: The strategy document also emphasises the need for mobilisation
of European citizens in the development of drug control strategies and the promotion of
illegal drug policy development at the local level. Do you think there is evidence that this is
being achieved? And could I ask you to distinguish in your reply between the agencies that
operate at a grassroots level, such as the project of Reverend Eric Blakebrough about which
we just heard, and city governments at an intermediate level where there might be the
resources to participate? There does not seem to be at the grassroots level, but there
might be at the city level perhaps.
Mike Trace: Once again, I think your question gets to the nub of it. I read the transcript of
the session where you questioned Alex Stevens and others on this, and I would share the
distinction that came up in that discussion. The quick answer to your question is I think no,
that the involvement of citizens and citizen representatives in organisations in this process is
painfully thin, institutionally and in practice, but that is not unique to the drugs issue. If you
have a Council subcommittee in Brussels, the Horizontal Working Party on Drugs in this
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
case, that is a committee of member state government representatives; it is not in any way a
grassroots structure and it has no mechanism for engaging with grassroots. There have
been a couple of attempts over the last decade to try to address that problem. I do not say
member states are casual about it, but they have talked about having discussion forums in
their capitals before coming to the meetings. I tried to kick off some of those myself when I
was responsible, but basically you have a monthly meeting in Brussels and it would take you
six months to organise a discussion forum with your NGO, so you are always behind.
So there are practical problems, but the end result is that the real discussions that lead to
EU drugs strategy and all of the decisions on legislative reform and Commission actions have
very little input from civil society and grassroots. I think you are right to address this as a
point that needs attention in Brussels; I personally harangued the previous head of the EC
Drug Coordination Unit—he is a good friend of mine—for years about how bad the civil
society engagement was, and begrudgingly they set up something called the Civil Society
Forum. It is an improvement and has been in existence for three or four years, and it is
maturing slowly. But it is bedevilled by the problem that is implicit in your question, which is
that the first round of membership of that Civil Society Forum was almost by invitation, so
the people who tended to turn up in Brussels and make a big noise were invited, and it was
city organisations or advocacy organisations. They were invited to be in the first declaration
of the Civil Society, and that is not a representation of the 200 or 300 million citizens of the
EU. I am one of them, by the way; I am on the Civil Society Forum.
The second iteration addressed that problem to some extent, and put out a wide call for
European citizens who wanted to be involved in the Civil Society Forum. They received 35
responses, of which around 25 were exactly the same people who were involved the
previous time because they are cited, interested and funded to be involved in these
meetings, and my organisation was one of them. When I look at those meetings now I see
exactly the problem you are referring to. I am not sure of the solution to it, but it certainly
needs serious thought. In the current 35 members of the Civil Society Forum we have, I
would say at least half of them are there because they have a very strong and distinctive view
of what should happen with drug policy, and they want the EU to support their view. So
there will be harm reduction networks, abstinence-only networks, zero tolerance, war on
drugs NGOS, legalisation NGOs, and they will have a big interest in drug policy. They quite
rightly, for their own objectives, want to be involved in the discussions. But once again, it is
a very sketchy representation of 350 million European citizens, so it is problematic. You
have got to welcome the fact that there is something when there was nothing, but it is a
problematic structure and I am not sure there is an easy way out of it.
Q108 Lord Avebury: Should there be any EU funding for people to attend the meetings
of the forum?
Mike Trace: I do not know if a question is coming later about the institutional funding
because that is another thing that Your Lordships could wisely look at, but what tends to
happen is there are organisations who receive grants from the drug coordination aspect of
the EU, and within the grants for those who receive them, there is funding to attend the
Civil Society Forum. So if you are a grantee you naturally have an interest and the ability to
attend. If you are something like Eric’s organisation, doing groundwork in Wales, you do
not have the funding, the time or the interest.
Q109 Lord Dear: Mr Trace, I had been minded to ask you a question about whether you
thought that the EU was doing enough to promote policy that was evidence based, but you
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
have already skirted across and around that in your other answers. Is there anything you
just want to add to that, or should we let that question drop?
Mike Trace: I will take that as an opportunity to talk about the institutional structures over
there. They are very weak. You may look at some of the documents coming out of
Brussels and say this is the grand EU strategy, or this is the grand legislative proposal. There
is a European Council subcommittee, a Horizontal Working Party on Drugs that meets
monthly, but as I said, that is much weaker now than it has been in previous years; there is
not really much political strength and momentum there. The actual institutions within the
EU are tiny. The coordination unit in the Director General for Justice, underneath Viviane
Reding, has five staff. It was double that three years ago, so it is slowly disappearing. That
was originally envisaged as a coordination unit, as we may envisage it in a national
government, but it has absolutely no influence. It happens to be the mechanism by which
member states talk to the European Commission, but it has no influence, for example, on
the EEAS, the aid budget to the European Union or DG SANCO, the health sector. It has a
relationship with Europol through home affairs. These are very weak mechanisms for setting
and reviewing policy. I think Commissioner Reding has very little power to create a nextgeneration well-balanced, implementable EU strategy, and I think the political judgement she
has made is, “Well if I cannot do that then I will just introduce some legislation and focus on
what I can do,” and that is very depressing after 15 years of trying to build it up.
Q110 Lord Dear: That is very helpful, but my question was more directed to whether
you think there are, to put it very simplistically, too many words and suppositions going on
in Europe and not enough that is evidence-based. I think you have already addressed that.
Mike Trace: Yes. Well I think that is what they can do. If we just talk about the budget
levels, the budget of that Drug Coordination Unit for its own running costs is €1million or
€2 million, and it has a €3 million a year budget to spend on everything. The EMCCDA
costs about €15 million; that is a Parliamentary allocation, a Strasbourg allocation, and that is
about it. Those are the drug allocations of the European Union. Operationally we have got
Europol and some law enforcement measures that receive European money, and we spend a
lot of external aid. I could not enumerate that for you, but those are much bigger figures.
But to achieve good strategy review and evidence development—the entire budget of the
European Union is less than €20 million. So this is not something that we are throwing
money or political power at, and any political priority we have given to it through the 1990s
and up until around 2005 is ebbing away, so those budgets are going down, and so is the
influence.
I would absolutely say that one of the reasons why I would say countries like the UK are less
excited about the process than they have been previously is that even with those relatively
small budgets, we think we could have a lot less hot air—this is a European theme, I think—
and a bit more focus on what can be done. I am a big advocate of what can be done. I think
what the monitoring centre does to develop data and agree data research and promote
debate is excellent. I think it is very good value for money and I would expand what they
do. The €3 million that it spent from Brussels does some very good work on promoting
exchange of best practices and promoting debate, but €3 million is tiny.
In terms of what you were talking about with Eric before, if I was advising the EU when they
were going through the budget process, I would suggest significantly enhancing that
€3 million, but be very clear on the actual things that you want to do from Brussels with it.
It would generally be more research, more ability to analyse and debate the results of
research, and as Eric was saying, more ability for member states and civil society and
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
professionals to see or hear what is happening in other countries. Beyond that I do not
think Europe should be seeking to have a multi-hundred million euro budget here, but what
they are trying to do with what they have at the moment is a bit derisory.
Q111 The Chairman: I take that, but of course the 27 member states are devoting very
large sums of money to drugs policy through their law enforcement agencies and their health
ministries, and so on. So the overall picture is rather distorted by just looking at the EU
expenditure, although it is useful to do that because so many silly stories abound about the
scale of EU spending in various areas, but what you say is very interesting.
Mike Trace: I would like to pick up on that because my point is absolutely that. In the UK
we are spending billions. Most of the big and well-off European countries are spending a
similar order, and we are misspending quite a lot. I do not say that to suggest, “Oh,
everything is wrong, it is terrible,” I have set up a lot of the expenditures in the UK, but we
could spend it a lot better if we really dedicated ourselves to learning from evidence and
experience. And we are in an era where no government knows exactly how to deal with
the policy dilemmas in this area. We seem to be in an era where we really should be taking
exchanges of experience and evidence and understanding policy analysis seriously.
But the European Union itself should not be trying to take on the mantle of national
governments to say, “Right, we will now have a €5 billion Europol budget because the UK
national crime agency is not doing it well enough.” I do not support that sort of idea, which
you hear now and again in Brussels. Instead of spending $3 million on a few people without
much scrutiny exchanging best practice and evidence whenever they can find a bit of money
to do it, I support spending €20 million or €30 million and do it as a proper EU strategy of
learning, definition and going forward. And those are quite cheap activities.
The Chairman: Yes, and presumably there would be some—and I am afraid, Lord Tope, I
think we have rather asked your question now, if that is all right.
Q112 Lord Tope: My question also is the EU policy cost effective? I think you have been
answering it for us for the last few minutes.
Mike Trace: Exactly as the Chairman said: on the EU’s contribution to national drug
policies, I think they spend tiny amounts, and broadly I would say it is cost effective, but it
just does not have the oomph to do what we want it to do.
Q113 The Chairman: I presume also there is some need to clarify whether, if you were
to give some additional resources, it would be better to direct them through the agency or
through some increase in the central spending directed by the Commission. I do not know
what you feel, but my personal feeling is that I would tend to put it through the agency.
Mike Trace: I would absolutely agree. Obviously I have a vested interest because I chaired
it for three years. Once again this is EU Parliamentary scrutiny as well, but if member states
wanted to increase the amount of research, knowledge, sharing of experience and policyusable information, money allocated through the Lisbon agency is going to be much more
scrutinisable than money allocated through Brussels. That would be my prime
recommendation if I ruled Europe, to invest more in the Lisbon agency to do that,
remembering my caveat that we are not innocent as member states, we do turn up to the
management board of the monitoring centre and inconvenient data is suppressed, so you do
have that governance issue in Lisbon.
Rev Eric Blakebrough and Mike Trace – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Q114 The Chairman: We have heard a lot of evidence so far that has been very much
to the credit of the agency. We are going to visit the agency in the course of this, at the end
of this month.
Mike Trace: Excellent.
Q115 The Chairman: And we will need to take all that into account, but I think your
evidence has been very helpful, and I would like to thank you very much for that. You have
added another piece to our mosaic.
Mike Trace: Could I close with an invitation, Lord Chairman? On this general issue that I
have started and finished with, which is the level of enthusiasm and scrutiny in Brussels, I am
co-hosting an event on 7 December with Javier Solana, where we are having a private dinner
with the Commissioners and others to try to talk these dilemmas through. It would be very
good if a representative of the Committee wished to receive an invitation. Maybe I could
issue an invitation through the Chair. But these are exactly the issues we are trying to flag
up there at the highest level. We are trying to encourage people to avoid the inertia that
we seem to be slipping into, and it sounds like it is very relevant to the Committee’s
deliberations.
Q116 The Chairman: That is very helpful, thank you very much indeed. If you could
direct the invitation to the Committee, I will consult with my colleagues and I am sure we
will be able to respond positively. I think it would be very valuable for us because at that
stage we will just be moving from the stage of taking evidence to the stage of drawing up our
recommendations, so that would be thoroughly helpful. Your meeting is in the evening, is it?
Mike Trace: Yes.
The Chairman: Yes, well it should be possible. We are taking evidence from the Home
Office Minister that morning.
Mike Trace: Okay, well first things first.
The Chairman: But I do not think that precludes—
Mike Trace: I will issue the invitation, we will have the technical and practical details, and
we will see if it is possible.
Q117 The Chairman: That would be splendid. Who is organising it?
Mike Trace: It is a co-organisation. The organisation I chair is International Drug Policy
Consortium, and there is a thing called the Global Commission, of which Javier Solana is a
spokesperson, so we are co-hosting a dinner.
The Chairman: Oh, that is the one that is coming to report its findings later this month?
Mike Trace: That is it.
The Chairman: That is the thing which Cardoso, the Brazilian, and the Swiss President—
Mike Trace: That is it. I think they have a representative coming to the House to present
the findings later this month.
The Chairman: Yes. Yes. Anyway, thank you very much indeed for that; it has been
extremely useful to us. And thank you for that invitation, which we will process in due
course. Thanks a lot.
Mike Trace: Thank you.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
Evidence Session No .5.
Heard in Public.
Questions 155 - 177
WEDNESDAY 16 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Richard
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
Antonio Maria Costa, Former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and
Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Q155 The Chairman: Good morning, Mr Costa, and thank you. A very warm welcome
to you. It is really good of you to have come from Brussels to give us evidence. We have not
had any evidence from the organisation which you headed for a number of years, the
UNODC, because the new Director General was not able to come during this period, so it
is very helpful to us because we are trying, of course, to fit the EU drug strategy into the
global drug strategy and to see how it fits into the national drug strategy. So, your evidence
is really helpful to us and we understand that you are going to give us a PowerPoint
presentation at the beginning.
As you know, the session is open for the public and a webcast of the session goes out live as
an audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the Parliamentary website. A
verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence and this will be put on the Parliamentary
website and a few days after this evidence session you will be sent a copy of the transcript to
check it for accuracy. We would be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as
quickly as possible. If after this session you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during
your evidence or have any additional points to make you are welcome to submit
supplementary evidence to us. So, I think now we could, if you agree, go into the
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
PowerPoint presentation and any introductory remarks you want to make and then we will
move on to the question and answer after that.
Antonio Maria Costa: Thank you, Lord Chairman, I am honoured to be your guest in this
Committee. I have prepared an extremely succinct PowerPoint presentation. I knew the
setting because I have been attending other hearings and other similar events in the past, but
I always thought that Members of the Committee would prefer to put forward questions
and hear answers rather than enduring a long presentation. This half a dozen—perhaps no
more than 10 pages—will show you the world drug situation as of today. I will just lay the
statistics out for the end of 2010, beginning of 2011. We go first to the global situation
looking at the matter both from the demand and from the supply side. The very first
pageshows the two key parameters. On the left you have the number, in millions of people,
of users of illicit drugs. We have to understand what we mean by “user of illicit drugs”. This
is a definition which focuses on those who have declared that they used drugs at least once
last year. So this is the annual prevalence, not daily, weekly or whatever. So it is a rather
generic definition.
The numbers you see, are cruising at around 200, 205, 210 million people—basically stable
since 2004 and 2005—and now we are going to go back to those strategically important
dates of 2004 and 2005. The percentage of people who declared themselves as using drugs
at least once a year remains again stable, perhaps with a slight decline, less than 5%, 4%,
4.5%, 5% and then back to less than 4%. Those are people who have made a statement about
using drugs, all types of drugs. We are going to go back to these numbers in a second.
If you want to move on to page 2, this will show the relationship between those who like to
indulge, perhaps abuse, a drug which is licit and therefore commercially available, tobacco. I
could make the same statement about alcohol if you wish, and the percentage of people in
the world that use drugs, illicit drugs, therefore the ones that are not commercially available,
at least not openly. You can see that about a quarter of the world population uses tobacco
products. By the way, if you want to add a histogram there you would say that those who
are using alcohol is about 30%, so it is about one-third, one person out of three in the
world. One person out of four is using tobacco. Okay, they are licit drugs but they are
killers. Tobacco, just to make sure that we understand one another, kills five million people a
year, alcohol kills 2.5 million people a year, drugs kill about 500,000 people a year. So you
can see a major disproportion between those who die because of licit drugs, or addictive
substances if you wish, and those who die because of controlled substances.
Going back to the percentage of people using drugs you go back to the number of people
who are abusing all drugs once a year, about 5% or so, those who used in the past month,
3.3%, and then problem drug users, namely those who use drugs on a continuing basis, and
we are talking about—it is hard to say, but it is about 0.7%, 0.8%, less than 1%. So, we are
talking about a fraction of the world population that is very small, certainly in comparison to
those who use licit addictive substances like tobacco and alcohol. That was the consumption
on the demand side of the spectrum.
Now if you want to go on the production side I focus on all four, three botanics and one
synthetic. The first two botanic drugs are coca at the bottom and opium at the top. You can
see that cultivation has been stable, perhaps in a decline. A major increase in 2007, this was
coming from Colombia, but all together the trend is stable or, to a limited extent,
downward.
A few important considerations. This histogram covers 20 years from 1990 to 2010. The
bottom part in light colour is coca cultivation. Coca cultivation was basically a Peruvian
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
problem in the early 1990s, became a Colombian problem until a few years ago and now
slowly coca cultivation is switching back to Peru, but at the moment Colombia is still, with
its 64,000 hectares, the foremost producer of coca.
The top portion of the histogramshows the cultivation of opium. In the early 1990s it was in
Myanmar. Starting in 2001, 2002 the cultivation shifted to Afghanistan and now is an Afghan
problem, in the sense that 95% of the cultivation of opium is in Afghanistan. Last year, the
latest information for 2010 is that we had stable growth conditions in Afghanistan, perhaps a
minor increase but in 2009 the cultivation was larger but the output was small because of an
infestation. So, again from the coca side and the opium side you see stable or declining.
Let’s just very briefly focus on opium. That is cultivated, as I said, mostly in Afghanistan. If
you go to the next page, this is a political page in a sense; it shows that we do not have an
Afghan opium problem; we have an opium problem in a few provinces, about half a dozen or
a dozen provinces of Afghanistan, above all Helmand and Kandahar—this is where your boys
are or have been—and some other provinces nearby. The rest of the country, at least when
I left office which was a year ago or so, all the other provinces besides those five were
considered opium-free, were vetted by us as being opium-free. Now, there has been some
recrudescence of cultivation in other provinces but basically the bulk of the cultivation is in
these five provinces. I call this a political map because it shows the symbiosis between
insurgency and violence on the one hand, or lawlessness if you wish, and illegal activity,
namely the cultivation of opium.
If you allow me I will move on, and where does the stuff from Afghanistan go? There are
basically two routes to Europe; most of the Afghan dope remains in Europe. A very large
percentage, about 70 tonnes of refined products—and we are talking about heroin now—
goes to Russia or in any event heads towards Russia, crossing the basically borderless states
of central Asia. I say “borderless” because there are no controls of any sort between
Kazakhstan and Russia or between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, so that is the northern route.
The western route goes, of course, first and foremost to Iran. About two-thirds of Afghan
opium or heroin at this point, or even morphine, goes through the country which has the
highest degree of addiction in the world, which is Iran, and then moves on from Iran into
Turkey through an area that I call—this is not a political statement—Kurdistan; the Kurds
are very heavily involved in this traffic.
Then from Turkey it moves on through the Bulgarian and the Balkan routes—to some
extent the Italian routes as well but it is mostly to the Balkan routes—into the main
consumption centres which are obviously the rich countries in Europe.
I will be happy to take questions, Chairman, if it is necessary as I move on.
The Chairman: I think if you take us through the whole of your statement, and then we
might have a short question session for anybody who wants questions on these things and
then we will move into the question and answer.
Antonio Maria Costa: Very good. Two simple presentations on synthetics about opium,
cocaine; coca and cocaine is a different story, different continent, a very different product. If
you move on to cocaine flows, you see the major shifts. About 10-12 years ago in 1998 the
bulk of the dope would go through the Caribbean and the Mexican route into the United
States and the global market and to some extent to Europe, but Europe was about a fourth
or a fifth of the overall market. Ten years later, the US remains an important buyer, the
rates of use of cocaine in the US are declining very rapidly.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
The route to the US goes fundamentally through Mexico, and you are all familiar with this—
10,043 is the latest tally numbers of people killed in the cartel wars run by cartels in Mexico.
There is a major problem now in Europe. The latest statistic, in 2010 I believe, just before I
left office, we found that the size of the two markets, western Europe versus the US were
identical, 50:50. A lot of it goes directly into the Iberian peninsula or Amsterdam and some
of the northern ports, but a growing amount—although this seems to have stabilised in the
past couple of years—reaches Europe through West Africa. And you can see there in 2008 I
am talking about perhaps 15 tons or 18 tons of cocaine reaching West Africa.
The route to West Africa is easily understood; these countries’ borders are not controlled,
their waters are not controlled, their skies are not controlled. Not long ago a Boeing 727
crashed in the Sahara in Niger and it was loaded with 10 tons of cocaine. So, you can see
that the reason why this cocaine freeway between South America, the northern part of
South America—Venezuela and Colombia—reaches West Africa and then it splinters into
various means of transportation whether mules, people who ingest the drugs, or little planes,
or fishing vessels, or four-wheel-drive cars that cross the Sahara. It gets into Algeria and
Tunisia and then across the Mediterranean.
As I mentioned earlier, the market in the US is declining while Europe is increasing. I believe
that the direction south-east for the US and north-east for the EU shows clearly that Europe
has a problem, but that may have stabilised. The latest statistics show that it has stabilised.
The three major countries affected by the cocaine problem are the UK, Italy and Spain.
News, as of the past few weeks, regarding these three markets showed stabilisation, but it is
still at a very high level.
In the US measures or means of testing, the road-testing, schools testing, prevention and just
perhaps a simple shift in quality of life and lifestyle has moved away from the torrid rate of
consumption of the late 1980s, early 1990s, to a very manageable level now. Perhaps cocaine
is not the biggest problem in the US.
Moving on, those were two botanical drugs, now the chemical one, the amphetamine-type
stimulants, and there are two groups. Amphetamines, which are basically a North American
and, we shall see, a Gulf problem, and ecstasy-type substances, which are fundamentally a
European problem. They are easy to produce; they are produced almost everywhere. They
are extremely dangerous; we have no medical understanding of how to remedy a brain that
has been affected, perhaps even destroyed by the use of ATS, amphetamine-type stimulants,
while we have therapies for both the coca user and the heroin user.
Okay, where is the stuff used? Amphetamine-type stimulants are used everywhere in the
world, the colour here shows the alarming usage in Europe, alarming rates in Europe, and
this is amphetamine or ecstasy in India, but above all in the Gulf. Here I open the parameters
because it will surprise you. Saudi Arabia has emerged over the last three or four years as
the foremost consumer of amphetamine, the foremost consumer. It is a product they call
Captagon; it is produced by modifying some of the molecules of amphetamine. Just to give
you again some other bits of evidence. We have statistics and we have intuitions, the solid
statistics regarding supply come from seizures, whatever Governments tell us, “We seize
this, we seize that.” If we sum up the seizures of amphetamines in China and the US, which
are the two largest markets, a grand total of 1.6 billion people, that number of seizures by
the US and China is smaller than the volume of seizures in Saudi Arabia, which is a country
of 27 million people. That gives you an idea how dramatic the problem is, perhaps not fully
recognised.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
There is some use, not extremely high, in the US, they have always had, they still believe
they have less than in the past the methamphetamine problem. Methamphetamine—meth as
they call it—being a very dangerous drug especially used in the inner cities.
Africa and Latin America do not really have much of a problem; Russia and Eastern Europe,
yes.
The fourth drug, the third drug from agricultural origin, which is cannabis, is very
controversial because that product is very different from the others. It is the most widely
used drug in the world. We saw earlier 250 million people using drugs; about 190 million are
cannabis users. The rest are the other three products, so this is the bulk of use.
There are very dramatic differences in the use; over time the histograms refer to different
observations 10 years apart by and large. In Europe—this is of course about the European
drug policy—you can see dramatic problems in my country, Italy, in the Czech Republic,
Spain, odd countries like Estonia, while others, Germany, Finland and so forth, have relatively
low levels.
This is a very simple review of where we stand as of late 2010, beginning of 2011. The
presentation covered issues that are not really at the core of your preoccupation, which is
focused on Europe and what Europe can do. This is a global market, and unless you
understand what goes on worldwide, I am afraid we will not be able to understand what
goes on in Europe and what can be done in Europe, and in particular of course in your
country. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you, that is a really useful run-through of a lot of material that we
have not had before us in the earlier sessions. Would anyone like to ask Mr Costa a
question on this presentation? Lord Dear.
Q156 Lord Dear: If I understood your presentation correctly, the production of coca
originally started in Peru. I thought it was always in Colombia, but I am open to correction
on that. Peru you say was the prime source originally and overtaken by Colombia.
Antonio Maria Costa: Yes, in the late 1980s and early 1990s Peru was, and I would say
through 1996 and 1997 was the foremost producer of coca. But keep in mind whether we
talk about coca or whether we talk about opium, the cultivation goes on in lawless regions
of the world. It is usually not a country; they are the provinces or counties in a country.
Peru at that time was devastated by insurgency, you remember it was the insurgency of
Shining Path and all of that, and so the farmers had a go at taking advantage of the fact that
they were not being repressed to the extent that they were under Fujimori and everybody
else. Colombia entered cultivation, they migrated to Colombia at that time. The three major
insurgency groups in Colombia, the FARC of course, ELN and FLN—all of them controlled
60% or 70% of the country, so the Colombians said, “Okay, we take advantage. Nobody is
coming after us,” and then with Uribe and the change in Government and the pressure and
the military, the success of the counter-insurgents had limited the area controlled by
insurgents, which at this point in time Latin America equals trafficking by and large. It is not
ideological. It is not really insurgency any more as it was in the beginning, and the same in
Afghanistan.
The Chairman: I have to say if you go to Machu Picchu you will be probably offered a cup
of coca tea; it is the sovereign remedy for altitude sickness.
Lord Dear: We drank coca tea in Machu Picchu. We drank a lot of it.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
Q157 Lord Avebury: Can I ask about the fungus in Afghanistan? That does not show up
in these figures because I think it happened only recently in 2010, but did that cause a major
decline in the cultivation of opium in Afghanistan?
Antonio Maria Costa: Yes, indeed, it did. The fungus, whose origin is still rather
controversial, we believe—we analysed the leaves and the plants extensively, we had them
done in laboratories—was a normal illness or an infection that has botanical origin. It was
not as somebody, an observer, pointed out, originated by counter-insurgents in an attempt
to reduce the revenue the Taliban is deriving from the cultivation. But no, the fungus did not
reduce the cultivation. It reduced the output; namely, Afghanistan using its best land, for
example, the irrigated land of Kandahar and Helmand, for the production of opium. The
yield, the production of opium out of a hectare in Afghanistan is something like 14 kilos,
while in Myanmar, which uses lousy land, it is 2 kilos, so you can immediately see why
Afghanistan is the foremost producer.
Secondly, the bacteria did not reduce the cultivation, which remained around 110,000
hectares, but it reduced the number of kilos produced per hectare and the output therefore
was severely reduced by 30% or 40%. I must say that for our countries—consuming
nations—what counts is the kilos, not the hectares, because what arrives here is the output
and not the surface of the land.
Q158 Lord Judd: I would find it interesting if you could just tell us a word or two about
the source of your statistics, because I am always interested in, to put it bluntly, the
reliability of statistics and I just wonder where you get the information.
Antonio Maria Costa: All of this is encapsulated in publications of my former office, the
UNODC 2009 World Drug Report. The source of the statistics varies depending on what we
are talking about. If we talk about production, for example, or cultivation we focus—when I
say “we” allow me to say the UNODC, I am not the head of the UNODC any longer—the
UNODC has developed a monitoring mechanism; those are projects paid for very often by
European countries, including your country, regarding Afghanistan. They are projects
whereby using satellite images UNODC can spot the areas that are under cultivation. The
satellite images are then verified on the basis of what is called the truthing process; namely,
UNODC has observers on the ground, who verify the reading of the satellite on a sample
basis. The satellite says, “There is coca,” and the guy says, “No, I’m sorry, this is something
else,” or vice-versa; it is confirmed. So there is an interaction between IT and space-based
technology and human verification on the ground. The margin of error that accompanies the
statistics of the UNODC regarding cultivation—and I said Afghanistan very quickly; it could
be Colombia, it could be Morocco for cannabis, it could be Peru, or it could be Laos, or it
could be Myanmar and so forth—is 10%. So, when UNODC says, “130,000 hectares of
cultivation,” the ranges are between 120,000 and 140,000 approximately. That is for
cultivation.
And then, of course, we need technical parameters provided to UNODC by specialists that
allow the transformation of areas into volumes, or hectares into kilos. That is a pretty tricky
sum because at times good rain may make the opium bulb very big and juicy and rich in
dope. A dry-type period or a dry season would, of course, reduce the output, or an infirmity
of the plant. There is a lot of technical work, which UNODC I believe continues to do, but
in the past they did so with the technical assistance provided by the UK and the US. The
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
specialists in these two countries have been assisting UNODC and I suppose they are still
doing that.
When UNODC go to demand, when they switch to consumption, they use national
statistics. UNODC use their national questionnaires, which ask different countries on the
basis of standardised formulas their degree of use, what product, age, the breakdown by sex
and breakdown by student versus not students, and so on and so forth. That is for the
demand side.
Regarding trafficking, you have seen X tonnes going there and another volume going
somewhere else. Those are data that are generated using seizures information. The seizures
information is very solid. Then to go from the seizure to the flows, we confiscated 10
tonnes, but what is the flow? Well, there are some technical parameters. There is a good
accretion—as customs officers will tell you, I believe—that it is, for example, a simple rule of
thumb that we seize about 10% of what comes into our country. It is not as simple as that,
but that gives you an idea of the complexity of that exercise. The UNODC tends to make
sure that supply and demand numbers cannot have X number of tonnes produced or
consumed and much lower estimates of production, so there are also general market tools
that are used to make sure that their statistics make sense.
Q159 The Chairman: I think we need to move on to the main questions now if that is all
right, Mr Costa. If you could go up there and you will have an easier vantage point from
which to handle that. Thank you very much for that. That has really helped us a lot. I will
wait until you have got there.
I should say that we are asking quite a lot of questions about the EU drug strategy. We
understand perfectly well that you have had no responsibility for the EU drug strategy and,
moreover, that you are, as you reminded us, no longer responsible for UNODC, so that
anything you say about the European drug strategy does not represent the views of
UNODC on the EU drug strategy. I say that because I think it is quite important and it is
obviously important for you because I hope it will enable you to be very frank with us
knowing that we are not going to use anything you say as an expression of UNODC policy,
nor that you have personally been responsible for the EU drug strategy.
Now, the first question I would like to put to you is about the EU drug strategy, which as
you know basically has accepted that different member states are free to apply different
policies, particularly on the possession and use of drugs. This is an area, in fact, where
subsidiarity is actually alive and well and being applied by the EU. Do you think that
acceptance of differences in member states, of subsidiarity, should continue, or do you think
that the EU should be looking for a greater harmonisation of national drug policy at EU
level?
Antonio Maria Costa: The drug problem lies at the heart of two areas where there is no
EU jurisdiction. On the demand side I am referring to health—and we will discuss that later
on; I will stress the importance of considering drug addiction as a health problem—and
justice and home affairs on the supply side. There is really no commonality and there cannot
be commonality unless Governments decide to change that. What is being said in the
preparatory meetings for the new startegy, what is being said by members of the
Commission, is that despite the fact that there is no EU jurisdiction, it is important to
promote convergence. It is important to avoid differences in treatment, differences in
recognition of severity of the problems, namely the Union should reach minimum standards.
That is what is being said. I personally in this hearing—and I thank you, Lord Chairman, for
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
inviting me to this hearing—would like to use this session to stress the fact that the Union
should move on forward to at least recognise and develop a common conceptual
framework. There is no such thing as a common conceptual framework. I can even offer
one, which I think is the most modern one, and is the only one valid; namely, to treat drug
addiction as a health condition and, therefore, assist the addicts via treatment in hospitals
rather than repressively by throwing them in jails and forgetting about the condition. While I
welcome progress being made in reaching minimum standards because of subsidiarity and,
therefore, because of the lack of jurisdiction of the EU on that, I propose to go beyond what
is being discussed now.
Regarding supply, all the papers I have seen in the evaluation, including the very recent one
by the Commission regarding implementation of the strategy, recognise that drug trafficking
is a global problem and as a consequence countries cannot operate on their own individually
because trafficking and traffickers and organised crime groups tend to cross borders easily. I
see that this is indeed what is being proposed in the new strategy, or being discussed in view
of establishing the new strategy, but again I would go one step beyond. I would like to
establish in this case as well a common conceptual framework. I would like this to be
included in the strategy. What do I mean by a common conceptual framework on the supply
side? I mean that it is not enough to disrupt markets by seizures of drugs and arresting
individuals. I think we have to recognise that drug trafficking is driven by market forces.
There are prices; there are revenues; there are operators. We need to disrupt these
operators. We need to disrupt these markets. We need to be able to penetrate through
adequate policies, anti-money laundering, adequate police co-operation, which is strong in
drugs, much less in organised crime measures, but still can be approved. At the moment,
even the cacophony of some countries considering, let us say, cannabis less of a problem
and, therefore, unwillingness to share information about those trafficking routes is not very
helpful. First and foremost, I suggest a conceptual framework to disrupt the markets and not
only to arrest the criminals.
Q160 Lord Richard: Some of the major objectives of the 2005 to 2012 EU drug strategy
have been to significantly reduce the demand for and the supply of drugs. Now, I think you
have probably answered this already. To what extent do you think these aims are being met?
Antonio Maria Costa: I will be happy to repeat myself focusing both on supply and demand.
On the demand side, the histogram only gave you the past 15 to 20 years. We can date the
origin of the problem of drugs consumption basically in the US and then immediately after in
Europe to the late 1960s, very rapid increase through the 1970s, stabilisation in the 1980s,
major roaring growth in the 1990s, and it is at that point that the United Nations steps in
with its decade to fight the drugs—you will be familiar with that document—as well as the
European Union deciding to establish the first strategy.
I did indeed already refer to the fact that since 2004 and 2005 to this day consumption,
abuse, use, demand of drugs in general has been very stable. Stability at the global level could
be misleading in the sense that within regions there have been countries, for example, major
growth of cocaine consumption in Europe, less in the United States, declining consumption
in Western Europe and increase in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia. As I said, market
forces mean that the traffickers understand that this market may be saturated or they may
be ready to switch to something else, so they attack another market.
Your question is backward-looking but not forward-looking. Looking forward I sense in the
making a decline of interest by trafficking groups in Europe in general, in a rich market, in an
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
attempt to penetrate developing countries, which are obviously very vulnerable because they
are not ready to protect themselves. This was actually about demand.
Regarding supply cultivations in terms of production, as I mentioned earlier, there have been
shifts from one country to another, from Peru to Colombia, from Myanmar to Afghanistan,
but the global output of drugs worldwide has remained stable. If your question is, “Was
there a significant reduction of demand and supply?” the answer is no, but there has been
stability and that means it is no longer the runaway train of the 1990s, but basically status
quo.
Q161 Lord Judd: Before I ask the question, I wonder if I can just ask a supplementary to
what Lord Richard was pursuing. How far do you have the impression that within Europe, or
indeed within the UN system with which you are very familiar, there is enough co-ordination
between those working on drugs and those working on development in the sense that if one
is looking at supply there is a huge issue of rural populations dependent upon growing and
selling drugs?
Antonio Maria Costa: I very much like your question and what the question implies. Yes,
for sure production and trafficking are to be repressed because they deal with illicit or
controlled substances; that repression is not necessarily the best or the only instrument. At
the very source, development should be an important factor, an important tool, to be used.
Now, let us make sure we understand one another. Cultivation of opium in Afghanistan or
cocaine in Colombia is done by poor farmers. Africa has more poor farmers than Colombia
and Afghanistan together and they do not cultivate drugs. It is not that we can justify the
cultivation of drugs on their part just because these people are poor. On the other hand,
while we are trying so hard to win the heart and the mind of the Afghans, I say we should
also win the wallet if possible, so development is definitely an important factor.
Now, that leads us to a number of issues; first, the complexity of it. Repression through rule
enforcement is fast if you just learn through whatever channel of a shipment arriving
wherever, you can activate development. It takes years and years. This is not only a question
of giving seeds to farmers so that they can grow onions and not the dope, which looks like
an onion; but it is the roads, it is access to market, it is whether the European Union is
willing to buy these products, whether it is cannabis from Morocco, or flowers from
Columbia instead of cocaine, and so on and so forth. It is not a policy of fast delivery and,
therefore, to that extent Governments do not necessarily like it.
Third, and that is not unimportant, it has taken a long time. I must say that it has been one of
the success stories of my former work, to convince the development institutions to deal
with this issue. If you talk to the World Bank in general, at least in the past, and you say, “Let
us talk about some counter-narcotic development,” they look at the speaker with big eyes
and say, “Counter-narcotic is something I do not want to touch. We are development. We
are very honourable institutions and we are a very humanitarian institution.” But eventually
they look at it and I would say that recently—well, not so recently—the current president of
the bank, has clearly understood that there is merit to that. By the way, not only on
counter-narcotic—it could be the inner cities, it could be about crime, it could be about
many other distortions of our society. Going back to your point, yes, development is an
instrument but it is a very slow delivery.
Q162 Lord Judd: Thank you for that. I wonder how much room you believe there is for
manoeuvre at national and European level of policy given that they must work within the
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
parameters of international drug conventions and treaties and alongside United Nations drug
policy. Is it time to review these conventions, treaties and policies perhaps?
Antonio Maria Costa: Yes. Well, at UNODC I was myself in the past the custodian of the
United Nations conventions against drugs, three conventions. By the way, there are very few
conventions of the UN that are unanimously ratified and adopted. These three conventions
have been adopted by over 180 countries out of 190, so basically they are unanimously
upheld. The conventions do not mandate what countries should do. The conventions
establish three basic principles. The first principle is that drugs should only be used for health
reasons, and that is recognised. Opium is the source of morphine, which is one of the most
important pain relievers in the world. Drugs can only be used for health purposes. Secondly,
if they are not used for health purposes they should be controlled, which basically means
banned; controlled in the sense they can only be used under certain conditions. The third
principle of the UN convention is that there should be a degree of control related to the
harm drugs can do, so a more harmful drug like heroin should be tightly controlled. Other
substances—choline, for example—should be more loosely controlled. Those are the three
parameters.
Member states are then left with the freedom to establish a policy within these three
principles. Some cacophony has emerged—not enormous. I think we are reading newspaper
articles that tend to trump up and magnify the severity of the problem of cacophony; namely,
policies that are not identical across countries, but it is not a very big problem.
Your final question regarding, “Is it time to review this convention?”—I got that question on
a daily basis when I used to be at the UNODC. My answer is very simple. People thought
that UNODC could change the convention. Conventions are only changed by Governments,
period. Nothing else. The UNODC is only the notary, so to speak, in terms of helping
countries to implement the conventions.
Now, I mentioned earlier in addressing another question that the United Nations established
a decade against narcotics, against the use of drugs. At the end of this decade, and I
completed the exercise in 2010, Governments looked back on performance and they
recognised there were no significant reductions in the use of drugs, but no Government out
of 180 proposed changes or proposed renegotiation or proposed anything which would
attack at the core these conventions. A year later only one president, President Morales of
Bolivia, sitting by my side took the floor and said, “I am going to ask for the elimination of
one sub-article in one of the conventions, the specific article which bans the chewing of coca
leaves,” more or less for the reasons that the Lord Chairman mentioned, referring to coca
tea being offered in Machu Picchu, because coca leaves can give us a certain amount of
whatever, and President Morales proposed a year or 14 months ago, to remove that
sub-article. Well, according to the procedure Governments have 12 months to respond and
Governments have responded, a very large number of major countries—the US, the
Russians and others; I am not sure about this country—and a very large number of smaller
countries, all of them objecting and saying, “You do not touch the convention, you do not
touch that article and forget about what you are—” so that shows that there is no room for
manoeuvre. Again, you are not asking me what I would like to do if I were responsible for all
this, but Governments—who are the only ones responsible—have shown no appetite so the
question is not on the table as far as I can tell.
Q163 The Chairman: Presumably this is all a bit theoretical within Bolivia because I do
not imagine the Bolivian Government takes criminal proceedings against people who make
coca tea or chew coca leaves.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
Antonio Maria Costa: I believe they had in mind something else and if you can chew them
perhaps you can put them in toothpaste so you can start trading coca-based toothpaste
worldwide. I think there was also some disappointment that all the coca being used by CocaCola, for example, is coming from Peru and none coming from Bolivia and perhaps there is a
little market. There are some commercial considerations, but again it is a moot issue. I use it
only as an example.
Q164 Lord Tope: Mr Costa, I think you were Executive Director at the UNODC for
eight years until last year?
Antonio Maria Costa: Yes.
Q165 Lord Tope: During that period, what was the working relationship like between
UNODC and the European Commission and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs
and Drug Addiction? What would you say was the added value of working with one
European agency as distinct from lots of individual member states?
Antonio Maria Costa: The merit is certainly there, in the sense that the UNODC and the
monitoring centre, EMCDDAhave very different mandates. The UNODC has an executive
responsibility to assist countries implementing the convention. The monitoring centre is a
monitoring institution and, therefore, gathering statistics and providing evidence so that
member states can decide.
There have been thoughts expressed to change them to some extent or evolve these
monitoring centres. I suppose at one point that may very well happen but it is very much in
relation to whether the EU will or will not have the jurisdiction in this area. At the moment
it does not have that jurisdiction. The UNODC and, I would say, individual researchers and
specialists around the world use statistics from the monitoring centre heavily. They are very
good. Actually, their last report, if I remember, was published two days ago and it is always
updated. Institutions like UNODC, but also university researchers, like that the statistics are
comparable and that is what the monitoring centre does, at least for Europe, which is a big
chunk. I would say the collaboration was very good with the centre. It was equally good with
member states. The UNODC uses, as I mentioned earlier, questionnaires, which are
submitted to member states, because the UNODC tends to have statistics that are
comparable worldwide. Their statistics, including the ones presented there, come not only
from EMCDDA but also from national Governments.
Now, regarding the work with the European Union, it is normally very good in terms of not
only exchanging experiences but also funding. The UNODC in the past has received, and I
suppose still now, a considerable amount of resources from the European Union.
Q166 The Chairman: Some of the evidence we have had suggested to us that the
statistical basis within the European Union for drug work is pretty shaky because there really
is not a very effective comparability between the statistics produced by individual member
states. Of course, EMCDDA depends also on member states like the UNODC does. Would
I deduce from what you say that you think there is some progress that could be made if the
statistical basis on which European member states and the EMCDDA work were refined and
made more comparable?
Antonio Maria Costa: I agree with that observation for sure. Now, if we want to focus on
Europe your point is extremely crucial. If you want to also focus globally, then we have to
recognise that the real problem we all have, institutions like UNODC and others, is the lack
of statistics from developing countries. Researchers and institutions operate in a statistical
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
fog regarding drugs. The US is over-studied, as in everything else; Europe, despite occasional
incongruence, is still very well studied. We practically know very little, if at all, about Africa,
very little about Latin America. China has been reluctant, so we are missing 2 or 3 or 4
billion people from our map. While it is still important to insist on improving the statistics
within our region, if resources or efforts or anything else can be done in order to improve
our knowledge of the situation in developing countries that would be good, especially
because they are coming under attack.
The Chairman: I imagine the Europeans would be better placed to do that if they had
more consistent statistics themselves. So, in a way, the two things could come together.
Q167 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Mr Costa, we are back on the subject of the lack of
consensus between member states within the European Union and how to treat both drug
use and drug users. In your comments in answer to the first question, you did talk about a
common conceptual framework that could concentrate on health and disrupt supply, but
that is obviously for the future. At present is there any way that the institutions of the EU
could present a more united position on drug policy at international level or have any hope
of having some influence in the area of global drug policy?
Antonio Maria Costa: The role of the Union in my view is still evolving in this specific area.
I would say—I mentioned it earlier—both on demand and supply, whether we talk about the
health side of drug use or the criminal side of drug trafficking, I do not think it is possible to
hope and count on the new strategy—and this is a personal view—to go further than finding
common frameworks that would then inspire national policies. At the moment there is not
such a common framework. I am familiar with not only the policy but the practice for
implementation of policy at the national level in Europe, and I was glad to see that slowly
there is a recognition that drug addiction is a health problem and, therefore, the conceptual
framework of inserting drug treatment in national health programmes rather than
stigmatising them in a specific place in little houses usually run by volunteers, NGOs, in a
neighbourhood that is styled to help these people. If progress can be made at that level, I
would say everything else would follow, the various other elements, specific policy would
follow. At the moment there is no such recognition. Obviously, I personally tried very hard
and my former institution tried very hard to develop that concept. I would not say it is the
only one but it is certainly the most modern way of dealing with the issue. Rather than only
looking for—I use the expression—minimum standards or practices that are not
inconsistent, I would advise the European Union to go through the use of member states,
Parliaments but also experts, try to figure out what is at the root of the recognition of the
severity of the problem and then build on this.
Q168 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Mr Costa, some of the evidence that we have
collected so far suggests that the EU often contracts out supply reduction and drugs aid
programmes to the UNODC. How does the European Union benefit from that relationship
with the UNODC and does this contracting out process represent the removal of
decision-making power from Brussels to the United Nations?
Antonio Maria Costa: The relationship used to be non-existent up to, probably, the late
1990s, the beginning of 2000. When I took office at the UNODC, the Union was a minor
force in both the political discussions, policy discussion if you wish, for example, in the
Commission of Narcotic Drugs, which is our own bit of Parliament—the UNODC
parliament—and was not present also in development assistance or in technical assistance.
UNODC operates by and large as a technical assistance provider. The budget when I left
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
office was about €400 million a year. Ten years ago the EU was absent. I think they provided
at that time about €3 million a year. When I left office it was €30 million. It increased by a
factor of 10. The presence, therefore, in financial terms but also in political terms became
very prominent.
Now, you may ask why; you may ask, was this a removal of decision-making from Brussels to
Vienna? No, there is a very specific reason why the EU is, in a sense, providing so many
resources to UNODC and others—because they used the US aid type of instrument of
delivery of technical assistance. The US, which has been much more stingy in terms of
providing assistance than the European Union, has the mechanisms to provide technical
assistance to Afghan farmers, Columbian farmers and whatever. They just look at this area;
not to the rest. The USA is a powerful machine in the world, and very influential. The EU
does not have anything of that sort. Of course, it has officers, it has delegations, and so on
and so forth, but it does not have a mechanism of delivery. Once the resources are decided
to provide assistance, they have to go through contracts and provide the assistance to those
who are on the ground. The United Nations agencies are particularly well positioned to do
that. It is not a removal or transfer of decision-making; it is an inevitable fact of life given the
circumstances of the European Union presence in these countries.
Q169 Lord Avebury: You have already answered this to some extent, but in the
UNODC statistics did you use the drug-related data which are collected and disseminated
by the EMCDDA, without independent verification? Are they reliable enough for you to
accept them in their raw form? Secondly, do they bring value to the understanding of the
global drugs problem or are the different regions of the world so different in their
characteristics that nothing in the EMCDDA statistics reads across to the other continents?
Antonio Maria Costa: At the cost of repeating myself, and I apologise, I insist on the
fundamental usefulness of the statistical databases and information provided by EMCDDA.
The unit of measurement at the United Nations is always the member state; it is not regional
aggregates unless they become a member state, which has not been the case for a long time.
On the contrary, a number of countries split. I do not think it would be the case, but if we
had a problem with inconsistency between a national source within the region and the
regional source, for example, EMCDDA, we would go back to square one and try to sort it
out in giving priority to the national state. But that being said, the availability of the work of
the Lisbon-based institutions and the availability of regionally coherent data has been a very
important contribution to the work in UNODC.
Q170 Lord Judd: The recent UNODC discussion document, From Coercion to Cohesion,
underlines the thesis to which you have alluded several times this morning that drug
addiction is a health problem rather than a crime problem. Could you say something about
how you think this presents challenges for European drug policy and what the implications
are?
Antonio Maria Costa: Well, I am glad that the Committee is aware of or is familiar with a
document published when I was Executive Director of UNODC, a document that I consider
probably one of the most important that I was ever associated with. From Coercion to
Cohesion shows clearly the shift from imprisonment to treatment. That document, which per
se is nothing more than a write-up of the concept that was developed by UNODC between
2006 and 2008-09, has confronted Governments with the recognition that drug control
must be based on the health aspects of drug addiction. It is not a lifestyle preference; at least
UNODC has been saying that. It is not a manifestation of a corrupt mind or a vicious
attitude; it is an inevitable consequence of circumstances of the individual. This could be
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
prenatal, could be in the genes of the individual, which could be at birth, the conditions,
whatever consumption the mother may have used of drugs and so forth, in the rearing of the
child and, therefore, in the education of the child, in the upbringing of the child, plus
obviously environmental conditions, which could be marginalisation or not, being part of
difficult economic predicaments. It is a health condition that is not driven necessarily by the
body of the individual. It may very well be driven by the mind of the individual, but in any
event the mind is, of course, another part of ourselves that can and must be treated.
This has been a significant change in the attitude of UNODC and I would say it has made an
impact worldwide. A growing number of countries are shifting to this recognition. Now,
what would that mean if, as I suggested at the outset, the European Union in drafting the
new strategy would accept this principle? Well, I would say that it would make it much
easier for member states, for the region, for the member states in the region to develop
common policies, to reduce drug demand, to share experience and measures in preventing
addiction, and to frame assistance to addicts in a way that would be consistent with the
recognition that there is nothing wrong with the individual besides the fact that his health
needs to be treated. He is not a vicious person. He is not a person who has lost a compass
in life. He is someone who perhaps is not able to manifest his illness, but unless it is
recognised it will not work. That, in any event, is what I consider crucial and perhaps I would
like to suggest that we make this the heart of my own statement, because I believe strongly
in it.
Q171 Lord Richard: Two or three times in the course of your evidence this morning
you have said that the idea of getting a common conceptual framework is terribly important
on this issue of whether it is a health problem or whether it is a criminal problem. I think
you also said two or three times that the countries seem to be moving in that direction. I
wonder how many have actually shown signs of movement; how strong do you detect this
movement to be?
Antonio Maria Costa: Hard to say. Tea leaves at the bottom of a cup are notoriously
difficult to read, but the principle of treating drug addicts as against incarcerating them is
certainly the rule in democratic countries. Authoritarian countries, and there are plenty
around the world, have a different attitude. They still tend to throw them in prison. The
Union, of course, dealing with a country with a legitimate Parliament, legitimate
representation, democratic credentials, I would say altogether is now in agreement with the
common principle on the demand side that I mentioned, considering drug addicts as people
affected by a health condition.
When we go to the supply side it is a bit more complicated. Now, fighting drug trafficking
has been more successful than fighting organised crime, although drug trafficking is very
much in the hands of organised crime, and even more successful than dealing with terrorism.
When I speak with senior law enforcement officers—serious crime officers here, officers in
charge of fighting serious crimes, or the anti-mafia officers in Italy at a more senior level—
they would all recognise that if it is possible to sit around a table of this size with the
representatives of different counties and have a controlled delivery of Afghan opium from
Kandahar to Lisbon. Controlled delivery means monitoring the cargo without interfering in
order to see the ramifications of who is involved. When we go to fighting serious,
international organised crime, the experts will tell you that you can sit two officers of
different countries around the table and they would exchange information but it is hard to
go beyond that. When you go to counter-terrorism, the information I got is that it is even
more difficult just because of the complications of that. Given this rather notional
representation that I offered you, I believe that also finding a common platform on this
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
supply side is more possible than in the case of another area—I mentioned organised crime;
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime are responsible for the three conventions
against drug trafficking—but also the two conventions against crime: the so-called
transnational organised crime convention and the Convention Against Corruption. Indeed,
we see that it is very difficult to make progress in this area. But if you are talking about
drugs, if we remain focused on the European Union strategy I believe this will already be one
of the important steps forward.
Q172 The Chairman: I imagine you are familiar with the report of the Global
Commission on Drugs, the one that includes President Cardoso and other very distinguished
people, which was published in June of this year and to which I think the President of
Colombia recently lent his support. Do you have any comment on that report and the
efforts that are being made? There are quite a lot of meetings going on this week in London,
in fact, among supporters of that approach.
Antonio Maria Costa: No, I do not have much of a comment to offer. I read the report; I
was asked to comment on the report at one point. We had sessions to review what was
being drafted at that point in time. The report keeps avoiding the big issue, the big issue
being that in order to modify the convention and therefore change the regime, Governments
have to be involved and Governments have to be convinced and at the moment I do not see
any Governments interested in it. To a very large extent, the signatories of that document
are former leaders of countries. Former leaders of countries are very dignified people but
they are not decision-makers any more and, therefore, what counts is what current
Governments say, think and do.
Q173 The Chairman: Some of the evidence we have received suggests that international
anti-drug trafficking initiatives do not always respect human rights. It can help to support
corrupt regimes and it can result in the displacement of drug trafficking routes rather than
their eradication. From your own experience, how much validity is there in those criticisms
and how do UNODC and the EU try to minimise those risks?
Antonio Maria Costa: I said earlier that I consider one of the major accomplishments of my
tenure at UNODC was to put forward the notion of health being a fundamental condition of
addicts. I would say that the second major pillar in our work has been to make the respect
of human rights at the heart of drug control policies. Too often I have seen personally
around the world a situation of crude violation of human rights, whether we talk about
demand again or supply. The incarceration without any treatment, without any assistance, in
dramatically overcrowded conditions, which prevail in most countries around world, is a
denial of the human right of the addict, while of course the treatment, to the extent that is
financially possible, in medical facilities would respect and put forward human rights. It is the
same on the supply side. I have personally witnessed, or in any event, been so familiar with
extrajudicial killing of drug traffickers without questions being asked. I think that is—
whatever we may think about drug traffickers—another violation of human rights. The
second pillar of the work of UNODC, when I was at the helm of that institution, was in
trying to convince Governments of the importance of human rights. I even proposed in
some situations to deny technical assistance to countries in need, perhaps a supplier of drugs
to countries in need, if they refused to respect human rights. In any event, I put forward a
notion of a negative pledge. Countries should either pledge to recognise human rights or
pledge not to violate human rights—what I call a negative pledge—in their own counternarcotic work, as a condition for development assistance. All of these are starters. I do not
necessarily believe that they are final considerations because worldwide there are still so
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
many countries, there are still countries in Asia, that in mid-June there is a so-called
anti-narcotic day when the Secretary General issues a statement and all countries are
mobilised on that day to bring forward the notion for public opinion of the severity of the
drug problem. There are many countries in Asia that celebrate that day by executing
traffickers and so forth. I always felt that this was not the right way to put forward the cause
of anti-narcotics.
Q174 Lord Avebury: The statistics you gave us in your initial presentation seemed to
indicate that supply side interventions have not been that effective. Does the UNODC have
transparent monitoring systems in place to assess and review the impact of supply side
interventions?
Antonio Maria Costa: Not really, at least as far as I recall when I was the head of that
institution. Actually, your question is divided in two parts. The first part is the monitoring
mechanism. I explained the monitoring of the cultivation done through satellite technologies
and truthing on the ground, and I explained the technical work done in converting areas into
volumes, hectares into tonnes. Now, is there a way to review the impact of supply side
intervention? Not that I can list; not that I can see at the moment. There was an experiment
two years ago funded by the UK Government in the Helmand region to assist the farmers in
a given valley—I forget the name of the valley—through irrigation, through seeds and
through access to market. Perhaps the welfare programme was committed to buying the
wheat cultivated in that region. We did see on that occasion the cultivation decline by
something like 70% or so, year over year. Now, whether this was a lasting change or not, I
cannot tell you because I left office. But those are the supporting ways of documenting the
relationship between the supply side intervention and reduction in cultivation. As an expert
in this area, I sense that there is merit in supply side interventions. That, as I mentioned
earlier, is not only a question of exchanging a product for another, but it is a question of
creating a development framework whereby the farmers in this case—the producer—can
prosper. Not only can they shift the product, but they can sell the new product nationally,
internationally. We tried to mobilise even local distribution chains to buy those products,
but it is all in development and educational effort, which is very slow to produce the results
but no doubt quite effective.
Q175 Lord Avebury: But do you think that there should be monitoring of supply side
intervention such as, for example, the financial inducements to farmers to grow wheat
instead of opium in Helmand, as compared with biological interventions such as the use of
funguses to eradicate crops or the American system of forcible eradication of crops? These
are various supply-side interventions that have been tried. Should there not be some
comparative measure in their effectiveness?
Antonio Maria Costa: I am familiar with all three options that you refer to. I am not
familiar with attempts to measure the impact of these initiatives. Through the experience of
year over year I could, for example, detect that the American-funded spraying of the coca
cultivation in Colombia has been very effective. Over the year, Colombia cultivation
decreased from 164,000 hectares in 2003-2004 to 64,000, almost two-thirds. Now, was it
spraying, which was massive? Was it because of success in counterinsurgency, as I mentioned
earlier? Was it because of lower demand, especially in the United States, for that product?
Was it because the Colombians were bumped off the market by the Mexicans, who became
the biggest cartel in the world, and the Colombians basically cultivate it but do not sell it
anymore or bring it overseas as they used to? That is very hard to say. But the fact is that
the cultivation decreased.
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
The Karzai type of US-inspired eradication, which is not aerial spraying, which Karzai has
refused—its eradication troops are paramilitary. They are brought to a field, they destroy it,
basically. The poppy is just a little stem. With a stick you break the stem and the whole thing
collapses over, so it is easily done manually. That was a disaster. Targets were of 15,000,
20,000, 30,000 hectares to be eradicated and yearly were 3,000 or 4,000 with a very
significant human cost because of Taliban and others, so that did not work.
The programmes based on development proved to be more successful. In Laos, for example,
I declared Laos drug-free in terms of cultivation in 2006, and it was mostly because the
Government sponsored some other institutions and programmes to assist the farmers.
Myanmar is using both mostly but is not so successful, but Myanmar’s cultivation is very
small now. Morocco had a high of 134,000 acres of cannabis in the provinces of the north,
engaged in a massive transformation of the economy of these provinces and succeeded in
reducing it to marginal amounts. Different countries for various reasons use different
methods. I believe that the development method is still the best one, but it has a slower
delivery and is very costly and it involves more than just buying whatever the farmers
produce. It involves reorganising society and production at large of the national product in
that region.
Q176 The Chairman: Somebody, I read somewhere, suggested that all Afghanistan
needs is a common agricultural policy.
Antonio Maria Costa: Yes, a common one.
The Chairman: It might prove a little expensive.
Q177 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Mr Costa, this is the last question and I am not sure
whether it is one that it is possible to answer. Is the global drug policy cost-effective?
Antonio Maria Costa: Illustrious members of this Committee, I agree with the first part of
the question. I do not know whether it is possible to do it. It is very difficult to measure the
effectiveness of initiatives to protect society. We are talking about the health of individuals
and we are talking about the health of our societies. I know that including the report that
the Chairman referred to, including the discussion here—and I will be interviewed twice in
the course of the afternoon on this—there are plenty of voices around the world asking for
a comparative assessment of current policies versus alternative policies. I find it very difficult,
as a professional economist, to see which way we could go regarding the cost-effectiveness
of measures. At the UNODC we had estimated the size of the global drug market in the
mid-2000s—2004 to 2005—at over $320 billion so it is a huge market. I think it is a bit
simplistic to assume that the market will be destroyed by whatever formula alternative to
control, it could be legalisation, liberalisation, there are varieties of formula. I am familiar
with all of them.
As a final sort of point, in relation to the question just asked, I would like you to focus again
on the statistics regarding abuse of licit and, therefore, commercially available substances,
addictive substances, tobacco and alcohol, versus the illicit ones. It shows that controls
work. It shows that controls have been able to reduce the availability of drugs to one-tenth
of the availability of the other drugs, and the deaths: five million a year—this is the World
Health Organisation—because of tobacco; 500,000 because of drugs. Well, I am not sure I
understand when in public opinion or in some media or in that report you hear steps and
proposals regarding legalisation of drugs and general efforts throughout all countries to ban
tobacco. It is not banned in the sense that you can still buy it, but you cannot smoke here,
you cannot smoke there. It is becoming terribly expensive and there are health conditions
Antonio Maria Costa – Oral evidence (QQ 155-177)
and Governments are concerned about all these people dying. My own suggestion would be
to look at the whole set of substances, including abuse of pharmaceutical products but
certainly tobacco, alcohol and drugs, see them in a cohesive way and see the threat that all
of these generate to humanity and then venture into a review of what can be done
comprehensively, rather than engaging in an exercise that would mimic perhaps the situation
of China 100 years ago. That is the only experience in the world. In that case opium was
freely available and China had—at that time the population was one-tenth of what it is
today—a number of deaths that was much larger than the ones today for humanity at large
and the amount of drug addiction was in the tens of millions of people just in China. That is
the single example one can use about free availability of narcotics as a demonstration that
the health of our countries would get out of control if drugs were available today.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr Costa. You have really been very helpful to the
Committee. You have enabled us to look wider than just the European Union, which I think
is important for us to do, and you have brought a wealth of experience and wisdom to bear
on these subjects. Thank you very much indeed.
Antonio Maria Costa: Thank you, Lord Chairman. I am honoured to be here.
The Chairman: The meeting is now closed.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294)
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction
(EMCDDA) – Oral evidence (QQ 258-294)
Evidence Session No. 9.
Heard in Public.
Questions 258 - 294
TUESDAY 29 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Mr Danilo Ballotta, Co-ordinator Institutional Relations, Mr Gonçalo Felgueiras e
Sousa, Head of Director’s Office, Ms Ana Gallegos, Scientific Analyst, Mr Alexis
Goosdeel, Head of Reitox and International Co-operation, Mr Wolfgang Götz, Director,
Mr Paul Griffiths, Scientific Director, and Mr Frank Zobel, Head of Policy, Evaluation
and Content Co-ordination Unit, EMCDDA
Q258 The Chairman: I wonder whether we can start by introducing ourselves around
the table so that we get a better grasp of who you all are and what you do—what your jobs
are in the agency. On this side of the table we have a Hansard script writer, John Vice; we
have Caroline Chatwin, our specialist adviser who has visited the agency before in her
academic capacity; we have Lady Eccles.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: I am a Conservative Member of the House of Lords.
The Chairman: I am the Chair of this Sub-Committee. I am an independent Member of the
House of Lords. This is Michael Collon, who is the Clerk of the Sub-Committee.
Lord Tope: I am Lord Tope. As we are all declaring, I am a Liberal Democrat.
Lord Avebury: Eric Avebury. I am also a Liberal Democrat. In fact the majority of us are.
Lord Tope: It is an unusual experience.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Could I introduce John McCracken, who is the UK member of our
management board? He is sitting in today because he is an in town for another meeting and
is here to generally observe. And this is Kate Christie, from the British Embassy in Lisbon
Mr Paul Griffiths: Perhaps I may ask the others to introduce themselves.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294)
Mr Gonçalo Felgueiras e Sousa: I am Gonçalo Felgueiras e Sousa and I am the head of the
director’s office.
Ms Ana Gallegos: My name is Ana Gallegos. I am the scientific analyst I am responsible for
the co-ordination of the early warning system for action on new drugs.
Mr Alexis Goosdeel: Good afternoon. My name is Alexis Goosdeel. I am head of Reitox
and international co-operation; Reitox is the network of national drugs observatories, or
national focal points, through which the EMCDDA collects and disseminate information in
Europe.
Mr Paul Griffiths: My name is Paul Griffiths. I am the scientific director. My job is to coordinate the scientific work of the centre. I am representing here my director, Wolfgang
Götz, who is unfortunately in Brussels, but he is coming back and may join us, if he can. He
asked me to give you his warm welcome.
Mr Danilo Ballotta: Good afternoon. I am Danilo Ballotta. I am in charge of the
institutional relations and responsible for co-ordination with European institutions here at
the agency.
Mr Frank Zobel: I am Frank Zobel. I am the head of the policy, evaluation and content coordination unit, which is one of the four scientific units here.
Mr Paul Griffiths: What we have tried to do is to select a few staff who will cover the areas
of what you have told us you are interested in with the idea that I can give you a general
perspective on the work of the monitoring centre and then my colleagues can fill in some of
the more technical detail in specific areas. We have prepared a short introduction to give
you the overall context of our work. We do not want to give you one lecture because it
would not be appropriate, but I can give you an introduction to, and an overview of, the
work of the monitoring centre, if that will be helpful, to start with.
Q259 The Chairman: Yes. Thank you very much for receiving us here. Thank you for
your hospitality and for meeting us at the airport and taking us back. It is a great boon for
groups like us to be helped in that way. To set our activities in a kind of framework, this
committee deals with not all of JHA activity—because we have a sister sub-committee which
deals with the justice aspects—but with the home affairs aspects; and drugs fall on our side
of that line. All the sub-committees report to the overall EU Select Committee, which
decides whether or not to publish our reports—which it invariably does—and we both
scrutinise European legislation as it comes out of the Commission and other bodies and give
our opinion to the Government about it. We also write what I suppose would be described
as thematic reports, of which this one on the EU drug strategy is one. Our previous report
was on the internal security strategy, on which Cecilia Malmström put forward an action
programme last year, and before that we did one on cyber-attacks, on dealing with natural
disasters. This study of the EU drug strategy is basically a forward-looking, rather than a
backward-looking one. We are taking a lot of evidence which is obviously about the past and
the present. The reason we chose to do this is because of the imminence of a discussion in
Brussels on the future drug strategy, on which we like to think we might make a modest
influence if we report at this stage. Our report will I hope be completed round about
February, March, April, that sort of time. It has to be because the parliamentary Session
finishes at that stage and we would lose all of it if we did not do it. So we will do that and it
will be published then. We have taken a lot of evidence and we are fairly close to the end of
the evidence-taking sessions. We are seeing the British Minister responsible on 7 December
and that brings us practically to the end. We will then be discussing and writing our report
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294)
after that. This visit comes at an extremely good moment. We saw the Commissioner
yesterday in Brussels, Vice-President Reding; we saw Mr Sócrates, who gave some very
interesting testimony yesterday; we have had a lot of academic input; we have had Home
Office officials and those involved in drug policy; we have had one or two NGOs; we have
had the all-party parliamentary groups which deal with these various aspects of drugs policy.
We have had a fairly wide scope. Also last week, when there were a lot of people in
London, as you know, for various meetings on the Global Commission, we got involved in
that and were able to attend those meetings. So I hope that we will produce – although
none of us would say that we are experts in the field, far from it – an informed report which
is based, as it always has to be in the House of Lords, on evidence and not on what our
opinions on the subject are, whatever they may be. It is very valuable for us to come here. It
will be helpful to have your PowerPoint presentation initially. We all have copies of your
annual report—thank you for getting it to us so promptly—and I believe everyone has read
it. Whether we have all understood every bit of it I am not so sure—some of it is quite
complicated technically—but it helps us to get some understanding of what the agency does.
Of course, your work has cropped up at various stages in the evidence sessions. In every
single one of them there has been at least some mention of it, and sometimes it has been an
important part of it. It would be helpful to have a presentation and then, after that, if there
are not any questions on the presentation, we can go into a kind of question and answer
mode which will enable us to cover a lot of the ground that we would like to cover with
you.
Mr Paul Griffiths: And in terms of timing, you have to rise at 5.45?
The Chairman: Yes, I think so. Having got started a little ahead of time we have given
ourselves ample time to do it. We have got two sessions, one with yourselves, and one with
the Portuguese co-ordinator. With a coffee break in between, we should be able to do that
perfectly. Perhaps we will then even have an opportunity to look over the premises and see
a bit of what you do.
Mr Paul Griffiths: That is great. We have not been here very long. This is a very nice
building, but we have still not totally sorted out all the audio visual requirements. I am also
aware of the possibility of death by PowerPoint, so we have kept this presentation to a very
brief introduction. The EMCDDA is a decentralised technical agency of the European
communities, which means that our director has overall responsibility for our work. We
work to our management board; we have a regulation framework but we are technically
independent to some extent. We were established in 1993 and we have really been working,
substantively I suppose, since 1995. At that stage, it was impossible to talk about the drug
situation in the EU in any meaningful way. It has taken us a while—we have adopted a
developmental approach—and now the situation is changing and, overall, we are pleased
with the progress we have made, certainly in the past five or 10 years. We have been
ensconced in Lisbon since 1995 and we have a very warm and fruitful relationship with the
Portuguese authorities. We are somewhat strange in that we work strictly in the realm of
information—it is quite odd for an agency to be in this position—and so we tend to be the
central hub for drugs-related information across the European Union. In terms of what
dictates our current work, there are two key documents. The main one is the Recast
Regulation, which sums up our mission to collect objective, reliable and comparable
information at the EU level. Everything we do in some sense can be seen as stemming from
this central mandate. What is also increasingly important now— and certainly has very high
political visibility—is the work that we do in terms of the implementation across Europe.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294)
We are the implementation agency for the Council Decision on the information exchange
and risk assessment of new psychoactive substances— or the EU early-warning system, as it
is more commonly called. This is a rare bit of drugs policy in the EU context as there is a
legal basis at the European level to identify and respond to drugs that may pose a threat
similar to those that are controlled under the conventions. This has become an increasingly
important part of our work, although in terms of activities it still only represents a small part
of the resources that we have. More recently, we have also been included in the
pharmacovigilance legislation, so we now have a responsibility to discuss the abuse potential
of medicinal products with the Medicines Agency as well. Our main task is fairly
straightforward—it is collecting and analysing the data available on the EU drugs problem —
but, beyond this, we also work to improve data collection methods and facilitate the
development of new information sets and approaches.
For instance, we have just commissioned a demonstration study of the use of sewage water
to test for the presence of drug metabolates. Now the technology allows you the possibility
of having a population-level estimate of drug consumption. This is potentially a very
interesting new area of work. It is also the kind of thing that might fall through the cracks
had we not picked it up to support its methodological development - even if we do this in
only a very limited way. Also, in the survey area, we are developing common procedures for
how you might ask a question about the use of some new psychoactive substances— this is a
more complicated technical task than perhaps it at first seems— but necessary if we are to
get comparable data between countries. So our work supports a lot of methodological
developments. Again, we have been influential in developing a large number of statistical
methods used for the estimation of problem drug use. When I say “we”, that is the
EMCDDA working with the technical experts across the European Union. We act in some
ways as a sort of catalyst for methodological development and discussion. Having the data is
not much good if you do not do something with it, so a lot of what we do here is also
concerned with analysis, reporting and knowledge transfer. It is about trying to understand
what the information means. All data in this area is imperfect in some respect. Our model is
a multi-information-source model. We are working with obviously very different pieces of
information—all of which gives you just one part of the picture—and our task is to bring it
together to get a holistic overview. Increasingly now also the whole issue about best
practice, guidelines, standards and knowledge transfer between countries becomes more
important, and that has happened as the evidence base has grown for what constitutes
effective responses in this area. Tomorrow I am in Brussels at the launch of joint guidelines.
We have just done an ECDC on the prevention of HIV among drug injectors and this is the
first time we have got common European guidelines on evidence-based approaches.
Increasingly now more emphasis is given to collating best practice, identifying evidence-based
practices and sharing them between member states. We also provide technical support to
the European institutions when it is requested — for example to support the European
position at the meetings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. We also cooperate with
European and international organisations in non-EU countries, but strictly in the technical
information sphere. I will not go into this in detail but essentially our work covers the whole
span of the drugs question. We deal with the drug situation, epidemiology and also now,
increasingly, supply and market information. Currently this is a less developed area, which I
know is subject for some of your questions, but one which is at the moment under the
spotlight, so to speak. We are very interested in how you pick up the trends of various new
drugs, polydrug-use trends, new threats and new developments. This week we were
involved in the risk assessment of the HIV outbreak in Romania, for example. There is also
much work on the early warning system. We also cover the whole area of responses, which
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
(QQ 258-294)
covers prevention, treatment and harm reduction responses There is less quantitative data
available in those areas. We are also monitoring supply reduction activities, although up to
now that area has not been well developed. As I say, we are increasing the emphasis on best
practice. We also monitor policies and laws and other such issues. I will say a bit more about
that later in questions. We do not evaluate national policies but we can provide the tools to
help member states in their evaluation of their own policies. Our mandate does not ask us at
present to judge the policies of member states. I will now quickly tell you something about
our operational structure. We are governed by the management board, with representation
from the member states, the European Commission and the European Parliament. At
present, we have an executive committee that prepares decisions for the management
board. Our day to day management is ensured by our director’s office, and he can call on
our scientific committee for advice. This is a group of independent scientists chosen for their
scientific competence, via open competition, who act as the guardians of our scientific
credibility. They also provide guidance on our work programmes. A number of prominent
UK scientists are represented on that group, as well as German, Spanish, Norwegian and
French scientists. One of the things that gives us our unique advantage, if you like, is the
Reitox network. By having a focal point for all member states it is possible for us to maintain
an ongoing dialogue with countries on the situation across the EU. It is a hard thing to do,
even if you want to ask a very simple question, for example “What is the legal situation in
respect of khat?”, it is illegal in some countries and uncontrolled in other countries. If you
wanted to go to all member states and get an accurate answer to that, it would be a difficult
thing to achieve. We can achieve that very quickly because we maintain a network of
standing focal points. There is an institutional connection and that gives us sustainability over
time. We co-finance the service, which is a little bit unusual for an EU agency, but it is the
sort of powerhouse behind our ability to comment on events and developments. It is the
thing that allows us to do our jobs. We have about 108 staff here at present, including those
stagiaires and trainees whom we are now increasingly being asked to host. There are around
20 different nationalities, which gives us a vibrant, although sometimes challenging, working
environment. Lunchtime starts somewhere between 12 o’clock and 4 o’clock depending
upon which floor you are on and which nationalities you are talking to. Some people come in
at 7 in the morning and some people leave at 9 in the evening, again depending upon the
person. We deal very well with this cultural diversity. In fact, again, it is one of the strengths
of the agency. It also allows us to understand the national context in which we are working. I
will not go into the detail of our structure. Essentially, we have totally scientific work. We
have four scientific units—one that is mostly concerned with policies; one mostly looking at
the prevalence of the situation; one on crime and the new drugs—I am going to summarise
here—and one on responses and best practice. We also have a unit which Alexis here coordinates, which is responsible for the management of the Reitox network and international
co-operation. As well as an administrative unit and IT team. The important thing is that as
we are an information agency, we are also a communications agency, and so we have a very
strong communications team. We work closely with and are very much engaged in scientific
work. We work with all current 27 member states. We also work with Norway by special
arrangement—we are paid to be a Nordic centre—and Croatia and Turkey as part of the
application process of the EU. We have memorandums of understanding and working
relationships with a few other countries. Again in terms of external relationships, we work
with all the Commission services, particularly with the Community agencies, and now the
disease-control agency in Stockholm, ECDC, is important for us, as is the EMA, the
medicines agency in London. We also have quite a lot of dealings with Europol and now,
increasingly, CEPOL as well. We also actively engage with the international community.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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Increasingly, Europe has become a sort of model for good practice in terms of data
collection, and so we have quite an influential role . The UNODC asks us to be involved in
its committees. We try not to spend all our time doing international work as we have our
own work to do but we try to assist where we can in the technical aspects of EU projects.
In EU spending outside the EU we are often called on to provide technical assistance to
potential candidate countries and also in terms of EU work within the context of the
neighbouring countries. We have memoranda of understanding with the Russian Federation,
the Ukraine and a few other countries.
You have seen the annual report. We are very pleased with it but you do not need 100
people sitting in Lisbon to produce one document of 100 pages a year. It is very much the
synthesis of our work. It is the window of our work over a year. It is prepared for both a
generalist and policy audience. In some ways, it is best viewed as the entry point to all the
other things that we do. We make the point that all the data we collect we try to make
accessible – usually in our annual statistical bulletin. Everything goes into the statistical
bulletin in terms of quantitative data, so much so that other agencies say that they do not
need a data-sharing agreement with us because they can just take everything straight from
the statistical bulletin. We know, for example, that although the UN gets data submissions
from member states, the first thing it does is download our statistical bulletin and then it
looks at submissions from member states.
We also produce very good online tools. We have about 70 products, not counting scientific
papers submitted to journals. We also produce national reports from the REITOX network
that provide an overview of the different national situations in the EU. Our product range is
a diverse one ranging from things developed for a general public, journalist, and the policy
audience to highly technical guidelines and analyses. We try to make sure that the data we
produce is prepared in different formats to meet the needs of these different audiences. It is
not always possible, depending on the technical nature of the subject. We are very focused
on trying to get the information across. There is no point in us collecting the information if
we do not get it out. There are also various publication series with other agencies: examples
of which include the drug market analyses we produce with Europol, and the guidelines we
produce with ECDC. We contribute to other products where possible. Increasingly, we are
also developing our online resources, so that you can see drug profiles with a definitive and
accurate chemical description of drugs, both new and old. You can also see English language
overviews of drug laws across Europe. You can find a best practice portal and a prevention
portal. Increasingly, we are trying to be the central repository for all European drugs-related
information that can be accessed easily by different audiences in different ways. The last thing
I will say is that another one of our strengths is our multilingual policy and practice. We try
to prepare policy summaries in different languages. We produce multilingual products. We
summarise key documents in different languages and we are the only EU agency to publish
an annual report in all 23 languages. This is a huge task and challenge for the agency but it
means that people can read about the situation in their native language. In terms of the
scientific audience, we are happy now working in French, English, German and Spanish. To
be honest, if you have Spanish, French, Italian and English, you will be able to reach most
scientists. We also want to talk to the practitioners and policymaking audience. You really
need to speak to policymakers and we spend quite a lot of time and effort with them. For
example, we have been working with the translations office to produce a glossary of key
terms with linguistic equivalents because translating some technical terms is very difficult.
Some of the terminology we use is very specific. That ends my whistle-stop overview of our
work.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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The Chairman: Thank you very much. We had noticed that this issue of language and the
words that are used is open to all sorts of misunderstanding. The obvious one that we have
come across is the whole issue of decriminalisation and utilisation. Most ordinary people
think that that means that all drugs, trafficked, illegal or otherwise, will become completely
legal. I think the choice of words has not always been a happy one in that respect because it
has been misleading. It is very good that you do that. Would any of my colleagues like to ask
questions on that presentation, before we go into the policy areas?
Q260 Lord Avebury: You mentioned khat and the survey that has been done by the
EMCDDA of all the situations in the 27 Member States. Was that published?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Yes, we have a policy brief on that and also a more comprehensive policy
summary because we felt that there were some quite complicated policy issues there and
some countries were not being clear what the legal status was. We had the problem where
there was a big increase in khat seizures and arrests in Germany and some other countries.
Essentially what we have seen is East African migrants taking khat up into Northern Europe
and being stopped en route, perhaps not even realising that in some countries they are
transiting through they are committing a legal offence by driving across the border they are
in a country where they are now committing quite a serious legal offence. We wanted to put
that all together with some perspective in terms of what was happening in terms of
production. Khat production has become a major economic activity in parts of East Africa.
Should the khat trade be looked at in terms of searches? One of the questions we asked is
on the impact on development. There are other projects that we are putting money into to
really transform development goals. We were trying to show that it is a very complicated
policy issue and also that data availability was somewhat limited. We can provide you with
that and also point you at the major conference hosted by the European Science Foundation
last year in Sweden on khat.
Lord Avebury: I would be interested in that.
Mr Paul Griffiths: It has become a big issue, especially with some smaller countries, now
having significant migration from khat using regions.
Lord Avebury: Does the work include an assessment of the harm that is caused by khat?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Our work here did not. We relied on previous work done some years
ago by the Home Office on that question. Certainly, it is one of the issues that was
discussed.
Q261 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: I have got two or three questions. Before asking
them, can I just say how much I enjoyed reading your annual report? I would not say that I
read every word. Quite a bit of it was perhaps too technical for me but it was very
comprehensive and the amount of coverage of different areas that you described under each
drug section was very helpful. I learned a lot from it. I think I sort of understand what the
Reitox agency does but I am curious to know where the word comes from as I have never
heard it before.
Alexis Goosdeel: In Europe, there is a strong heritage from different cultures. One is the
British, with English, but there is also French. Reitox stands for the French name Réseau
Européen d'Information sur les Drogues et les Toxicomanies, which stands for the European
network of information on drugs and drug addiction. As the first director of the agency was
French, the name apparently looked easier to pronounce taking the French acronym.
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Baroness Eccles of Moulton: It is a good word.
The Chairman: You certainly could not have an acronym that was more difficult to
pronounce.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We are not gifted in that sense but once you have learned it you do not
forget it.
Q262 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: The only other questions I wanted to ask you were
about your website. Do you publish online everything that you produce in the way of
publications?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Yes, everything that is intended for an external audience. I say that
because we have some restricted areas. For the Early warning system for example, we have
a restricted database on chemical composition of all new substances being reported in
Europe. As soon as a synthesis method is identified and as soon as we have a description of
how to identify some new substance, we make it available to the forensic science community
through the early warning system. That is not something we would make more generally
public. It is freely open to those people who need to use it but at this stage we would not
make it part of the public database. Also, we are engaged in a lot of technical work. Each of
the indicators, for example, has a standing working group that is producing technical and
process things all the time. They have their own back-office areas with work in progress that
is not ready to be put out. The principle that we try to work on is that if we collect
information it should be made use of so we try to make it available. To be honest, we could
almost be criticised now for being a little too full on in our publishing. We perhaps need to
look at some of the information again to see if it is worth publishing. The principle up until
now is that if people bother to collect it and we are analysing it, then we ought to make it
available. That is what we try to do.
The Chairman: Presumably your co-operation with Europol is restricted.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Yes, but there are certain documents that we deal with. We do not deal
with operational-level data. But we do occasionally deal with second-step data and some
general intelligence based data. That information would obviously not be made public. We
have a secure data channel for that. There are always certain things worth preparing, such as
briefings for the Commission, for example, or temporary documents where we might feel
that they are not prepared for the public domain. Most of the time, the general principle is
that we are an information and communication agency, we should put this stuff out there
and prepare it in a way that people can use. I am very pleased that you found the report
accessible. We are trying to deal with everything within a 100-page document. I suspect the
problem is that it is a little too short to be very technical and a little too long to be a very
policy-orientated document. It is falling somewhere between the two. We try to serve all
the different audiences with that annual report and thus it is quite a scientific report for
policy people who pick it up. That is a challenge.
Q263 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: You translate the annual report into 23 languages.
Did I hear that right?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Yes, 23 languages. That might sound strange but we do, and we do it
successfully. It is a good communication tool. Over the years, the translations have got much
better and there has been more equivalence but every year it is a real challenge.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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Baroness Eccles of Moulton: As far as the website is concerned, presumably that is being
updated all the time so as you put new material on you have to decide what you can take off.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Exactly, and the challenge for us in the future is that we will probably
need to move more to online products because that is the way things are going generally.
We need to look at the website in terms of its accessibility and adding new functionality. We
are just beginning to address that question in the next work programme of how we ensure
that the online resources are of the same quality as our print products. The danger of the
website is that it is very easy to put stuff on it. We are keen therefore to ensure
appropriate quality control procedures. This is the issue that we are wrestling with at the
moment.
The Chairman: Presumably what you put out in Portuguese is of considerable importance
to the Brazilians, because they have major drug problems of different kinds.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We have a good working relationship with CICAD, the American
organisation that collects information on drugs for the Americas, both north and south. At
the moment we are in a form of soft negotiation with research centres in Brazil, Australia
and Canada to see whether there ought to be some sort of informal network of research
centres with interests in monitoring in the drugs field. We get an awful lot of requests to
engage in activities in Latin America, Asia, and other places. Our problem is that essentially
our job is to work with the EU member states and our resources are pretty stretched, so
we have to make some difficult decisions about things that would be nice to do and those
things we really have to do within the resources we currently have available to us.
Q264 The Chairman: Does anybody else have any questions? I thank you very much for
that introduction. We have all learnt a good deal from it. It forms a useful basis for us to go
into the questions. If you do not mind, I shall read out a formulaic statement that I always
make at the beginning of an evidence session.
This is a formal meeting of the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the House of Lords
European Union Committee and a verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence. This
will be put on the parliamentary website and it will include the introductory discussions we
have had. A few days after this evidence session, you will be sent a copy of the transcript to
check it for accuracy, and we would be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as
quickly as possible. If, after this session, you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during
your evidence or if you have any additional points to make, you are welcome to submit
supplementary evidence to us.
That concludes the introductory remarks, so if you are happy, we will set to with the
questions, of which I think you have been given some advance warning. I did say to you over
lunch that at an appropriate moment in the questioning, I will raise the issue of the idea that
there could, particularly if the statistical material you gather becomes very compatible and
comparable, be a move towards a kind of scorecard among member states as to how they
are doing in particular areas of policy. It would not be telling them how they should be
doing, but how they are doing. It was suggested to us in evidence we took yesterday that
this sort of approach has been working rather well in the Lisbon process on innovation and
the single market. People’s competitive instincts are on the whole benign in this area and
therefore worth encouraging. So we would like to put that out on the table and get a first
reaction from you, although obviously not of a substantive kind. This also gives you a degree
of advance warning that this is a subject we may come back to in our report.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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The first question I would like to ask is of a general nature. The current drug strategy
covering 2005-12 basically accepts, as did the previous one, that different member states are
free to apply different drugs policies within their own jurisdictions. This is an area in which
that much-maligned concept of subsidiarity applies. Do you think it is right that that should
continue to be the basis going into the next period that we are looking at, or should there
be a greater degree of harmonisation of national drugs policies at the EU level? I understand
that in some cases you will not want to answer a policy question too deeply, but this is just
an opinion on which we would be interested to hear your views.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Okay, I think what we will do with this one is for me to start with some
general comments and then turn to one of our more specialist colleagues to add some
colour and detail.
The question is posed, I suspect, as something of an either/or question where both options
could be possible in some way. I think that it is not for us to comment on subsidiarity, but
that seems to be the wish of member states, and certainly Lisbon does not dramatically
change that in any sense. However, what I would expect to see is what we have seen over
the past 10 years, which is a drift towards consensus based on an understanding of the
evidence, on discussion, and on the co-ordination of common actions. So I think that there is
a normative framework provided by the monitoring system we now have in the EU. Over
time what we are seeing is member states drifting towards more common policies. I think
that that has also been influenced by the fact that the drugs situation has changed. We still
have very divergent experiences of drug problems across Europe. They are still diverging,
but they are not as divergent as they once were. We also have what is increasingly
something that could be called a European policy model which is informed by a desire to
introduce evidence-based policies, respect for human rights and proportionality; what I see
as normal European mannerisms in the general sense. We see differences between the
policies of member states, but they are not as great as they once were. I think there is a
general rational drift, if you like.
It is also important to remember that cultural and substantive differences exist between
countries, which means that policy articulation may be legitimately different at the national
level. We see countries pursuing slightly different policy mixes that reflect institutional
situations, the drug situation in a country and cultural factors. This means that simply
applying a one-size-fits-all model would probably be inappropriate. However, those solutions
increasingly contain the same elements, albeit in a somewhat different mix according to what
is appropriate within a specific national context. I am not sure if my colleague wishes to add
to that.
Frank Zobel: I come from a federal country. I am German, but I grew up in another federal
country which is not part of the EU—Switzerland. The drug policies are organised so that
you have subsidiarity through a framework at the national level, and then you have all the
regions which implement the policies they want. The model has disadvantages but it also has
the great advantage of allowing for experimentation, in that different policies can be
compared. Different approaches can be taken and they are capable of being culturally
adapted. In Switzerland, with its French, Italian and German speaking parts, you have
different cultures so different policies are needed. The subsidiarity model has some
advantages which sometimes are not readily seen.
Mr Paul Griffiths: One thing we have seen is just how similar the policy documents have
become across Europe. If you look at the European policy document, increasingly member
states have, over time, more or less coalesced on a similar model, so there are structural
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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elements that are becoming more similar, even if some of the detail within member states
may differ. What we have is a policy framework that allows member states to have
differences on certain harm reduction issues, although there is not so much disagreement
about the general concept of harm reduction now throughout the European Union, even
though at the national level it is interpreted in very different ways. We have what I supposed
could be called a policy jacket so that member states can co-operate and co-ordinate their
activities while still allowing themselves sufficient freedom to adapt policy responses to their
own conditions. Perhaps that is the most sensible response to this point.
Q265 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: When the EU drugs strategy was produced for
2005-12, it had some pretty ambitious major objectives. Those were to reduce the demand
for and supply of drugs, to promote international co-operation and to promote research,
information and evaluation. Now, some five or six years later, to what extent do you think
those aims are being met?
Mr Paul Griffiths: They are ambitious aims for a European level of agreement, one that is
focused on co-operation and the co-ordination of actions within a framework of subsidiarity.
I guess that that would be my framing response. You could ask what you would expect an
EU-level drug strategy to achieve. My personal view is that the strategy has been very
effective in terms of encouraging co-ordination and co-operation. It is obviously much more
difficult from the scientific point of view—dare I say impossible even – to measure its impact
on the drug problem? However, we have prepared a report for the Commission analysing
the data that exists as well as we can to show the direct relationship between policy actions
taken at the European level and the situation on the ground in member states in terms of
prevalence and supply. We must be aware that these things are influenced by many factors,
of which the drug policy are but one, and indeed policies are applied at different levels, so
the extent to which the EU drugs policy at the European level has impacted on drug
prevalence in individual member states is going to mean working through a very complicated
set of intervening variables and factors. It would be simplistic to assume that one thing would
have a direct and simple relationship with the other. If it did, the data as we currently have it
in terms of pre and post measures do not permit us to measure it very well.
None the less, if we look at what has happened in Europe, the first thing I would say is that
Europe is looking pretty good on many measures when compared internationally. HIV is an
obvious example as is the decline in drug injection. We are probably also now looking at a
decline in the use of heroin over the next 10 years. It has been a major public health
problem within the European Union. I suspect that that will be the case, although I could be
wrong. But there is at least some evidence which is beginning to point in that direction. If
you look at declining levels of cannabis use, you can see overall that there is both a positive
and a negative assessment of the drug situation. The extent to which that can be directly
related to the European drug strategy is, I have to say, a complicated question. However,
Europe looks remarkably positive on many measures when compared with several other
areas.
In terms of drug information, we have some of the best low-cost information systems.
Certainly when I go to the US, I can see that they often struggle to have the understanding
of their situation as we now have in Europe, even though we are a low-cost and
decentralised model. There are 100 of us working here for a population of half a billion in
Europe, so it is not a huge resource. If you look at supply reduction, while it is once again a
difficult question, I think that there is increasing evidence that joined-up policing around
external borders is having greater impact. You can see this in some of the things we have
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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seen being done to the heroin route, and also in the Atlantic in terms of the cocaine trade.
So I think it reasonable assessment that you can see some definite benefits emerging from
co-operation between member states. That is a long answer to your question, I am afraid.
It is difficult to plot the direct relationship between the EU strategy and some of these more
complicated factors, but clearly that was always going to be the case. Even so, in terms of
co-operation and co-ordination, I have reason to feel quite positive about certain things that
have been achieved, and I am not too pessimistic about some of the areas you have
highlighted in terms of the drug situation. Clearly there is room to do far better—let us not
avoid the point—but things could also be far worse.
In terms of research, we are beginning to see more articulation at the European level on
drug research issues. Quite a lot of work remains to be done in terms of co-ordination, but
we are starting to see things like the recent proposal for the EU ERA-NET project indicating
that there is some development going on in terms of the European research effort too.
Q266 The Chairman: You said that you have made an analysis or an evaluation of the
strategy over the past five or six years for the Commission. Is that something you will be
able to share with us?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Frank Zobel is responsible for our work here. Part of our job is to
support the evaluation of the EU action plan and strategy, but there is an external company
involved in the actual evaluation and we would rather not commit in relation to its findings
at this stage. We produce a report where we chart the changes we have seen in the drug
situation. I hope there is no problem in releasing it.
Frank Zobel: There is no problem with that.
The Chairman: If you could share that with us, it would be really valuable. I would be very
grateful.
Frank Zobel: We can do that. It would be no problem. We are providing the external
evaluators who work for the European Commission and who will report on the changes in
the drug situation. We have already said that we are going to publish it ourselves and make
it available. So I think you can have it. It will remain confidential for some time, but you
should be able to have it.
The Chairman: Perhaps you could let Michael Collon know what restrictions, if any, there
would be on publication. But it would be valuable to us even if it does have restrictions.
Sometimes we get material from the British Government with restrictions on it. But of
course if we were able to use it in our report, that would be even better.
Danilo Ballotta: Probably after February it could be publicly released. The European
Commission will decide on the final version.
Q267 The Chairman: In that case, we should be all right because we will not be
publishing before February. That should not be a problem.
Alexis Goosdeel: Regarding your question about the impact or how effective is the
international co-operation part of the strategy, I have five points for consideration. The first
is that we have seen that the acquis on drugs is soft at the EU level, as you yourself
mentioned in your first question. There is also the rule of subsidiarity. The current strategy
is more about working together and improving co-ordination on international co-operation.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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The first point for consideration for us is that during the whole period compared with
before is that there is certainly an increasing number of integrated regional international cooperation policies in the form of geographical agreements and programmes. I shall mention a
few of them.
The two specific programmes for candidate and potential candidate countries to the EU are
now being merged. Previously there was one for current candidates and another for future
candidates. Now it is a single programme, and we are working actively on it. You have the
strategy for the Balkans, which is still the basis for the co-ordination of efforts in the western
Balkans. You have a programme with the neighbouring countries, as Paul mentioned in his
introduction. You have a very important programme that has existed for more than 10
years, which is the agreement between the EU and Latin America and the Caribbean. There
is a new component and a new programme which for the first time addresses supply,
demand reduction and national co-ordination mechanisms. It is called COPOLAD.
We also saw a big change seven or eight years ago through the decision of the Commission
to change the organisation of the technical co-operation and to follow the heroin route or
the cocaine route. That is the first point.
The second is that there has been a strong component of supply reduction, especially
international co-operation on supply reduction, in the strategy. I can give one example. In
the western Balkans, you have the Regional Co-ordination Council based in Sarajevo. There
is increasing co-ordination between the different law enforcement networks that did not
exist before. The third point is that of, course, compared with the previous strategy for EU
policy in the 1990s, there has been a general fear that less priority is put on demand
reduction for international cooperation activities. This is partly due to the fact that the
budget line which was decided by the European Parliament was cancelled some seven or
eight years ago and has not been replaced. However, there are still activities being financed
by the EU through regional programmes like the Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPA). IPA is
an instrument for preparation of candidate and potential candidate countries, which preaccession, has a regional component and national indicative programmes, and all countries
have the opportunity to apply and present their projects. For instance, Serbia has put
together a very important programme of Demand Reduction and for the preparation of the
first national drug strategy for its Ministry of Health.
The last two points go together.
The first is that the picture has changed, especially now with Latin America and the
Caribbean with COPOLAD, and in the candidate and potential candidate countries. There is
a strong effort made with those countries by the EU, with a concentration on national
strategies and action plans. If you look at the situation today compared with eight years ago,
all the Balkan countries have or are close to adopting national action plans which follow the
model of the European one. Some of those countries now need support on how to
implement their plans. Certainly there is a result that was not only pushed by the EU, it was
also financially supported by the EU.
My last point is more directly linked to European Union Agencies, like the EMCDDA. In all
candidate and potential candidate countries, and for the past two years now for the
neighbouring countries also, there is an opportunity for those new countries to participate
in EU agencies because priority has been given to fewer agencies, among which is the
EMCDDA. Overall, with more technical co-operation, they can be helped to establish
national drug observatories and to provide more reliable and objective information.
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) – Oral evidence
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Q268 Lord Tope: I am going to go back to your presentation at the beginning, which I
thought was extremely useful. You told us quite a lot about how you collect, collate and
disseminate very valuable information. Just now you said it was the best system in the world.
It is a bold claim, but I have to say that all the evidence we have had would bear that out.
Some of it is very valuable. I have said that in order to preface what are perhaps slightly
critical questions.
First, you are clearly dependent on each of the member states for the information you get.
What sort of quality checks are made? There must be some variation between states in the
quality and reliability of the detail of the information you are actually given. I wonder how
you deal with that inevitable issue.
The other issue, which has been raised with us a number of times, is related to what you
stressed in your presentation, which is comparability. Again, a lot of the comments in the
evidence we have received talk about the difficulty of actually being sure—it is not your
fault—that the information which is received is not fairly comparable, perhaps because of
different definitions and interpretations. How do you deal with that problem?
Mr Paul Griffiths: It is certainly the central problem that we wrestle with. I would hazard to
say that I think we have one of the best regional information systems.
Lord Tope: There is no need to be too modest. We will accept that.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Let us take your question: are there problems with the data? For sure,
there are some problems. Can we talk with some confidence about the drug situation in
Europe in a way that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago? Yes, we can. Are the data
in this area always likely to be problematical at some level? They will be, because we are
looking at measuring a complicated set of interrelated behaviours which by definition are
hard to observe and hard to measure. They are also interrelated with all sorts of other
factors. We are not looking at, if you like, a disease, but rather at a cluster of different types
of behaviour that can often only be observed through indirect sources. How do we deal
with that? We take a long-term developmental view and we try to work slowly with
member states in order to bring them into line with what we consider to be good practice
in terms of reporting standards.
In terms of the analysis, we are trying to work with multi-source information. In that way
you test one data source for accuracy of information. It is not quite true that we are an
information centre, because in a sense we are an analysis centre. We had an interesting
meeting on the heroin drought in the last two weeks. These data are not even available in
the form of registered data. What you have are expert opinions, partial data and disparate
reports. If I bring them all together with expertise, you are able to draw some conclusions
and understand what we know and what we do not know. I looked at some of the evidence
you received and in my opinion the data we collect are not always nearly as bad as many
people tend to assume. Sometimes, especially from a UK perspective, people tend to be a
little bit unsure about what is happening in Europe, but five or six years ago there were huge
problems in terms of data comparability but they are becoming less great.
The year before last, we did a full assessment of the key indicator decisions, trying to be
formal and judge severely how well they had been implemented. The conclusion was actually
quite a cheerful one. It is surprising how much of the data were comparable. In many
countries there are still problems—there always will be—but the fact is that things are
looking much more robust than they are given credit for.
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You mentioned drugs-related-deaths data in a written question. Now, more than 20
countries report data from general mortality registers. Seventeen of those would be
regarded as excellent or good in terms of European standard definitions. Is that good or
bad? As someone who has been working in this field for 20 years or so, it is pretty damned
good compared with how it used to be. There is still a long way to go but I think it is a
question of whether the glass is half empty or half full, and it depends on how you look at it.
That does not mean that often, I am terribly depressed at the problems that we are facing
with some of the data.
In some areas, the data are far less well developed than in others and the situation is more
problematic. In terms of a lot of the response data, you do not have formalised registry data
or data collection systems that exist in member states, and you probably never will have,
because the investment required to get those data is simply not justified. So there you have
to deal much more with qualitative data and expert assessments and try and develop more
robust ways of doing that. You can only monitor systematically things that it is reasonable to
expect people to collect on a systematic basis. Also things are changing over time, so in
terms of monitoring drug treatment, for example, IT developments are coming along at such
a pace that we can now start to collect information in ways that we could not think of doing
a few years ago.
Many of the new EU member states introduced quite rigorous drug information systems as
part of the assessment process for the EU. In some respects, some of the problems that we
had were with bigger data sets in the older member states, where there was a historical
legacy of doing things in a particular way. They were slower to change to some sort of
common system, so there has been a legacy issue here in that respect.
We started our work with the key indicators—which are the most well developed data sets.
Now, part of the interest is in looking at supply reduction indicators. We are working on
drug seizures, and what might be seen as quite punitive seizures, and that sort of thing,
moving to find the suppliers. Now, I think we are still further back. We have got a longer
journey in terms of standardising the process, but I think that we know how to do it—that
is, by bringing together experts and breaking the data into reasonable analytical chunks. You
deal with each chunk individually, establish guidelines and encourage people to take some
time adjusting their process and adopt the common guidelines. You also encourage people
to engage in common analyses, as this gives value to their work. We have a commitment to
making those sorts of changes. The Reitox network is key there because it is the way that
we communicate with member states in terms of education. We also require the support of
member states and the commitment of policy-makers to say that collecting the information
in a common fashion is worth while. However, even in the best possible the world, there
will always be differences in terms of the quality of data available.
The Chairman: We noticed that the English and the Scots do not provide you with
material on drug-related deaths which is exactly comparable.
Mr Paul Griffiths: It is not exactly comparable.
The Chairman: The English only provide that after a coroner’s verdict and the Scots
provide it immediately, so that there may well be a distortion in a particular period of
reporting.
Mr Paul Griffiths: It is important to understand that there will be differences in data sets
we receive. Countries do not always have the same systems, and there will be all sorts of
reasons why the data will be slightly different. One of my colleagues who is implementing the
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indicators is trying to understand those differences and factor them into the analysis. When
you look at the timeframes and trends over time, rather than individual data points, it may
mean that a discrepancy between the data is less important than the overall trend. So if the
number of deaths is going up in two countries and down in another, and we understand
something about the reporting biases that will always exist at some level, we can still make a
valuable comparison between the data sets. France, for example, has a known problem of
under-reporting the number of drug-related deaths, but we also know it is a country that
has tried to estimate the reporting bias. It has low levels of deaths over time, but looking at
the time trends of other countries, you can still make valuable comparisons within the bigger
context. However, if you ask whether we will end up with exactly the same data put in
exactly the same way in all the areas that we are interested in, I think that that is simply not
a possible objective. So you have to understand the context in which the data are put.
Q269 Lord Tope: The point you are making really is that it is the analysis of the data that
is crucial rather than simply the collection of approved data without understanding their
interpretation.
Mr Paul Griffiths: That is exactly what I should have said.
Lord Tope: You clearly did say it because I understood it. Inevitably some of the evidence
that we have been given will be a bit out of date. You are saying that it is improving all the
time. That is very important evidence and I think that taking that balance into account will be
quite helpful for our report.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We can provide you with the last assessment of the communicator,
which is a couple of years out of date now. It just looks at the comparability of the five key
epidemiological indicators.
Q270 The Chairman: This might be the moment when I ask you to respond very briefly
in the first instance on the importance of the idea of moving towards establishing scorecards
to compare national data, perhaps using some of the easier and more comparable areas first.
It has been suggested to us that this could be valuable and that it could act as a kind of
stimulus to member states to be more effective in their policies. What do you think about
that?
Mr Paul Griffiths: I am considering my words carefully. Our role is very clearly stipulated. It
is to help member states to evaluate the national policies, but we do not engage as actors in
the policy process. We do not try to encourage member states to engage in one particular
policy or another. For an information agency, it is very important that we have a neutral
perspective and that we do not try to push any particular perspective. Our job is to evaluate
what the evidence says and does not say and feed it back into the formal policy discussion.
Certainly, we have had an increasing number of requests from member states both to help
to develop their own policies and to develop policy tools, which is something that we are
engaging with. I will ask Frank to say a little about that in a minute. In terms of a comparative
analysis, in some sense we are going one step towards allowing someone to collect data. In
this country we have good data on the levels of drug-related deaths or whatever. So in some
ways, by doing comparisons it is implicit that you will want to compare things. I think that it
would be up to the member states to ask us to take a more strategic approach—as has been
suggested, a scorecard approach—and it would be something that we would only do if the
member states wished it.
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The Chairman: If I interpreted it rightly, you are saying that there would have to be some
trace of that idea in the new drugs strategy if you were to pick the ball up and run with it.
There would need to be an indication that the member states would welcome this.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We would have to see whether it was conforming fully with our founding
regulations. When we were formed, member states clearly did not want to have a new
agency whose job was to criticise national policy; rather, our job was to inform. We would
have to consider very carefully any change in that fundamental tenet.
Q271 The Chairman: Thank you very much. I was not expecting a definitive response on
this but I wanted to put the issue out on the table and hear your first reaction. We, of
course, are a completely different sort of body. If we chose to float this idea, it would be up
to Governments, agencies and others to respond to it as they wished. We have no means
beyond that of bringing an idea out on to the table.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Frank is our policy expert. Has he anything to add to this?
Frank Zobel: Maybe just a word about the evaluation of national drugs policies in general.
When I started at the MCDDA five years ago, I think that there were five or six new
member states that had formally evaluated their national drugs policy at least once. Today, I
think we have 20 that have done it at least once, so there has been a real development of
evaluation practices in the member states. It has become part of the European standard
policy to have a strategy, a drug co-ordination body and a final evaluation at the end of the
strategy. The quality of these evaluations is extremely diverse and goes from extremely
simple models to much more scientifically developed approaches. However, one of the
features that now seems to be becoming standard is that when you evaluate your own
national drugs strategy, you also look at other countries to see what they have done.
Nowadays, this is extremely easy because you just have to go on the website of the
MCDDA and in three clicks you know the level of cannabis use in France, if you come from
the UK, or in the Netherlands or in other countries. There is a tendency not to use a
scorecard system but to compare yourself with others, which is good because before this
process was very much an exercise in self-congratulation. Now it is more a case of seeing
whether what you do looks good compared with what is being done in other countries, and
whether the trends you observe are good compared with the trends you see in other
countries. I can give you an example. One of the things we saw recently from the data is that
the United Kingdom has had an incredible decrease in cannabis use. While it is absolutely
stable in most of the other countries in Europe or sometimes shifts up a little or down a
little, the United Kingdom has had an incredible decrease. That is an interesting question:
what is happening in the United Kingdom which is different from the rest of Europe? We do
not have the answer but one of the possibilities is that you have also had an incredible
decline in smoking among young people in the United Kingdom. It might be that there is a
difference here. This type of difference opens new questions around the effectiveness of the
drug policies.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Of course, we did recriminalise the use of cannabis.
Frank Zobel: But it started well before that; it is a 10-year decrease.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So, the BCCB change—
Frank Zobel: No, that made no change in one direction or the other. It seems that there is
another driving force behind it.
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Q272 Lord Avebury: Before I ask my question, can I just ask first whether we could have
access to the information on the five key epidemiological indicators that were mentioned? Is
that a published document?
Mr Paul Griffiths: It is an internal management board document but I am sure that it is also
a public document. It is on our website.
Lord Avebury: Will it be produced this year? What date do you think it will come out?
Mr Paul Griffiths: At the middle of next year. We are doing it as the baseline for the next
three-year working process.
Q273 Lord Avebury: Thank you very much. We have already heard praise for the
MCDDA efforts to evaluate an emphasis aimed at reducing the demand for drugs. I wonder
why there are no equally effective performance indicators in place in the evaluation of
initiatives seeking to reduce the supply of drugs.
Mr Paul Griffiths: As you may be aware from the recent communication from the
Commission, the supplying of indicators is a priority of the Commission’s current work plan.
It is also an objective in the current EU action plan. We have been working with the
Commission for the past couple of years in this area. We have been collecting data on this
for a long time but it has not had the level of development harmonisation and critical
attention as we demanded last year. There are a number of reasons for that, not least
because there is not the same reporting culture in the supply reduction area as there is in
the public health area. Public health specialists are used to reporting things in a standard way.
In respect to supply reduction reporting culture is often more tied up with performance
evaluation, which makes the data more complicated to deal with from our perspective.
There is less of a formal culture that supports the importance of reporting in a comparable
and standard way. It has also been given less attention . It has not been a priority up to now
simply for resource reasons, among others. We started a project which has involved a
conference last year in Brussels at which we brought together professionals in this area. This
is very much about building up expert networks. We also understand that you need to build
the confidence of those people supplying the data that this is a useful and worthwhile task
and that they get something out of it. Those are all things that are going to be quite
challenging in this area. At that conference a couple of weeks back we had three expert
working groups in this very room we are sitting in now developing proposals for key
indicators which will then go back to another consensus-building conference next year
supported by the Commission, which will then produce a proposal to go before member
states and the Council. At that point it will be very much a case of whether the member
states wish to support data collection in this area because they need to be committed to
providing this kind of information and giving the same sort of internal commitment to data
collection that that we see elsewhere. I think that we are also going to need a slightly
different data collection model. What we know from our experiences with the early warning
system is that we collect an awful lot of forensic science data and reinforcement data and we
do that in a virtually real-time fashion. That means that someone will record a new seizure
or a new drug in the morning and they will get a response from the system in the evening. It
is a different kind of data collection model but it provides value to those people involved in
the data collection process. That is why the early warning system is being run and is
successful in our terms. I think that in some of the supply reduction areas we are going to
have to develop more real-time and faster-time reporting and feedback systems. Law
enforcement personnel are not really interested in reporting data two or three years later,
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they want more immediacy in terms of the information. None the less, there are many
straightforward things you can do in terms of standardising the data on seizures and potency
of tablets and those sorts of things. That is quite straightforward. With the support of the
member states, and recognising that this is as much a human process as a technical
endeavour, I would hope to see the quality of supply-reduction data becoming ever better
over the next few years. To analyse supply-reduction data one of the first things you want to
do is put it in a context of demand-reduction data because if seizures are going up, you want
to see whether use levels are going up too or are going down. If they are not going in the
same direction, how you interpret the data is very different. There is a culture sometimes in
the law-enforcement world of having to show that you are making an impact. What we need
to do is stand back, put the data into the big picture and ask questions like, “Okay, if we are
seeing a lot of cocaine seizures, what are we seeing in terms of other stimulants—
amphetamines, for example?” Are demand, price and purity all going in the same direction? If
they are going in contrary directions, what does that mean? If the users are still reporting
that availability is good, how do we understand what we are interpreting in terms of the
seizures? I think the interpretation of the supply reduction data needs to be done in the
context of demand-reduction data.
Q274 Lord Avebury: You said it is up to member states to decide next year whether
supply reduction data are worth collecting.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We will still collect it but there will be a proposal for key indicators. We
have key indicators in demand areas. There is a debate at EU level about what sort of legal
structures or co-operation structures are needed to support data collection. In terms of the
demand-reduction indicators, we do not have any strong legal obligation on member states
other than the fact that it is mentioned in the drug action plan and in our regulation, so it is
very soft in terms of the obligation for member states to provide the data. The idea with
supply reduction indicators is that a proposal will be made by the commission on key
indicators. We have yet to see how that proposal is framed, and it will be up to the member
states to decide what they want to do with it. We cannot make member states provide us
with data if they do not want to, so the will and support of member states will be crucial to
improve the quality of data, as much as anything that can be done at the European level.
Q275 Lord Avebury: If they do decide to go ahead, that obviously means more work for
you, doesn’t it?
Mr Paul Griffiths: That could be a consequence of that decision.
Lord Avebury: Would you be in a position to make recommendations on whether it
should go ahead? If so, where would the resources come from?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Those are important questions that would need to be addressed when
that decision-making process was conducted. Clearly, we have limited resources here to
work on this area. We do what we can within the resources available to us. If there were a
decision to scale up what was required, we might have to transfer resources and turn them
to other tasks. The question then would be what tasks we would give up, and that is not an
easy question to answer. We have to explore other ways to work with those resources.
Q276 Lord Avebury: Without asking you to commit yourself to a prediction on the
usefulness of embarking on this action, do you think it might be conducive to a better
European drugs strategy than would otherwise be the case?
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Mr Paul Griffiths: I think everyone recognises that the absence of sound information is a
problem. It is far more problematic to understand the impact of drug policies on the drug
situation. There is a general acceptance that we need to do better, and we as an agency are
committed to doing what we can. We have been working in this area for 15 years. It is just
that the pace of development is quite slow. I would be hopeful that the current political and
technical process that the Commission is supporting, and in which we are playing our part as
a technical agency, will lead to invigoration. It is hard to predict at this stage what that will
actually mean. Can I stop to introduce you to Wolfgang Götz, who has joined us from
Brussels?
Wolfgang Götz: Thank you, but there was no need.
The Chairman: We will have a chance to meet you in the coffee break and have an
informal talk, but now you are here, thank you very much for the hospitality of you and your
colleagues, which has been very good. We are in the middle of things now.
Danilo Ballotta: Can I just say, to come back to your question about the resources for this
area, the European Commission is just finishing off its 2007-13 term of financing and
projecting the new one, 2014-20? This area will have a single programme instead of several
crime programmes. I think the envelope is €400 million for this period. The Commission is
very well disposed to the programme already. The implementation of guidelines, standards
and indeed indicators—a lot will be covered there. Greater collaboration in this area
between the agencies and institutions can also mean different scenarios that we have not yet
seen in these countries. A new level of resources could be mobilised for this.
Q277 The Chairman: The multiannual framework that you are speaking about is of
course highly unlikely to get agreed for quite a long time, judging by the slowness with which
the process is moving at the moment, due partly to the difficult economic situation. In a way,
you are saying that you, Europol, Frontex and all the others have to divide up the envelope
for JHA. Presumably, that is done, largely on the proposal of the Commission. What rough
percentage doe the ECMDDA get at the moment of the JHA funds?
Danilo Ballotta: We have another budget line that is directly towards our functioning. But,
as you say, how that will be split among the different areas is not known, and it will probably
be a headache in the future. Until now we have had a drugs programme and a crime
prevention programme, and there things can be better identified. How that will be divided
up is very hard to say at the moment because the programme has just been released, a
couple of weeks ago, and now is in consultation with the Parliament and the member states,
and different forces will act in this area.
The Chairman: And are likely to do so for another two years, I would think.
Wolfgang Götz: I have one figure. The current scenario that the Commission is putting on
the table for the 2014-20 budget is that the overall amount for home affairs is €8.2 billion.
The part for the EMCDDA that we are looking at is about €120 million over seven years.
Q278 Lord Tope: What benefit does the sharing of instances of best practice bring to
those working directly with drug users?
Mr Paul Griffiths: I hope that by definition it should bring considerable benefit and results
in improvement of best practice. At the end of the day, there is no point in collecting the
information and providing it if it does not impact in better policies and better responses. I
could talk for hours on individual cases of where the information makes a difference and
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changes can be seen. An easy example is the EU member states that joined the EU in 2004.
They essentially adopted a whole drug response model based on the learning from other
countries from the past 20 years of dealing with drug problems .
At the moment, it is very interesting and we have been pulling together data. Historically,
the UK funds quite a lot of research related to the drug problems and its responses. If
anything, it is a good practice generator, in some sense, for other countries. An example of
this is some interesting new work on Hepatitis C, where we can see how the data available
helps us respond better. It does not really matter what we do in terms of scaling up existing
responses. Having an impact on HCV incidence is important as this disease will have longterm health costs for all countries in the EU. You need to treat injectors in drug treatment
who are infected with HCV, so you have to treat active cases within drug treatment, if you
are going to impact on prevalence. This is changing the whole response model. It does not
really matter how much you do in terms of scaling up harm reduction, outreach or drug
treatment service if you are not treating those infected It will not significantly impact on the
problem. Again, that learning is coming up from monitoring the overall system.
We have just released guidelines on HIV in terms of disease control, which is very
important. We estimate now that there is something like 1,200 to 1,500 new HIV cases of
registered drug use in Europe a year. If that is taken in the context of 8,000 to 10,000 drug
overdoses and probably 25,000 deaths associated with chronic drug use in the more general
sense, HIV is increasingly becoming a smaller public health issue. None the less, the potential
for the new outbreaks remains ever present, especially in these difficult times economically
with policymaking cuts. But, with the other issues, it is important to emphasise that we know
how to prevent HIV and that combinations of measures are better than individual measures.
Putting that perspective across as guidance at the EU level can impact on practice and help
people when they go in to argue for their service money in their localities.
We increasingly find that when we produce a guidance document it gets downloaded many
thousands of times. It makes me think that the number of people who are actually involved
in this topic is infinite. My suspicion is that a large proportion of those people are now
sourcing information because they are more aware of it being available centrally.
Increasingly in Europe, it can bring in new drugs. New drugs came in in some countries first,
although they are very hard to detect. Using Poland as an example, around 1,200 shops have
opened up selling legal highs. Quite a lot of people end up in the emergency rooms with
acute reactions. That sort of learning can inform other countries which perhaps have not yet
experienced that problem. The information should show the fundamental reasons that exist.
We are constantly trying to ensure that the information is getting to the people who need it.
I think that overall we do quite a good job .
Q279 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: When the Commission is making policy, how much
influence do you think your work has on the policies that emerge? Please also apply that
question to the member states.
Mr Paul Griffiths: It is a difficult question. One would hope that, certainly at the European
level, the extent to which drug policies are made at the European level, we have a close
working relationship with the Commission and I do not think that anything starts without
EMCDDA say-so. So we provide the context and the frame in which all discussion takes
place. My feeling is that that happens more and more these days.
Often, many member states in drafting their policies come to us and ask about the
interesting area of legal highs. Lots of member states have asked what other countries have
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done in terms of legislation and health responses in this area, and how that legislation is
effected, in terms of their own reflection on how their policies are emerging in that area.
ll sorts of things influence national policymaking. Not all of them are strictly evidence based. I
suspect that all sorts of factors need to come into play.
The Chairman: Like press campaigns?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Clearly, the press is an important source of information. We try to work
with the press as best we can. In terms of those areas where you would expect information
to be used, people take note of it. On whether policies should be more evidence and
information-based, that is for encouraging countries to take stock of what can be learned
from other member states and what the information is saying. Certainly, in some areas, you
can put that.
Interestingly, we have seen a slow shift to environmental and indicative prevention strategies,
which is increasingly robust.
Q280 The Chairman: Can you just explain what that implies?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Rather than trying to target the preventionist registers universally, you
target them on those people where there is reason for why they might be indicated—so
targeting certain groups or populations—or you try to create an environment in which nondrug-taking choices are regarded as normal. Some of the argument is that universal drug
prevention can inadvertently give the assumption that everyone takes drugs and that it is a
normal choice. Therefore, it can be counterproductive.
There is increasing evidence that these kinds of more sophisticated and targeted forms of
prevention—one can look at the environment in which the behaviour takes place or the
individuals who are particularly at risk and need to be targeted in terms of prevention—can
be more effective. Simply giving “say no” messages in terms of mass media campaigns has a
much less robust evidence base. Even where they have been evaluated, they can sometimes
even be shown to be counterproductive. That kind of evidence has been out for quite a long
time now, but for most member states the bulk of prevention work does not always
conform with what the evidence says and investments are often greatest for universal
prevention campaigns.
We are seeing a drift to more evidence-based responses. Over time, and it is a slow slog,
but you do see a shift in responses to those areas which have been shown to have benefits,
as against those areas which cannot be shown to have benefits. The complexities of drug
policy making being able to show that this works can be a powerful argument if you keep
saying it for long enough.
Q281 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So could you say on the other side of the coin that
in the past there have been more times when you have perhaps been dismayed at the extent
to which the data, information and evidence in your work has not been taken on board by
either the Commission or the member states, and that that is happening less and less?
Mr Paul Griffiths: I am encouraged by the fact that, over time, being able to put the
evidence to the member states and to the broader political debate, increasingly—especially
as the drugs issue has become somewhat less of a flagpole issue—the policymakers are more
able to look at what can be seen to work and at how that can be applied.
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I am encouraged that there is a slow march of rationality. Clearly, drug policies are affected
by scientific evidence.
Alexis Goosdeel: I have indirect support for the policymaking or implementation. For
instance, the country profiles we produced on the western Balkans in all relevant countries
is being used by some member states, by the Commission and by other international
organisations when they try to determine the situation in countries if they need to
implement programmes. We provide also, on request by the Commission, technical
feedback on any kind of technical proposal or project presented by any country which is a
beneficiary from the regional programme. The EMCDDA contributes as much as it can,
despite its limited resources. But in EU policymaking towards non-EU countries, the EU
strategy and EC programmes support the adoption of European standards on data
collection, and are making reference to our work. Increasingly, we are being asked by the
European Commission for at least technical and scientific feedback, if not for a direct
involvement in technical co-operation.
Q282 Lord Avebury: You have been talking about evidence-based responses. Perhaps we
can look for a moment at what has been done about making more information available on
what we broadly call decriminalisation, and what you referred to a moment ago as penalty
changes, in Europe, particularly the startling evidence which you pointed to earlier on the
decline of cannabis. The graph is on page 45 or your report. Do you think that more needs
to be done in comparing the experience of countries before and after changes in the
penalties for the possession of small quantities of drugs as a means of tackling these
problems?
Mr Paul Griffiths: I will hand this to Frank to say something about the decriminalisation, as
opposed to our discussion on legalisation. Moving drug use out of the criminal arena to the
public health arena is a complex issue. We thought that it was an interesting analysis. We
have done it for cocaine, which I think I am right in saying showed that small changes in drug
legislation, be they more punitive or more liberal, for the want of a better word, could not
be seen to have any direct association on prevalence rates in the short to medium term. A
lot of attention is given to these quite small changes in the legislative framework.
From an initial analysis it is very hard to see them then impact in any way and in any
common way on a number of countries. This may be the fact that small changes do not have
a big impact on the perception or the reality of the availability of user evidence. It could be
that these things are given oversignificance.
Frank Zobel: Regarding your question, first, we do not really see a trend towards
decriminalisation in Europe. We see a trend towards lower penalties, more alternatives to
punishments and assessment methods, and towards differentiation of penalties according to
drugs. As regards how we make this information available, on our website we have a section,
the European Legal Database on Drugs, where you can find analysis of the existing laws in all
the member states on an issue like this—the criminalisation of possession for personal use.
You also can compare all the countries on other topics—for example, trafficking penalties—
and you have tables where you can look at the differences.
Part of your question was also about how we look at the phenomenon of decriminalisation.
In the past decade, the big example is Portugal. I think you have the report, which we
published in June this year, on the policy profile of Portugal showing what this policy is
exactly. As you mentioned before, there was a lack of understanding between
decriminalisation and legalisation on this issue. The report tries to show the specific features
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of the approach taken in Portugal—a big part of which is the implementation of the
commission for the dissuasion of drug use, which you have probably heard of or will hear
about from João Goulão—and assesses the problems that people have.
We made this information available because we thought that the whole debate about the
Portuguese decriminalisation was going in all possible directions. We have tried to explain
what is going on. We will continue and there will probably be an evaluation of the
Portuguese scheme, after which we will report on the results. We are following the debate
quite closely but the main example in recent years is Portugal.
Danilo Ballotta: Can I add something about the terminology? What the Portuguese coordinator might refer to as “decriminalisation” is in reality what Nordic countries might call
“depenalisation”, in the sense that, in Portugal, you can get arrested for possession of any
substance. In other countries, such as Italy and Spain, you do not follow the criminal justice
system but an administrative system, but they do not call it that. The terminology and
significance that you give to “decriminalisation” is very important. It is clear that we do not
understand the same thing by using the same term.
Q283 The Chairman: Do you think that there is anything the agency could do to clarify
these misunderstandings about terminology? You have only to read the British press, which
gets wildly excited on this subject often on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of what
is being suggested. I wonder whether your agency could do something, in the 23 languages in
which you produce things, to provide a kind of glossary—obviously, you cannot tell anyone
else how they should do it, but I expect that they would tend to follow your example—of
how you in your publications intend to categorise various forms of legal activity and so on. It
could be quite valuable to do that, because I am really struck, coming to this from the
outside, by the amount of confusion and disinformation there is around.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We tried to address that in part by the Portuguese policy profile,
because we wanted to explain the context of it and describe it neutrally, so that what you
see is very much a public health-orientated drugs policy that does not look vastly dissimilar
to many other drug policies. We are also working on a glossary and translation project and
we have our internal glossary project. Some of these terms become quite complicated. One
of the interesting things about terminology is that different countries interpret it in very
different ways. In some senses, that ambiguity can almost be useful to a debate in which
everybody can take part by virtue of their understanding the concept perhaps slightly
differently from their own national context. I take your point; I think that we should try to
explain these things while recognising that some of these concepts are blurred.
Q284 The Chairman: Yes, I am sure one cannot achieve absolute clarity, but I think that
a higher degree of confusion is caused by the language that is used than is entirely desirable. I
am sure that there will always be very strong opinions on both sides on some of these
issues. You cannot eliminate those simply by way of syntactical tweaks, but I think that you
could perhaps reduce the amount of disinformation and misunderstanding if there was a
glossary that came to be used in all the languages in Europe to mean roughly the same thing.
Danilo Ballotta: Besides this very sensible proposal, we could provide you with a report
that we wrote in 2005, published in French and English, on legislative approaches to drug
use. In the first part, we dealt with what was meant by “decriminalisation” and “legalisation”.
We thought that it would be out of date in a couple of years, but this part is not. That first
part is still up to date; the rest of it—the description of the legislation—has changed. For
example, in southern Europe, “decriminalisation”, as in Italy, Spain and Portugal, means
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removing criminal penalties which others might continue to have. So there is a
linguistic/cultural issue there. We tried to assess that in that report. If you want, we can
provide it.
The Chairman: Yes, thank you.
Mr Paul Griffiths: The idea is good. Part of the reason for having drug profiles on the
website is to try to build a definitive, accurate statement of what a drug is. Although that
might sound obvious, it is more complicated than you would suspect when you come to the
chemistry and the structure of things like amphetamines, for example. There is confusion.
Maybe we should look again at some of these other key terms and, if we do not give one
definition, at least give the different definitions that people use in different parts of Europe so
that people understand the differences.
Q285 The Chairman: It often does help. Can we move on? We have to speed up at least
a little or we will eat into both our coffee time and our time with your Portuguese colleague.
There is a good deal in the present European drug strategy about the need to promote local
initiatives and citizen participation in drug policy. From the evidence that you have collected,
do you get the feeling that this kind of promotion of local initiatives and citizen participation
has been successful? For example, do you think that more could be done whereby cities of
comparable size and culture could work together more directly across national
boundaries—not necessarily through their national Governments—to gain experience and
to put to good use some of the work that you do?
Mr Paul Griffiths: To answer your question exactly, we do not collect a lot of information
that allows us to have an informed view on the amount or rate of change in community
participation. However, more generally, such activity is seen as a clearly positive thing to do.
From our monitoring perspective, we increasingly look at new trends at a local level. Many
responses are also implemented at a local level. We are looking at how we might work
more with cities or subsets of smaller geographical areas on data collection. I am aware of an
interesting project in which we looked at European and American cities. A lot of interest is
shown in sharing information at that level. We are not really the best people to comment on
it, but it is hard not to be supportive of that. Given how complicated and fast-moving drug
problems can be, responses need to be tailored to local conditions, which vary enormously.
The Chairman: Yes, I suspect that some of the city officials who have to grapple with
these problems think that their national Governments are not always the most helpful
people and that there are other cities grappling with similar problems that have much that is
important to teach them. That is one of the ideas that we have identified as being something
of which there should, perhaps, be more.
Q286 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Some of our witnesses have suggested that the
EMCDDA could do with an increase in resources. We know that you run a very tight ship. If
this miracle should happen, how would you spend it?
Wolfgang Götz: As you can easily imagine, nobody would reject additional resources. At
the same time, it is not the time to ask for resources. If you follow the development of the
agency over the past few years you will see that we have seriously increased our output. We
have reached this with quite stable resources. We are creating synergies and becoming more
effective. We have reached a point at which, if we go much further, we will squeeze our staff
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like lemons, which we do not want to do. I have to protect my people here; that is also very
important.
However, if the miracle would happen, and it can happen only with formally approved new
task. That is the situation as it looks to me from a legal point of view. We might manage to
convince the Commission and the European Parliament, but we can never convince the
Council of Ministers or member states that we need more resources for the tasks that we
are already doing. This is how the budget and power are divided. The Council is always
looking to cut or to give the minimum. The UK is one of the members that is known as not
being very generous. If you compare our agency with other information agencies, I am happy
about all kinds of benchmarking. Everybody will say that we do much more with fewer
resources than some of the others. This is not because the others are bad; it just means that
we are better. If you see what we are doing, there is a need to do more and to do it better
than we do today. There is the issue of new substances popping up all over the place.
I refer you to Ana and other colleagues are working up to their limits. They could have two,
three or four times more staff; that would be helpful. The agency has started to work on a
health scheme. This was foreseen in the founding regulation from 1993. The mandate always
covered all areas—demand and supply. It was a vast economy. However, we started in the
health field and when, a few years later, we wanted to start in the supply area we were told,
“Now you are an agency at cruising speed and cruising speed no longer gets additional
resources”. Therefore, we are struggling to develop now with very few resources in supply
indicators. Our colleagues from the law enforcement agencies, particularly Europol, CEPOL
and Frontex, are always happy about our analysis because they do not have the people for
the kind of analysis that we do. It is not their job. I am not talking about operational analysis.
We have promised to develop standard indicators in the area of responses. This is possible
only if we have the resources for them. Recently, these are more on the demand reduction
side, but one day we might have to show the factors on the supply side. I can make an
endless list of elements where we could do more and we could do better, but you can push
the lists through the political agenda much better than we can. We would be very grateful
for that. I have not said anything about the areas where we overlap with others. There is the
question of illicit substances in many countries. The point is not whether drugs are licit or
illicit; it is more about addiction and whether something is addictive; all that is put into one
package so that you have a blurred area. Paul mentioned the term “so-called legal highs”. It
comes together with all kinds of illicit synthetic substances, doping, the question of
consumer protection and the misuse of prescription medicines. That is all a blurred area.
We are working with medicines agencies in London on the pharmacovigilance system. I can
make an endless list of important tasks that should be done. These days I will not go out and
say that I want more money for my side but I want to protect what we have.
Q287 The Chairman: Yes, I can understand that. It sounds as though you probably are
doing something that is a fairly well known management tool, which is to be able to answer
two questions. If you had 10% fewer resources than you have now, what would you have to
cut? If you had 10% more resources than you have now, what would you do in addition to
what you are doing now? They are quite useful exercises to perform because they mean you
can be more precise when people ask a question about this. Even if you are not campaigning
for greater resources, it is quite an important discipline to show that you would not just say,
“If you gave me 10% more, I’d do more of the same but I’d do it better”. That is always a
pretty unconvincing answer.
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Wolfgang Götz: May I just add one sentence? You have also given the other dimension. If
you had to cut 10 per cent from our funding, if the worst comes to the worst, there would
be two areas where you could lose something. One is that we could have fewer translations
of annual reports, which is a very sensitive issue and a big expense. Secondly, there is the cofinancing of our so-called national focal points, such as the Reitox system, which costs
around €2.7 million a year. At least we have an influence. It would be extremely harmful if
the worst came to the worst; there would be no way out. We have the current situation
with our focal points. We have an infamous number of focal points because we are cofinancing, which has increased the quality enormously. It could be useful, in relation to cofinancing, if we did not have the same data collection because we cannot collect the same
quality of information from all member states. With the annual report, we could come to a
compromise and produce summaries or something like that. We are thinking about and
hoping for more but we are also thinking about how it can be reduced if necessary.
Q288 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: What is the agency’s budget?
Wolfgang Götz: The subsidy from the Union is €15.5 million. We get some €400,000 from
Norway and we always have a small programme which Alexis is running for the candidate
and potential candidate countries and the neighbourhood policy area.
Mr Paul Griffiths: We spoke about resources, but there are two other important areas to
consider. There is quite a lot of research spending.
The Chairman: We will come to that in the next question.
Mr Paul Griffiths: There is also the question of the money you invest nationally in your
own data collection.
Q289 Lord Tope: Should the EU research and development programmes put more
emphasis on research into drug-related issues?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Thank you for that; I was jumping the gun. I think the issue has been
addressed in this report. The Commission looked at research and the question has two
answers. One involves the move towards seeing drugs and dependency issues generally as a
subject for research. We wish to see more funding in that area. From our perspective, that
is clearly a good thing. The second issue is to do with how we co-ordinate that spend. There
is also a national spend, which can be joined up to gain advantage in terms of expenditure
and so on. I see that in the ERA-NET project. I also see quite a lot of different types of
research spending across the EU which has to do with drugs in some way. One of the
questions is: how do we put that together in a sensible way and how do we use it to support
our work? How can we take in the findings from research, spin them into the monitoring
area and also produce questions from our work that are relevant for future research and
science? One issue is about how much money is put into funding and the other is about how
that spend is co-ordinated and decisions are made about which projects to pursue.
Q290 Lord Avebury: You talked a lot about harm reduction, an area that has been
receiving increasing attention at national and European level. I wonder whether you think
that that attention is justified and what challenges remain to be tackled in that area—for
example, the use of drugs in prison, and the inequality of harm reduction measures between
eastern Europe and western Europe?
Mr Paul Griffiths: Harm reduction used to be a flagpole issue. Historically, people tended
to take very strong or negative approaches to it when it was debated. These days many
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aspects of it tend not to be so controversial, particularly when it comes to substitution
treatment, and even needle and syringe exchange programmes have some provision. As soon
as it gets outside that, it depends on what you mean by harm reduction, and there is
dramatic variation according to the kinds of approaches that end up being included. Here it
becomes a much more complicated question. We published a large review of harm
reduction very recently. One of the interesting areas was how much it focused on injected
drug use and HIV. The further you got away from those topics, the less impressive was the
evidence and the less available were the kinds of responses. This is important because
increasingly in Europe although we still see injecting and HIV as the key issues, but they are
perhaps not quite as key as they were in the past. The question really is: how do you start
taking harm reduction measures and whatdoes harm reduction mean in terms of stimulants,
polydrug use or co-dependency with alcohol, tobacco and illicit drugs? There is a more
complicated agenda for harm reduction, but we are also seeing a blurring of the distinction
between conventional treatment and harm reduction. Just as clinicians now give more of
their clients interventions that are multifaceted so they may have a prevention component, a
treatment component and a risk reduction—or harm reduction—component, in terms of
policy we also see less of this strong divide: is this harm reduction, prevention or treatment?
If you look on the internet at, for example, treatment, prevention and harm reduction in
connection with cannabis use, there are greater interventions and they seem to be
interested in policy. Are they doing prevention, treatment or harm reduction? They seem to
be doing all three things, depending on the individual needs of the person—even sometimes
doing multiple things with the same person. We are moving into a slightly more complicated
world for harm reduction approaches, I suspect.
I will finish by saying that prison is a very important setting for drug intervention. In terms of
harm reduction, treatment, prevention and follow-up services in terms of the continuation
of care and policing, prisons are a key setting but we have not addressed them sufficiently.
On the information side, we are acutely aware of our failings in that respect. In our next
review, we will try to produce a better strategy for developing robust information resources
on the nature of the drug use problem in the prison setting but also on what is known about
responses and how we understand what an effective response is.
Q291 Lord Avebury: Can you disaggregate the data that you have now analysed so that
you can look at what is happening in prisons, or does that remain to be done in the work
that is going on?
Mr Paul Griffiths: We have a poorly developed information flow. There has been a lot of
work. There has been an awful lot of European money spent on developing networks. At the
moment we are not doing as well as we should be in respect to monitoring. We need to
look at how we audit studies—and I think they are studies, rather than routinely monitoring
all prisoners for their drug consumption pre-prison and in prison, which perhaps would be
too costly a venture to suggest. What we need are Berkeley studies. Prisons are very
different; they are not like-for-like institutions so in different types of prisons the drug use
issues will be different. Increasingly we are interested in the area of best practice, needs
assessment and service provision within the prison setting and what counts as effective and
good practice. The social integration of those leaving prison is also an important topic. As is
the importance of prisons as a key risk variable for drug overdose for people leaving prison,
who have been dependent but are no longer tolerant of the drugs that they have been using
in that community. How do you continue care in the prison setting? It is an incredibly
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important setting, but on the information side we are not doing nearly as well as we should
be.
Lord Avebury: I am very glad to hear you say that, because there is evidence from our
own system that people who come into prison clean become drug addicts while they are
inside. I do not know whether that is a general view or a general phenomenon, but if it is, it
should certainly be drawn to the attention of the European Commission.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Prisons are a known risk factor for both drug initiation and some of the
problems associated with drugs.
Q292 Lord Avebury: Was the report that you mentioned initially concerned with
prevention and harm reduction? Is it possible for us to have a look at that?
Mr Paul Griffiths: We have numerous scoping reports. Did I mention one report in
particular?
Lord Avebury: You mentioned a recent report on harm reduction.
Mr Paul Griffiths: Of course, we have a global review on reduction that has been freely
available. I have a copy next door. It is a bulky document. We can post it on to you or you
are welcome to take it with you if you do not anticipate baggage problems. You are
welcome to any of the documents that we have that could be helpful. If you want take copies
for reading on the plane, we have them available.
Frank Zobel: Just two quick comments. One is that the EMCDDA want to publish next year
a report on intervention in prisons in Europe. It will not be ready at the time of your writing,
but we have collected data with all our member states on this specific topic. There is also a
strategy at the EU level—maybe Danilo can speak afterwards about this. I just wanted to
come back on another issue. I listened to some of your witnesses. There were some
comments about us, the EMCDDA, not mentioning heroin-prescription interventions. In
fact, in recent years, we have mentioned heroin-assisted treatments, either in our annual
report or in other documents. We are going to publish in a few weeks or months an insight
on heroin-assisted treatment where all the leading experts in those countries that have
implemented this intervention describe what they have done and the results of their studies.
There will be some people who are not happy because they would like us to discuss this
type of intervention more, but what you have to know is that in Europe we have 670,000
people undergoing substitution treatment. Of those 670,000, 1,000 are getting heroinassisted treatment, so it is still a small intervention in comparison with methadone and other
central interventions in the European response to drugs.
Danilo Ballotta: Under the current action plan, we are trying to develop a data collection
strategy in prisons to measure three things: drug use in prison; health problems related to
drug use in prison; and health services provided to prisoners. We still have patchy
information at the European level. We are committed to giving the strategy back to the
Council in Brussels early next year, at that time we will discuss with member states to see
whether there is a will to proceed in this area.
Alexis Goosdeel: Underlying the last four or five questions is the importance of financing.
What is not always visible is the important part played in data collection by donations and
financing by the Member States. The budget for the co-financing of Focal Point does not
cover data collection, which is the competence and obligation of Member States. For
instance, new supply indicators, if they are adopted one day, or the proposals that we have
made for improving data collection in prisons, would require huge investment at national
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level. Certainly, one of the underlying questions is what one can expect in addition from this
exercise. To have an extensive and comprehensive system would be nice but probably not
possible. We are more likely to see, as Paul was describing, targeted studies in prisons from
time to time. Also, it is a specific world where data collection is in most cases not as possible
as it is in the outside world. Similarly, the practice of medicine in prisons is not always easy.
So there are a lot of problems that interfere with collecting information about risk
behaviours such as drug use or sexual intercourse among prisoners. Usually, prisoners do
not speak because of the fear that the rule of medical confidentiality could be broken and
could expose their behaviour to the knowledge of other prisoners or of penitentiary agents
Q293 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: The Commission has recently produced a
communication called Towards a Stronger European Response to Drugs. How much influence do
you think this communication might have on the next EU drugs strategy?
Mr Paul Griffiths: I am aware that time is rapidly moving on.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: You could say a little or a lot.
Mr Paul Griffiths: The important issue there is that it outlines the Commission’s agenda for
the next few years, which is legislative in focus. There are important elements in it that I am
sure will be in the new EU drugs strategy should the member states decide that there will be
one. The early-warning system is one of the key priorities, because, after Lisbon, the Council
decision legal mechanism is no longer available to us. We now have an evaluation of the
overall system and we will need a new legal instrument, given the political interest in this
important and challenging area. That is a very important aspect of whatever comes from the
strategy. We see drug trafficking as being another key area for legislative proposals. Here we
will have the drug strategy and the framework provided by what is happening in the COSI.
We also note the reference to good-practice and guidelines for minimum quality standards
and the indicators proposed there. They, too, are important areas for any future coordination framework in Europe. Those are things that we would expect to see translated
through from the Commission’s paper. The strategy tends to emphasise a balanced approach
with public health and justice concerns. That might be something that needs to be expanded.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Those points will all be in the written evidence, which is
great. Thank you.
Q294 Lord Avebury: Your annual report, which has given us a great deal of information,
suggests that more member states are attempting to revive a common interest in drugrelated expenditure. What have been the difficulties with this?
Mr Paul Griffiths: They have been considerable.
Frank Zobel: It is extremely difficult to estimate this expenditure. Drug-related public
expenditure is for the most part embedded in larger budgets for law enforcement and
health. You need modelling approaches to try to estimate what exactly is attributed to the
drugs issue. You need in some countries to do that not only at the national level but also at
the regional and the municipal levels, because in some countries that is where the money is
really spent. So it is a very difficult exercise. There has been more interest from countries in
that. The depth of the analysis differs between countries, which makes it a bit difficult to
compare them. Some countries will just have national data but not look at regional data,
which makes it difficult to compare them with others that do have regional data. So it is a
slow process and it will remain a difficult issue. There is a bit more interest, I think, from
member states in doing that now, but it is technically difficult.
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The Chairman: Thank you very much, Director. I thank you and your colleagues very
warmly for giving us a lot of your time and a tremendous amount of wisdom, information
and background, which will be valuable to us. I think that we have all learnt a lot from this.
The material that you are providing to us is very welcome indeed. So thank you for that.
Perhaps now we should break for coffee. We have to allow our poor record- taker a gap of
quarter of an hour.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: He is on a taxi meter.
The Chairman: We will then have a session with the Portuguese director who deals with
all these things and be on our way to the airport. Thank you very much. It has been really
valuable.
Wolfgang Götz: Thank you very much for having made the effort to come back to us here
in this country. We really appreciate that. It is really marvellous. I am sorry that I could not
be with you—I think that you understand that I was at the European Parliament this
morning—but I am sure that you got as much as possible. Please never forget that this house
is your house. Please do not hesitate to contact us by whatever means. We will always do
our best to help you in policy-making.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
Europol – Written Evidence
Europol – Written Evidence
The success or otherwise of the existing Drugs Strategy and Action Plans
The 2005 – 2012 EU Drugs Strategy is accompanied by two consecutive Action Plans (20052008 and 2009-2012). The first of these Action Plans was the subject of an evaluation in
2008. The Commission’s evaluation report 44 is positive about Europol’s involvement in the
implementation of the Strategy. It affirmatively describes Europol’s role in the institutional
framework stating, for example, that “the cooperation between the Commission and the
Drugs Unit at Europol is considered constructive, both inside the HDG 45 and in daily
cooperation” (page 22).
More importantly, the report rightly defines Europol’s role in the decision-making process
and praises its contribution to a proactive approach against drugs. The report states that
“the main tool for implementing the concept of intelligence-led law enforcement is the
European Criminal Intelligence Model (ECIM), a cyclical process that starts with the
Organised Crime Threat Assessment (OCTA), produced by Europol in close cooperation
with the Member States. (…) The aim is to develop intelligence products that provide the
basis for targeting top criminal organisations in the Member States, where appropriate with
the support of Europol and Eurojust (…)” (page 31).
The report also correctly identifies certain shortcomings in the implementation of the action
plan and encourages Member States to use Europol’s capabilities more extensively indicating
that, for example, “Joint Investigation Teams (JITs) and Joint Customs Operations (JCOs)
could be used to a greater extent by the Member States in collaboration with Europol”
(page 31). The authors of the report attach much attention to the exchange of data, which is
improving but remains inadequate: “Whilst Member State support to Europol has been
enhanced, in particular in the area of synthetic drugs and related precursors, there remains
substantial room for improvement in all areas. This requires, inter alia, enhanced information
and intelligence collation and coordination between law enforcement services at the national
level” (page 83).
This is followed by another recommendation that also is of importance from Europol’s point
of view: “The results of various operational and intelligence law enforcement cross-border
projects in the EU highlight the importance of strengthening intelligence gathering and
sharing as a basis for enhanced, intelligence-led law enforcement along air, sea and land
routes” (page 83).
The report clearly refers to the problems Europol faces, especially Member States’ uneven
readiness to provide data. Referring to Europol and the EMCDDA collecting data on drug
seizures in Member States, the report states that “discrepancies between the two data
collections can be substantial, mainly due to the fact that Europol does not receive
information from one or more key destination countries” (page 46).
Europol shares these assessments made in the Commission’s report.
44 SEC (2008) 2456, Commission Staff Working Document accompanying document to the Communication from the
Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on an EU Drugs Action Plan 2009-2012, Report on the final
evaluation of the EU Drugs Action Plan (2005-2008).
45 Horizontal Drugs Group.
Europol – Written Evidence
Since the report covered only the lifetime of the first action plan, the Commission is
currently working on a similar report covering the implementation of the entire 2005 – 2012
Strategy.
Europol is actively involved in the evaluation exercise, for example through expert
interviews conducted with Europol officials.
Although the Commission’s final report is not yet available, certain strong points of the
Strategy and its added value can be already listed. From Europol’s perspective the Strategy
and its Action Plans provide:
•
clear European-level objectives and guidance for setting national priorities, resulting in
greater coherence and convergence of drug policies between countries on a voluntary
basis;
•
guidance for sharing of best practice and development of common standards in many key
areas of both drug demand and drug supply reduction;
•
a comprehensive drug policy framework that has encouraged the development of high
quality, broad national strategies and action plans across the EU.
Moreover, the Strategy is important for international cooperation. The EU has gained
influence in the international arena in the field of drugs, because it has been able to work on
the basis of the consensus reflected in the Strategy and Action Plans.
Importantly, the EU Action Plans play a vital role in presenting the European model of drug
policy, with a balanced approach and fundamental rights as its cornerstones.
On the other hand the action plans are primarily non-binding instruments for coordination
among the Member States, which are autonomous in implementing the aims and objectives.
Most objectives and actions in the Action Plans are implemented indirectly: the Action Plans
aim to influence the actions of others. This, combined with the lack of relevant comparable
and reliable data on the drug phenomenon, drug demand and drug supply reduction means
that it is very difficult to assess how much influence in general the Strategy has had in
impacting upon the drug situation in the EU. Action 25.1 of the 2005 – 2008 Action Plan
sought to adopt an EU wide definition of the term ‘drug related crime’. This has not been
achieved, with only a few Member States defining the term at national level meaning that
establishing clear and common indicators is exceptionally difficult. These indicators are the
subject of continued work being carried out by the Commission, EMCDDA and Europol.
The success or otherwise of EU and international collaboration among law
enforcement agencies in disrupting trafficking routes
During the lifetime of the EU Drugs Strategy, numerous examples of improved co-operation
and collaboration can be quoted.
2.1 European Criminal Intelligence Model
To strengthen their law enforcement capacities, Member States have developed the model
of intelligence-led law enforcement, which aims to make the exchange of information more
efficient and effective by selecting the most appropriate targets for police investigation based
on an assessment of the threat that they pose. The concept also permits a more efficient use
of human and financial resources. The main tool for implementing the concept of
intelligence-led law enforcement is the European Criminal Intelligence Model (ECIM) and its
key driving instrument, the Organised Crime Threat Assessment (OCTA), which is
produced by Europol in close cooperation with Member States. The OCTA is designed to
identify current and future trends, knowledge gaps and intelligence requirements for data
Europol – Written Evidence
collection programmes in Member States and at European Union level. Council Conclusions
on the creation and implementation of a EU policy cycle for organised and serious
international crime 46 confirmed the methodology and established a coherent EU decisionmaking mechanism based on Europol’s analysis. Europol attaches great importance to the
policy cycle and actively participates in meetings of the internal security committee (COSI)
that translates strategic objectives of the policy cycle into concrete actions.
2.2 Europol drugs projects
Europol runs drug-related projects, implementing intelligence gathering and operational
initiatives. The drug-related projects include Project Heroin, Project Cola (cocaine
trafficking), Project Synergy (production and trafficking of synthetic drugs, chemical
precursors and production equipment) and Project Cannabis providing operational and
strategic reports and expertise to Member States. Across all these areas, Europol facilitated
more than 2.800 cross-border investigations in the EU in 2010.
In addition to the OCTA, situation reports and ad hoc reports on specific crime phenomena
are provided to enhance the intelligence picture for Member States and support their
investigations. Together with the EMCDDA, the Europol drugs projects are in the process of
producing a series of reports on various drug-related subjects. Reports on
methamphetamine and cocaine have already been produced and are publicly available on the
Europol website. The reports on amphetamine and heroin are in the stages of production.
2.3 Regional drug enforcement initiatives
Regional drug enforcement initiatives have evolved, involving several Member States,
focusing on intelligence sharing and operational cooperation. In 2007, an informal working
group, in close cooperation with Europol, prepared the ground for the Maritime Analysis
and Operations Centre — Narcotics (MAOC-N), which focuses on cocaine trafficking by air
and sea in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean region. In 2008, the ‘Centre de Coordination et de
Lutte Antidrogue pour la Mediterranée’ (CECLAD-M) was set up to counter drug trafficking
in the Mediterranean. The Bucharest-based Southeast European Cooperation Initiative
(SECI) also includes a specialised task force on illegal drugs trafficking. In the Baltic region,
cooperation is through the Baltic Sea Task Force.
More recently, the European pact to combat international drug trafficking – Disrupting
cocaine and heroin routes 47 has increased the focus on European cooperation with Member
States forming partnerships in the areas of trafficking and countering the proceeds of crime.
This has led to such initiatives as the ‘Platforme Afrique’ where Member States’ Liaison
Officers work closely together to ensure the most effective use of available intelligence.
Europol actively supports the regional platforms; since April 2011, Europol Secure
Information Exchange Network Application (SIENA) capability has been supplied in both
Accra, Ghana and Dakar, Senegal to be used by the EU Liaison Officers based there giving
them the capability to communicate with both their national units and Europol.
Europol is involved to varying degrees with all the regional initiatives, supporting them with
its operational and analytical capabilities. Also the very structure of Europol, with its regional
support units coupled to the presence of 140 liaison officers drawn from Member States, is
compatible with the initiatives and their geographical areas of competence.
2.4 Reducing the manufacture and trafficking of synthetic drugs
46
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Europol – Written Evidence
Throughout the lifetime of the Strategy, there has been a steady decrease in the manufacture
of Ecstasy. This has been most marked since 2009 and is the result of a concerted effort by
Europol, the Member States and the EU Commission in preventing the availability of
precursor chemicals essential for the manufacture. As well as the decrease in availability in
Europe, significant effort has been made with authorities in the Russian Federation, China
and India to prevent the illegal trafficking in pre-cursors which has resulted in a significant
decline in the illicit manufacture of ecstasy in Europe.
This area was the subject of a number of actions within the Strategy’s Action Plans.
Europol’s Project Synergy — which gathers and exploits information, knowledge and
experience in the area of synthetic drugs, related precursors and equipment — continues to
support various major criminal investigations carried out by law enforcement agencies in the
Member States.
Project Synergy supports, and is supported by, the activities of the European Joint Unit on
Precursors (EJUP) and participates in the COSPOL 48 initiative on synthetic drugs. The
Commission has also sought to develop a long-term solution for the forensic profiling of
synthetic drugs, involving representatives from forensic laboratories as well as law
enforcement agencies, Europol and the Commission. The project on a European Drug
Profiling System, which commenced in early 2010, seeks to build on the experience of
projects co-funded by the Commission.
The importance of the project is likely to grow in the light of the recently proposed draft
pact against synthetic drugs mentioned below under point 3.
2.5 Money laundering and asset confiscation
In another area highlighted in the Strategy’s Action Plans, the European Criminal Assets
Bureau (ECAB) - launched by Europol - deals with asset recovery. This includes operational
support for Member States’ investigations (including drugs investigations) to trace criminal
proceeds.
The Europol Money Laundering Project, AWF Sustrans, was launched in November 2001
aiming to establish a pan-European platform for the analysis of financial data, especially
Suspicious Transactions Reports (STRs). Since then, the work file has also developed a more
significant operational focus, providing operational support to Member States’ money
laundering investigations.
Sustrans considers the detection and disruption of criminal monetary flows, generated from
drug trafficking and leaving the EU for high risk destinations and source countries, to be a
priority area: Sustrans' surveys demonstrate that drugs offences are one of the most
prevalent predicate offences underlying STRs, surpassed only by fraud and tax evasion.
Europol’s secure communication channel, SIENA, is expected to connect Member States’
Asset Recovery Units by the end of 2012. With this step Europol can become the central
hub for information exchange in asset recovery investigations, including those against drugs.
Whether further harmonisation of drugs policy is feasible or desirable at the EU
level
Certain limitations of the existing framework, such as the lack of common definitions and
therefore comparable data, were signaled above. From this perspective further work and a
more harmonised approach at the EU level are undoubtedly needed and would be welcomed
by Europol.
48
Comprehensive, Operational Strategic Planning for the Police
Europol – Written Evidence
Operational cooperation could be also enhanced. The draft European pact against synthetic
drugs 49, tabled by the Polish Presidency, covers a comprehensive set of actions against a
specific type of drugs. First consultations at the ministerial level 50 seem to confirm there is
wide consensus on its key concepts. More generally, the framework of the new EU policy
cycle, described above, including in regard with the prioritization of key strategic threats in
the EU, offers enhanced possibilities for effective coordination of counter-narcotics effects in
the EU. All actors in the EU, including Member States, should exploit this opportunity.
The draft pact rightly supports Europol’s more prominent role, encouraging Member States
to benefit from its unique ability to provide central support to cross-border investigations.
The external dimension of EU policy in relation to candidate countries and
cooperation with third countries
Throughout the lifetime of the Strategy, Europol has established a number of strategic or
operational agreements with third states and organisations which have also assisted in
furthering the aims and objectives of the Strategy.
This has included operational agreements (which allow for the exchange of personal data)
with organisations such as Interpol and Eurojust and strategically important countries such as
the United States, Switzerland and Croatia. At the same time, strategic agreements, which
provide for the exchange of non-personal data, have been established with organisations
such as the EMCDDA and Frontex, and with countries such as Colombia, Russia and a
number of the Balkan States.
Europol is in negotiation with a number of other states and organisations, in order to
increase the number of agreements, both operational and strategic. Negotiations with some
of the existing strategic partners, such as Colombia, are awaiting ratification or signature.
The role of the EU, and in particular the EMCDDA, in collating data, funding
research and development projects and sharing instances of best practice in
order to increase understanding of the problems and ways to tackle them
Whilst this particular question may have more relevance for the EMCDDA and the
Commission, within the drug-related projects, Europol does collect data which is intended
to enhance knowledge and contribute to ongoing Member States’ investigations. The
Europol Cocaine Logo System gathers contributions of logos found on blocks of cocaine in
order to compare them with those already collected from other samples. In this, the
Colombian Liaison Bureau at Europol is a regular supplier of such logos, and the instruments
necessary for their manufacture which assists in linking cocaine seizures in Europe with
dismantled clandestine laboratories in Colombia.
The Europol Cocaine Logo System produced some 60 leads to EU law enforcement agencies
in 2010 some of which were utilised by MS in domestic prosecutions. As an example Latvian
authorities used one report in a prosecution carried out against those responsible for a
clandestine cocaine processing laboratory.
There are similar comparison databases in relation to the logos found on XTC 51 tablets as
well as equipment seized from illicit laboratories used to manufacture synthetic drugs (the
EILCS referred to earlier). In respect of this latter point, the expertise of specialists working
within Europol’s Project Synergy is regularly used by Member States when dismantling these
illicit laboratories. This expertise is also regularly sought in the training environment, with
13286/11 JAI 544, COSI 58 CORDROGUE 58 ENFOPOL 263 CRIMORG 120 JAIEX 76.
Informal meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Ministers in Sopot, Poland, 18-19 July 2011.
51 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
49
50
Europol – Written Evidence
Europol delivering a number of training courses to assist law enforcement in dismantling
laboratories themselves.
28 September 2011
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
Evidence Session No. 4.
Heard in Public.
Questions 118 - 154
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2011
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Mawson
Lord Tomlinson
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
Rob Wainwright, Director, Europol
Q118 The Chairman: Good morning. It is nice to see you. We were in Brussels
together recently, talking about other matters within your field. Anyway, thank you very
much for coming along; I know it has not been particularly easy to fit this into your schedule
and we are very grateful you have got here to help us in this drugs strategy inquiry that we
are undertaking at the moment. We are about halfway through taking evidence, so we still
have quite a long way to go. We have had some evidence from the Home Office. I do not
know if you have seen all the previous evidence, but quite a bit is beginning to accumulate. I
will go through the routine items if you do not mind. It is of course rather familiar to you
since it is the third time you have given evidence to this Committee.
The session, as you know, is open to the public. A webcast of the session goes out live as an
audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the parliamentary website. A verbatim
transcript will be taken of your evidence; this will be put on the parliamentary website. A
few days after the evidence session, you will be sent a copy of the transcript to check for
accuracy and we would be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as quickly as
possible. If, after the session, you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during your
evidence, or have any additional points to make, you are welcome to submit supplementary
evidence to us. I will dispense, if I may, with asking you to introduce yourselves. If you want
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
to make any opening comments, on the drug strategy looking forward, or indeed on how
the drug strategy has worked up to now in the field in which you are involved, that would be
entirely welcome to the Committee. If you wish to go straight to questions that would be
equally satisfactory.
Rob Wainwright: Okay, I will make a very short statement, if I may, Lord Chairman. Thank
you very much for inviting me again to address the Committee. I am always very happy to
come here, not least because, if I may speak on behalf of the EU institutions as a senior
member of the EU institutional framework, we very much value the reports that this
Committee provides. I can certainly testify to the influence and the impact that they have in
the EU institutional machinery. That is certainly the case as was evident particularly in the
report recently regarding the new EU Internal Security Strategy. I am always very happy to
come here.
In regard to this particular subject matter, as you know I am the chief of the European police
agency, and drugs—or the combating of international drugs trafficking—remains the area of
operational work in which we are most engaged, of all the criminal sectors that we are
working in. It accounts for about 30% of our operational work, and we are committed,
therefore, to playing our part in the successful implementation of the EU drugs strategy in
ways that maybe I will have the opportunity to address the Committee on this morning.
Beyond that, I am very happy to proceed directly with the specific questions that you may
have.
Q119 The Chairman: Thank you very much, and that statistic you have given us is an
interesting one and one certainly I was not familiar with before—that it is such an important
part of the work of Europol. If I could start then with the first question: the drug strategy, as
it is currently cast, accepts that different member states are free to apply different drugs
policies and that is an area where effectively subsidiarity applies. Do you think it is right that
that kind of diversity should continue or do you think there ought to be greater
harmonisation of national drugs policies at EU level? I accept that your answers will always
be from the enforcement and control point of view; I am obviously not asking you to
comment on matters that are beyond the responsibility of Europol.
Rob Wainwright: My short answer is that I think we can do a bit more in this area to
integrate better the common efforts of member states, particularly in the field of operational
action. Clearly each member state has its own particular problems in regard to illicit
consumption and trafficking of drugs. It is right, I think, in broad policy terms that member
states therefore should be free to prioritise their own national drugs policy, particularly
where there are important variations in the picture of illicit drug consumption. Whereas in
the UK we have a particular problem, it seems still, with heroin, this is not evident in many
other member states. Similarly where synthetic drugs are an increasing problem in the
Benelux countries, Poland and other parts of Europe, they are maybe not so evident here in
the UK, so there are important national and regional variations, and therefore there should
be a flexible adoption of the strategy.
However, I would pick out three areas where a greater harmonisation might be beneficial.
The first is in regard to the development of a common set of key indicators for monitoring
drug consumption and drug-related criminal activity. This is not the case across the EU at
the moment. The absence of a coherent monitoring framework in that way makes it difficult,
therefore, for us to gauge how to establish a coherent picture of the problem that we are
dealing with. Secondly, establishing minimum rules concerning the definition of criminal
offences in this area and sanctions is a particular capability that has been established in the
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
new Lisbon Treaty under Article 83, and particularly in the field of illicit drug trafficking; we
could establish this to ensure that there is a minimum level of effective deterrents to combat
drug trafficking.
In the field in which I am most competent, I would say we also need to apply greater effort
in having a common approach in tackling the criminal problem from the perspective of police
co-operation. Very often this is about methodology. What we are trying to develop at
Europol through the EU mechanisms is a common methodology for fighting organised crime,
including illicit drug trafficking, and also to establish a framework that can prioritise to
establish common priorities across the EU. We have made significant progress within the
framework for the Internal Security Strategy in doing that now, but still, in this particular
field, I see important differences. I give you one example: cannabis trafficking. Cannabis is a
big priority for many countries across Europe, particularly in Spain and in others in the
southern part of the European Union. The priority that those countries attach to cannabis is
not reflected elsewhere in many parts of the European Union, including here in the UK, in
spite of the fact that the levels of cannabis trafficking and consumption may be the same or
broadly the same in those countries. It is an example where national priorities differ in some
important respects, and it is therefore more difficult for us to establish a common set of
priorities at the EU. I do think it is much better now however, because of the adoption of
the Internal Security Strategy. The implementation of that is the key now, where we have to
develop in particular a much greater sense of information sharing, intelligence sharing and
operational co-operation in these fields in particular. These are some of the areas where I
think a new strategy could encourage member states to integrate, if not harmonise, their
efforts in a more productive way.
Q120 The Chairman: Could you quickly illustrate why it is that if, let us say, Britain gives
a lower priority to cannabis than, say, Spain or Italy does this causes a problem for the
functioning of Europol?
Rob Wainwright: In the very narrow example of the work of my agency, it leads to
competing demands on operational services—on analytical services in particular—where
Spain would expect naturally that their national policies should be reflected to the same
extent at Europol, whereas other countries including the UK would expect us not to devote
any significant resource in this field and would expect us to do it in other areas. These are
things that can be managed on a daily basis, but it is a specific example of where the absence
of a common set of priorities can lead to operational difficulties.
Q121 Lord Dear: Mr Wainwright, good morning and welcome back to this room. You
are almost a resident here and we are grateful to you for coming. It is nice to see you here.
If I can ask a supplementary on what you have just said, the word “harmonisation” has
cropped up within that context, and we are beginning to get a feeling, as a group, that one of
the drawbacks within Europe is the lack of common terminology. I wondered whether, in
looking at the problem from the point of view of harmonisation, you are able to do anything
to get a common understanding of terminology and objectives, which if they are disparate is
going to work against your main thrust rather than for it.
Rob Wainwright: It is always difficult in the European Union to establish a common
terminology. Even the word “harmonisation” is one that I normally avoid; I repeat it here
because it was specifically mentioned in the question that was posed to me. I normally avoid
it because it has a sort of pejorative character for many people in the Union. It means
different things to different member states, and is a good example therefore of where we do
have problems arising from a lack of a uniformly applied common terminology. I prefer the
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
words “coherence” and “integration” where, particularly at the operational level, we need to
develop in the end a different kind of culture of co-operation, in which police investigators
understand the needs and benefits of engaging more constructively and more regularly at the
international level, and to use the operational services that are available, particularly in the
European Union, to do that. This is more about culture, I think, than legislative change and it
is less to do therefore with the absence of a common terminology.
Q122 Lord Dear: On that point, what about counting rules because, if you are not
counting the same things, country by country, then almost automatically it is very difficult to
get any harmonisation at all?
Rob Wainwright: That is one of the big problems. As I said earlier, the fact that we do not
work to a common set of performance indicators and performance measurements is a
problem. In some areas, there is more or less a common approach in the counting of
seizures of drugs of course, but across the board in the field of organised crime activity, this
remains a real problem for us.
The Chairman: It is very helpful to have your building block there, because it is not the
first brick that has been put in that wall; we have heard from several other witnesses that
the lack of consistent statistics is a real impediment to having a proper evidence-based policy
for drugs. That is helpful.
Q123 Lord Dear: Yes. Mr Wainwright, the obvious question early on in this session is:
do you think the aims of the current objectives of the drugs strategy are being met? For the
record, although you will know them of course day by day, they are mainly to reduce the
demand and supply of drugs, to promote international co-operation and to promote
research, information and evaluation across the EU.
Rob Wainwright: Maybe I can restrict myself to the first two of those areas, which are the
supply of drugs and international co-operation. I think it is a mixed picture. There are signs
of some important successes but still clearly evidence of some significant challenges that are
outstanding. There have been very notable successes on drug interdiction in some parts. I
would highlight in particular the success of the maritime operations centre that was
established in Lisbon a few years ago. That has been responsible for the seizure of over
50 tonnes of cocaine and almost 50 tonnes of cannabis since it began its operations in 2007.
In my previous function, I was responsible partly for bringing this international body into
operation. Other operational successes that the UK has had, in particular with Spain,
Portugal and the Netherlands, has clearly had a result on the supply of cocaine to the UK.
That seems to be reflected now with important changes to the level of price and purity as
well. I highlight that example; it is quite a narrow example but it is a good one of where a
tailor-made international solution applied with a very specific focus can work very well.
Increasingly in the EU and at Europol, we try to develop a more targeted response to the
problem of drug trafficking and not always try to develop a global single solution for the EU.
This example in Lisbon is a very good one.
Having said that, the picture of the criminal drugs market across Europe is a mixed one. As I
said, the heroin problem across continental Europe, which had decreased in recent years, is
showing signs of re-emerging now. I already mentioned cannabis, which is a significant
problem in many countries, and in particular the development of new psychoactive
substances—the so-called ‘legal highs’—is a particular phenomenon that we have noticed in
the last couple of years, and finally also in terms of synthetic drugs across the board, this is a
problem. What we see at Europol is therefore still a relatively vibrant drugs market, which
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
feeds an organised crime community and still provides significant levels of illicit profits for
these organised crime syndicates. Many if not most of these syndicates still rely primarily on
their drugs trade as their main illegal operational business, and it therefore remains a big
challenge for the EU.
We see on the level of international co-operation at a broader level, beyond these regional
operational projects that I mentioned, more evidence of member states collaborating. At
Europol we, for example, helped to facilitate 2,800 major cross-border investigations into
drug trafficking in 2010 alone. That is a sizable number; it is certainly bigger than it has been
at any time in the past. It is still probably below the level that it should be. There are at least
as many operations again that have an international character that are not fully exploited,
certainly not at Europol or indeed by any other international instrument. There are low
levels of information-sharing in relative terms still, and low adoption of important
instruments such as that of the joint investigation teams, which could be applied much more
productively and successfully by drug interception teams. So it is a mixed bag across the
board.
The Chairman: That is very useful. If you were able to just give us a short list of what I
would call successes, in which Europol has had a role in the period, ones that are in the
public domain, that would be very helpful to those who will be drafting the report, so that
we get down from generalities to specifics and can actually show what has been achieved
without exaggerating it to a point where you are making everyone think that it is all fine,
because we have seized X tonnes of this and Y tonnes of that.
Q124 Lord Tomlinson: Notwithstanding what you said about the successes you rightly
mentioned, particularly the figures that you gave us—the 50 tonnes of cocaine that had been
seized and all that—would it not be fair to assert that, overall, there has been a failure to
significantly impact on the availability and level of drug use within Europe? I am asking if it
follows from that that the control-focused policies that are associated with what I regard as
a failure need to be revisited and, additionally, are they in some cases causing actual harm?
Rob Wainwright: I do not agree that the control-focused policies have been a failure. I think
that, as I have already indicated, in some important areas they have led directly to important
successes and important reductions in the supply of drugs. It is certainly true, however, that
they can be improved. I have pointed at some of the weaknesses that we experience already,
in particular the extent to which we still do not have systematic engagement at the
international level of drug interdiction teams around the EU. This failure to fully share
information in the international context clearly leads to a suboptimal use of the available
resources to fight illicit trafficking.
I also think that there is an inflexibility about the extent to which many national agencies
pursue their drugs operations. What I mean by that is they are fairly fixed in their traditional
methodology about how to fight drug-related crime. This is evident not just in a failure to
properly exploit the international services available, but also in terms of the extent to which
many of them still see drug-related crime in isolation from others. One of the very
important differences that we have noticed in the development of organised crime in the last
few years is the extent to which organised crime syndicates have now become much more
flexible and adaptable, and are engaging simultaneously multiple sectors of organised crime
activity. It is very rare now that we see any major organised crime syndicate that alone
traffics in illicit drugs. We have progressed beyond the stage, therefore, where we should
rely solely on national drug teams, for example, to fight this problem. We need to have a
more flexible, integrated response to that.
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
Similarly, the traditional measures of drug interdiction need to be much more complemented
with a greater application of broader measures available to government authorities, so-called
“administrative measures” and non-traditional measures, with the use of powers that are
available to local authorities, powers that are available to tax authorities, for example, to
operate in a much more flexible and imaginative way to close down these drugs businesses. I
do not see enough of that innovation perhaps in the work of many national authorities, so I
think we can do a lot more. Having said that, and I repeat myself again, I do think the
framework established by the new EU Internal Security Strategy is already bringing benefits
in this respect. It has provided for the first time a coherent and productive framework for
establishing common priorities, a common methodology and encouraging information
sharing. I have seen real progress especially in the last year, and I hope that that will
continue. Some of that progress and the evidence of that progress clearly need to be
reflected in the text of the new strategy.
Q125 Lord Tomlinson: When you say you have seen significant progress in the last year,
do you feel that the report that was commissioned by the EU from the RAND Corporation
and the Dutch Trimbos Institute is now out of date? Because the criticisms it made were
substantially reflected in my first question.
Rob Wainwright: There has been evidence, even within the last year, that maybe makes that
report no longer up to date, I would say. I have to admit, Lord Tomlinson, I am not fully
aware of the major findings of that report. As I said, my own experience is that things are
certainly improving in the EU right now, and I would like to see that reflected in the new
strategy.
Q126 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Morning, Mr Wainwright. Gathering
intelligence and disseminating intelligence clearly rely on co-operation and communication
with people on the ground, in police forces in the main. What relationships does Europol
have with the governance and law enforcement agencies at the national level, and how does
Europol involvement in drug policy bring added value to the fight against illicit drugs?
Rob Wainwright: This is our primary reason of being: to serve the interests of those
authorities at the national level. Our institutional machinery is established directly to serve
that interest. We have a network of Europol national units established in every member
state. We have connected these national units not just with our headquarters but with each
other around Europe, using what is the only secure intelligence exchange system available to
police authorities in Europe. We have connected them to what are the only available
European databases on organisation crime activity, which include significant unique databases
in this area, respectively in the field of heroin trafficking, cocaine trafficking, cannabis
trafficking and synthetic drugs. We have established arrangements from our headquarters
that allow for the coordination of operations on the field, across borders, in almost 15,000
cases a year. As I said, almost 3,000 of those were directly linked to drug trafficking last year.
I believe that we have a major role to play in supporting member states’ interests in
interdicting international drug trafficking. We are becoming increasingly successful and
increasingly involved in many, but not all, international operations that are developed at the
national level, and I believe that we are therefore establishing a much better value for money
in what the member states are trying to do to interdict drugs.
Q127 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: You would not actually deal with individual
agencies; you would always deal with the national body. For example, you would not deal
directly with Scotland Yard or the police force in Strathclyde in Scotland.
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
Rob Wainwright: Absolutely we do, but in each case we do so through a common gateway,
through a common unit that is established in each country. This makes administrative and
bureaucratic sense. No, in the end, our primary customers are in the police forces
themselves and, in hundreds of cases a year, we are cooperating directly with the
Metropolitan Police for example, and indeed with the other example you gave with Scottish
police forces as well. That is reflected in the fact that we have dedicated liaison officers from
the Metropolitan Police and the Scottish police services at the UK liaison office at our
headquarters. These are good examples of work that we are doing directly with the
investigators.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: That is good because it engenders co-operation and
it gives you a face at the grassroots level.
Q128 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Mr Wainwright, when you have been to see
us and talked to us before—I think it was you, but if not, I apologise—I think you expressed
some frustration about the fact that there had been bilateral discussions between units in
different countries. Instead of routing it through you, they have been prone to work
individually, partially probably because a personal relationship has been established and
therefore is easy, and partially, you hinted—and again if I am putting words into your mouth,
I apologise—because not every force was believed to be as secure in its information as it
might be. Therefore, you were left sometimes in a state of suspended animation with things
going on around you that you did not quite know about. Has that situation improved as
Europol’s credibility, if that is the right word, has got greater so that more is coming through
you now?
Rob Wainwright: Yes, I think it is improving. It is still suboptimal, I would say. It is improving
because we are establishing, year on year, better credibility in terms of the extent to which
we can handle intelligence securely, in terms of the extent to which we can add real
operational value in major cases. Our credibility is certainly improving. Economics play a
factor here as well, in the sense that the UK, to use this member state as an example,
traditionally has established a very large bilateral network of police officers around Europe. It
can no longer afford to maintain this at that level and it sees a much more economic
possibility by routing more of its operational work through a multilateral centre at Europol.
Many member states, if not most of them, have followed the same path, so this has played a
very important role. It is not something that I am directly responsible for, but we are taking
benefits from that, but it is still well below the level that I would prefer, I have to say. Even
when the information is routed through our liaison bureau at Europol itself, the statistics
show still that only 50% of that material is even cross-checked with our central databases, is
even referred to our analysts. I fail to understand this, I really do, because it clearly denies an
intelligence opportunity to the investigators. We have unique and very substantial databases
on drug-related crime at Europol. Very often we are finding connections with criminal cases,
and I am always surprised when the investigators do no have the ingenuity or the inclination
to even check that database. That is something that I am focused on trying to change. That
figure of 50% is at least better than it was six months ago, even better than it was one
month ago. Things are improving but some things still surprise me actually, with the level of
co-operation that we do or do not enjoy across Europe.
Q129 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Could I ask one more question, because I
think this is a very important point? When we come to prepare our report, assuming we
agree with your approach, what would you like us to be recommending to try to improve
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that position? What could be done specifically in your mind on the effluction of time and the
creation of credibility?
Rob Wainwright: We have to go as far as we possibly can to almost make an obligation
upon national agencies to share information with my agency. I am not sure how far we can
go in institutional or even legislative ways to secure that, but there has to be stronger
language from policymakers to establish this expectation. There has to be some pressure
from within the political community, the lawmaking community, on the chiefs of these
agencies to ensure that these self-evident opportunities are no longer missed in the future.
These are opportunities not just for my agency, but ultimately, primarily, for the national
agencies themselves. I would expect therefore that there is that greater expectation at least
established within the framework of the new strategy.
Q130 Lord Avebury: I am wondering whether you consider it part of your duty to
spread best practice, such as on the use of your databases or, going back to the previous
question, on encouraging the national law enforcement agencies to look at these advanced
methodologies, which take into account the fact that drug-related crime is not isolated from
the rest of serious organised crime. Is it part of Europol’s duty to go out to the national law
enforcement agencies and say, “This is what other people are doing. Maybe this is a model
you could look at”?
Rob Wainwright: It is a very good point, Lord Avebury, and it is an important part of the
work that we do to identify best practice, very often within our own agency but in one
particular country, and then of course to communicate that across the board. We have
certain web-based applications that establish a platform for experts in many areas, including
in this area, and they serve as a very good tool for developing common standards and
approaches in this area. We have a particular field of competence for example in the
dismantling of illicit drug laboratories for the production of synthetic drugs—some of our
experts are among the best in the world at dismantling these illegal labs and are very often in
the field with national teams providing that support. What we find, however, in this area is
that it is the most conservative community of the police community that we deal with.
There have been, for many years, national drugs agencies and drug teams within police
forces, which have been established over such a long period in a way of working that is fairly
fixed and not particularly dynamic in the way that they entertain new ideas. That culture,
established 20 or more years ago, also does not particularly include an appetite for strong
multilateral engagement. Of all the areas that we are active in, although drugs consumes
more of our resources than any other area, it is the most difficult to break into the true
heart of the police community. That is again a cultural challenge—I use the same word
again—that we try to address very progressively with awareness campaigns, with these
expert platforms and with as many operational meetings at Europol as we can manage. We
are even now funding the travel costs of national experts to come to our headquarters to
meet with other national investigators and particular operations. We are really doing all that
we possibly can to take the horse to the water and it is having an effect, but it is still below
the levels of what I would like to see.
Q131 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: It is often said that police officers should
concentrate on enforcement rather than social work. In your capacity as a European police
force head, clearly enforcement is a very important part of your role. The United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime, in its document From Coercion to Cohesion, has recently signalled
a move from crime to health when dealing with illicit drugs. I know you are an enforcement
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agency, but we are interested in your comment as to whether this is a move that Europe
should be following.
Rob Wainwright: As you say, Lord Mackenzie, I perhaps do not have an objective view on
this matter. I am bound to say that, ultimately, a repressive strategy will always be a very
important part of what must be a balanced approach to fighting drugs. The fact that we still
have problems and only mixed success in our supply-side activities should not be a reason
for us to give up on that, of course. It remains a very important part of our work. It is
important not just in terms of dealing with the problem at hand of the illicit supply of drugs,
but also in the sense that the extent to which the illicit drugs market, which is a
multi-billion-dollar market in Europe and around the world, in itself helps to sustain and
further develop organised crime activity across Europe. As I said, it is a major part, perhaps
the most important funding source for organised crime in Europe, and we need to directly
target it in a repressive way to have an impact on the supply of drugs, but also to ensure
therefore that organised crime does not flourish to a greater extent in Europe. There are
opportunities, as I have already described, for us to be a bit more imaginative, flexible and
coherent in the way in which we pursue that repressive strategy across Europe.
Q132 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Do you think the approach of the United
Nations is wrong?
Rob Wainwright: I do not think I am the most competent person to advise on the right
balance between so-called health and police work. I am certainly not in a position to criticise
the expert opinion of UNODC, which is an agency whose work I hold in high esteem.
The Chairman: I think that is a very fair point you are making there. I deduce from the
way you answered Lord Mackenzie’s question at the beginning that you recognise perfectly
well that there is a balance that needs to be achieved, that it cannot just be done by control
and measures of the sort that police forces are doing, but that there is another side to it.
That is what this Committee is obviously looking into, and a lot of evidence that is coming
forward to us relates to that side of the equation, as it should do, and we will also have to
try to reflect that balance.
Q133 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Another question, Mr Wainwright, about UNODC:
I understand that some of the anti-trafficking work is subcontracted to UNODC, which
obviously sets up a different situation to that in which work was being done entirely inhouse in the EU. The question is: is that satisfactory? Does UNODC relate effectively with
the EU member states, both the bodies and institutions? I would like just a general comment
about whether you see this as a very good move and a sensible thing to do, or whether in
fact the anti-trafficking work that UNODC does could be better done at home.
Rob Wainwright: I do not recognise that observation that the EU has subcontracted its
anti-trafficking work to the UN. That is certainly not the case in my domain and it could not
be, because UNODC does not have any kind of an operational mandate of course. There is
no evidence that our important operational work across the 2,800 cases a year that we are
prosecuting has somehow been subcontracted to the UN, so I cannot really comment
further on the evidence that you have seen. I am quite happy, actually, with the level of cooperation that my agency has with UNODC. We have a formal strategic agreement with the
centre, which allows us to exchange important information. We are both competent in
producing strategic assessments of the problem relating to drug-related crime, and I am
quite happy with the co-operation that we have right now.
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Q134 Lord Avebury: Would it be that UNODC has a major role to play in the countries
of origin like Afghanistan and so on? Is that what the EU is subcontracting that would have
some relevance to this question?
Rob Wainwright: It certainly does and one area of our co-operation recently with UNODC
has been in the area of West Africa, for example, where UNODC has played an important
role in helping us to develop a platform for operational engagement in that region with the
countries of origin in West Africa, but also between the EU member states that have a
particular interest in that area. We have some regional operational platforms that have now
been established in West Africa. We have connected our secure systems with that platform.
We helped to facilitate operational meetings of police liaison officers that have been
established in those countries by some of the leading member states, including the United
Kingdom. UNODC does not play a direct role in that operational coordination, but has
certainly helped to establish good co-operation with the local police services and the
government authorities. I do not see that as any kind of inappropriate subcontracting of the
work; I see that as a very good example of the EU and the UN working to complement each
other in an area that is a common priority.
The Chairman: I think the word “subcontracting” is probably a little unwise in this
context. I understand what you are saying; you are saying that there is quite a lot of cooperation and that, in some cases, what the UN is doing complements what the EU is doing,
and therefore means you do not have to and should not duplicate what you are doing. That
is not exactly the same as subcontracting.
Q135 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Presumably if work is not being subcontracted,
then no funding is passing from the EU to the UN, or is the UN being helped financially to,
for instance, set up the very useful base in West Africa?
Rob Wainwright: Certainly some EU funding has been made available, also in indirect terms
from my own budget, to establish this greater operational platform in West Africa. I must
admit, I do not know if, beyond that, there has been any EU funding transferred to the UN
for that purpose. I do not have that information.
The Chairman: We will aim to pursue that a little bit when we go to Brussels, because the
EU funding will not come from Europol; it will come from the EU’s aid and co-operation
funds. I suspect we should be able to pursue that a bit better in Brussels.
Q136 Lord Tope: Mr Wainwright, following on from that, can you tell us which other
bodies and institutions external to the EU Europol works with and what benefits that brings?
Rob Wainwright: Pursuing a progressive external strategy is very important to our
operational work, because we recognise that most of our drug consumption problems in
Europe originate from outside of the Union, of course, with the significant exception of
some synthetic drugs. That pushes us, even though we are a European Union body, into
operating on the global stage, and we do that not just by working with the UN. We have a
particular engagement with the World Customs Organization in this field for example and, in
operational terms, with very important other partners. Interpol is one of them, our brother
in the international police community operating on a much bigger global stage. The Interpol
services help to connect us with police services in other parts of the world. We also have
our own direct operational collaboration with very important other third countries in this
area, such as the United States of course; the US Drug Enforcement Administration has a
very significant worldwide network of agents that are active in this field. Our co-operation
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with that agency is good but could be better. We also have co-operation with other US
authorities. Colombia I would highlight as well. Last year we signed an operational
agreement with Colombia. We have now Colombian police liaison officers in our
headquarters and are operating directly with Colombian authorities, therefore, in particular
in combating the illicit trafficking of cocaine.
One partner that so far is missing from the list is Turkey. I think I have given evidence to a
different Committee on this subject in Parliament before. Turkey is very important in
strategic terms as a major transshipment point for heroin entering the EU. One important
novelty recently also is the extent to which Turkey is now an important transshipment point
for cocaine, under the hands of West African criminal syndicates that have established
themselves in Istanbul and other parts of that country. Without doubt Turkey is an
important partner. We have not yet concluded a full operational agreement with Turkey and
it is something that we should certainly pursue in the future. That is a fairly healthy picture, I
would say, in terms of our international co-operation with other bodies.
Q137 Lord Tope: I want to explore a little bit more about what is the particular problem
with Turkey. Why are they apparently so reluctant?
Rob Wainwright: To be fair to Turkey, very often these are homemade problems in the
sense that my legal framework puts in place a very clear but rather bureaucratic process that
we have to pursue in order to conclude operational agreements with other countries. There
are good reasons for this, not least because operational agreements allow in particular for
the transfer of operational data with a third country, and that therefore is personal data
about the lives of European Union citizens. There is an expectation from Council and an
expectation from the European Parliament, quite rightly, that we take every care in ensuring
that there are adequate data protection standards in that third country before we begin the
transfer of operational data. That means we have to go through a fairly long process of
scrutinising these issues. There are different levels of authority that I have to obtain before I
am finally given the authority to sign such an agreement, and we have not yet reached the
end of that particular line with Turkey. There are of course, meanwhile, as I am sure the
Committee is aware, wider sensitive political issues about Turkey’s engagement with the
European Union, not least because of difficulties in its co-operation with Cyprus especially,
and this is also something that drags the national process of our concluding an agreement
with that country.
Q138 The Chairman: On that last consideration—the different attitudes of member
states to Turkish accession and the problem of Cyprus—it is quite wrong that that should
be affecting operational co-operation, which we would need whether Turkey remains a third
country forever or becomes part of the European Union one day or sooner or later. It
seems to me that that is very unfortunate, if that is affecting operational co-operation.
Rob Wainwright: It has not served to directly prevent this agreement from being signed.
Let me be clear about that. Of course, I recognise that there is a broader context of
Turkey’s relationship with the European Union which, in part at least, is coloured by that
particular issue. That broader context is not the most conducive for the rapid development
of co-operation in my field as well. That is the point that I would like to make.
Q139 Lord Judd: You have spoken about the extent of international crime, the
sophistication of international crime, the flexibility of international crime and its immense
significance for the work you are doing. Is this in any way complicated by what some people
perceive as an absence of a clear dividing line between the business community and the
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criminal community? There are areas that overlap. Do you therefore work nationally,
internationally and with financial and business regulatory authorities?
Rob Wainwright: Increasingly we see a different business model of organised crime
emerging—as I said, one that is much more adaptable and flexible, one that is of a rather
fluid set of criminal networks that are engaging in legitimate business interests as well. It is
becoming a blurred image, so it is very difficult for us and for our national counterparts to
discern a correct picture even of the criminal problem. That fact of course encourages us
meanwhile to have a greater engagement with the business community and, in particular as
you suggest, Lord Judd, the financial community. In this area, we hold on to the notion that
chasing the illicit profits from drug trafficking is a major part of our strategic response to the
problem. On that, we particularly depend on the financial institutions in their reporting of
suspicious financial transactions and in their successful implementation of
anti-money-laundering legislation. This is an area in which Europol plays somewhat an
important role, in that we have a key coordinating role for the asset recovery officers across
Europe. I agree with you: I think in particular the role of financial institutions in helping to
support this strategy is becoming more important.
Q140 Lord Avebury: As you may know, we have had some written evidence that
suggests that EU level anti-trafficking policy can end up supporting corrupt local regimes and
may be in contravention of human rights. Two examples that our attention has been drawn
to are: Suriname, where the head of Government was convicted of drug trafficking in an
Amsterdam court; and the position of the Drug Law Enforcement Agency in Nigeria, whose
investigative skills and rudimentary approach have been criticised by this particular witness.
Do you think these criticisms are founded?
Rob Wainwright: I have no evidence to support this criticism. I have no knowledge of the
subject. It is important that I say that, so there is not much that I can add, other than to say
that we do not have co-operation agreements with the authorities in either of those two
countries. As I said earlier, we have a particularly robust regime that regulates with whom
we should cooperate outside the European Union and with whom, in particular, we should
share operational information and this gives us, I think, quite some level of protection to
ensure that we at least minimise the risks that our co-operation partner might abuse the
data that we have shared. In this particular case, I am afraid I can offer no evidence of value
to the Committee.
The Chairman: The co-operation that has been referred to is between the European
Union through the Commission and various co-operation agreements and so on, and not
through Europol. I take that point.
Q141 Lord Dear: I wonder if I can turn your attention to the issue of displacement
which, in law enforcement agencies, is understood to be the phrase where, if you bear down
on one activity or one place, you might eradicate the activity or the individuals concerned in
criminality but, more likely, you move it elsewhere. The written evidence that we have is
that there is strong evidence to suggest that, if you bear down for example on a
drug-trafficking route, you might stop the route but, more likely, you just move the route
into another country or another place, and you probably also change the distribution point
in so doing, so the problem has only moved. You have actually provided a short-term
disincentive to those operating it but not for very long. I wonder if you have any evidence to
show, one way or the other, whether displacement is a real problem in Europe or something
that is not really worth the consideration of this Committee.
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Rob Wainwright: It is a problem. There is significant evidence that displacement occurs. The
operational success that I talked about earlier in Western Europe against major cocaine
trafficking entering the traditional ports of entry in Europe—Spain, Portugal and Holland—
clearly led to a displacement of those routes through West Africa increasingly and, as I said
earlier, there are even signs that cocaine is entering the EU through Turkey and, we know
also, through other parts of Eastern Europe. This is clearly a displacement effect. We see
significant levels of innovation. We see criminal syndicates that are very sensitive to police
activity. One major police operation in one country quickly leads to a change in
methodology with these criminal groups, so they are very adaptable, as I said earlier. We are
seeing the emergence of a key eastern Mediterranean sea route from the Suez Canal up
through the Black Sea through to Odessa, for example, and there are many other examples
that I could give you.
The point is that this is an inevitable part and an inevitable effect of the operational work
that authorities do, including Europol. I do not entirely despair, however, because what I also
notice is that, in many cases, the displacement is not just an inconvenience to the traffickers
but, in particular, it sometimes leads to increasing the risk that they have to take. They have
to therefore establish a new set of operations in a country that is less conducive to them,
where they might have lower levels of corruptive influence, where they are forced to engage
in ways that expose them to greater levels of risk. Therefore, the more that we can at least
push them into a corner that they would prefer not to go to, a corner of last resort for
them, the better it is ultimately for us all because it increases the likelihood that we can
finally disrupt them and, in the meantime, interdict a greater share of their illicit drugs. I do
believe that the displacement effect also leads to significant problems for the criminal
organisations as well. It is not simply a case of moving to the next country without any effect
on their ability to do their business.
Q142 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: My question is really also about displacement
but a different type of displacement, because the growing consensus appears to be on the
need for an implementation of an early warning system for new psychoactive drugs and
enforcement and control measures against them, where these are judged to be of significant
risk to their users. This paper we have now had, Towards a Stronger European Response to
Drugs, has a lot on that. At least two of the four proposals appear to be around that
particular issue. Is this the right approach? When you read some of the evidence that we
have had, and I speak as a person who is completely ignorant about this, the speed at which
these substances are changing is incredible and, therefore, are we just trying to pick up
quicksilver? Are we setting ourselves up for failure in trying to tackle it in this way?
Rob Wainwright: That is quite a difficult one to answer. I agree with you that the speed is
increasing. Europol has a particular role in monitoring this. We work with the monitoring
centre in Lisbon, EMCDDA, with which we have a formal agreement, and we have a joint
reporting responsibility to identify and report new psychoactive substances. Indeed, the rate
is going up—so 41 were recorded in 2010, and 115 in total since 2005 through this EU early
warning system. It is 41, not 4,000, so I am not sure it is quite right to characterise it as
quicksilver. It is still only 41. It is still possible for a system, a cogent system or a coherent
system, to be adaptable enough to be implemented in each member state. What we find of
course is that some member states have a domestic, legislative or other process that allows
for these new psychoactive substances to be banned relatively quickly and others that do
not, so there is a lack of uniformity in the national application of this area. Although it is not
primarily my field, the Commission’s interest is in trying to address that particular problem.
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Q143 Lord Tomlinson: I know you touched on this earlier about the monitoring
systems, right at the very beginning, but are transparent monitoring systems in place, or are
they being put in place, by which we can assess and review the impact of supply-side
intervention?
Rob Wainwright: They are not yet in place, for sure, and it leads to some problems, as I
said earlier, but we are now at least trying to address this. In particular, with the monitoring
centre in Lisbon and with the European Commission, we are now actively involved in trying
to find the right common indicators for monitoring the markets and supply reduction across
Europe. In fact, even two weeks ago one of my experts was in Lisbon at a meeting to discuss
this very issue, so some efforts are ongoing.
Q144 Lord Tomlinson: Earlier, with regard to supply-side intervention, you certainly
disputed what I said about it being a failure and you did highlight some successes. With what
you have now said about displacement, what proportion would you estimate that successful
supply-side intervention is then offset by displacement?
Rob Wainwright: We do not know and this is the problem. One of the things we lack in
these indicators is a good intelligent understanding of the volume of the supply. That is the
problem.
Q145 Lord Tomlinson: As price is going down, does it not seem to indicate that supply
is increasing or have I failed to understand my basic economics from many years ago?
Rob Wainwright: Of course it indicates that, but sometimes the particular intelligence
picture of that criminal phenomenon might yield different evidence as well. It is not always
directly linked in that way. The role for example of bulking or cutting agents that is a recent
phenomenon of cocaine trafficking, for example, distorts that economic picture. What this
points to is investing yet more in intelligence work in developing a more reliable
understanding of the volume of drugs that are supplied to Europe. If you stick on the
example of cocaine, we have a fairly good understanding of how much is produced in
Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. We have some understanding of how much cocaine is seized
within the European Union. What we do not know in between is how much has been
attempted to be trafficked to Europe and how much has got through. It is in particular very
difficult to judge how much of the proportion of that produced cocaine is going north to the
American market and how much is coming to the European market; we do not know. I do
not think a sufficient effort has been made to establish enough. You can never have a reliable
intelligence picture in that sense, but I think we could invest more in that area to have a
better developed and more mature set of indicators that can begin to get some sense of that
side as well.
Q146 The Chairman: Could I just ask you, and these are not questions of which we
gave you advance warning, but we have moved close to it. I wonder if you could give us a
feel for, first of all, whether you have noticed any difficulty for the Commission in handling
drugs policy due to the fact that it is now divided, quite clearly really, between two
Commissioners and two Departments—one Cecilia Malmström on the security and policing
side, and the other Vice-President Reding. Does that provide for any awkwardness? The
second question also about the Commission involves the fact that we were rather startled
when we were told, two weeks ago, how tiny the staff who works for Vice-President Reding
on drugs is. Do you get the impression that the Commissioner at the top of the heap, as it
were, is getting enough advice and enough access to what is, after all, an extremely technical,
detailed and complex field?
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Rob Wainwright: It is not unusual for administrations, at the national level, in this area, for
example for the justice ministry and interior ministry to share the burden of work on this
drugs policy. To that extent, the new arrangement at the Commission simply reflects that.
Has it led to problems? When it was integrated in one Department, there was clearly
greater potential for there to be a more efficient prosecution of the policy. Have I seen
significant problems since then? None that I have noticed directly or to a significant extent. I
would say that it is more than just the people who are directly working in that unit for
Commissioner Reding who are active in this field.
In particular in Commissioner Malmström’s area, we have a number of officials, even
including those who are working in the Europol unit for example, who are contributing to
the Commission’s policy in this area. Many of the issues that I have discussed today about
Europol’s role in this area—the development of a better set of indicators and the
development of a better framework for operational co-operation, including the example I
gave you in West Africa—are worked on and developed very well in Commissioner
Malmström’s area. It is important therefore that the Committee understands that both of
them are playing an important role in this area. There is a duty on the Commissioners
themselves and their staff to ensure that there is the closest possible co-operation. I really
should not comment on how effective that is on a daily basis. I do not see that.
Q147 The Chairman: Do you think that they are getting access to sufficient material,
advice and so on, when they are drawing up the next drugs strategy, given the very small
number of people who seem to be working on it?
Rob Wainwright: It is difficult for me to answer that. In my narrow field, I am confident that
the very close daily relationship that we have with the relevant policy officials in
Commissioner Malmström’s cabinet is very good and productive, and more than enough for
them to understand our experience of the operational environment in which this problem is
established. I am pretty confident that, at least in that part of the Commission, they have a
good and informed picture of our work.
Q148 Lord Avebury: To what extent do you think that a coherent European perspective
on drug policy can be developed, given the current lack of consensus in so many areas and,
in particular, the examples of departure from best practice that you have been citing this
morning?
The Chairman: Is that at the international level?
Lord Avebury: At the international level, yes.
The Chairman: The question is really directed towards: can Europe speak, in any
meaningful sense, in international fora about drug policy, given the diversity that there is
within its own member states?
Rob Wainwright: I think it can and it does. In a couple of weeks, for example, I will be part
of the EU ministerial delegation to the United States, and we will once again discuss our cooperation in this field with our American counterparts. We have an EU policy and EU
strategy. We have this new EU Internal Security Strategy and, through agencies like Europol,
we clearly have established a common framework for implementation of that strategy. The
fact that we still have some important differences at the national level should not prevent us
from speaking at least with some authority to the outside world.
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Q149 The Chairman: Could I ask a last question then, which is: do you, overall, think
that the drug policy is cost-effective and that the resources that are being devoted to it
really offer value for money?
Rob Wainwright: Again, I can only speak from my very narrow perspective. It is a difficult
question to answer, of course. What I see is that we are an agency with a budget of
€85 million. We devote approximately 30% of our work to this field, so we can do the
maths. Out of that investment, we are directly supporting some cases, in very substantial
terms—about 2,800 cross-border cases each year. Others can judge whether or not that is a
good bang for your buck, but I do not think it is so bad actually, and I am certainly happy to
defend the particular contribution that we make, albeit that it is a very narrow perspective in
the context of your question.
The Chairman: It is useful for the Committee to have that view, even on a narrow
perspective.
Q150 Lord Tomlinson: Looking at it from your perspective, you have approximately
£20 million that you are spending on drug policy. Is that an adequate resource for the task
that you are charged with facing and, if you had a bigger budget, bearing in mind some of the
things that you have said need to be done, would you believe that that bigger budget could
be cost-effectively spent?
Rob Wainwright: Yes, without a doubt, but then any police chief would say that he needs
more money, of course. Without a doubt. I see that that 2,800 cases probably is not even
half of what is possible if we had a different, more open engagement from the national
authorities. What I also see actually is that, even with the casework that we are receiving,
we are at our limits in terms of what we can do and not in every case therefore are we fully
exploiting the information that we see, because we do not have the resources available.
Q151 Lord Tomlinson: You do not know the opportunity cost of that which is lost.
Rob Wainwright: Quite. In particular, we are at the stretching point in terms of our
analytical capability. This is our primary added value that we offer. We have approximately
100 criminal analysts who are interrogating this substantial daily traffic of intelligence
between the member states, with this unique access to the database that they have. They are
the ones who identify these unique new operational leads, and they are the ones who are
able, therefore, to turn these 2,800 cases into something more successful. We have 100 of
those. They are beyond the stretching limit of what more they can do. 20 more of those will
cost my budget just €2 million, and that is the case that I have been making to
Commissioner Malmström and others but, in the context of the financial picture that we
have in the EU at the moment, it is a very difficult business case to make of course, and I
have very realistic expectations. You asked the question; that is my answer.
Q152 The Chairman: Presumably the evidence you gave much earlier, which was that
the British Government, facing cuts, had withdrawn quite a lot of its bilateral representatives
around Europe and was placing a greater value on Europol, is part of the answer to Lord
Tomlinson’s question, because while it does not directly answer whether Europol’s activity is
intrinsically good value for money, but it does seem to imply that it is better value for money
than spraying a lot of bilateral people around Europe.
Europol – Oral evidence (QQ 118-154)
Rob Wainwright: The problem though, Lord Chairman, is that it has also contributed to the
particular pressures that we face. That has led directly to the number of cases that are
managed through Europol significantly increasing by at least 25% in the last two to three
years. There has meanwhile been no corresponding increase in the internal resources
available to Europol, in particular to analysts. That figure of 100 has been static for a number
of years and, therefore, whereas we have become more successful in exchanging significantly
more information and in supporting more cases, we have been unable to service them with
analytical support in the same way, because there has been no corresponding increase in our
budget.
Q153 Lord Judd: You talk about the complexity and sophistication of international crime.
You talk about limited resources. There must be attempts to try to subvert your
organisation, particularly when it is operating in the context of needing friends and cooperation. Do you have internal rigorous systems to guard against this and to ensure it does
not happen and it cannot become infected?
Rob Wainwright: Yes, we do and—touch wood—we have not had a major security
problem in the lifetime of the agency. Those security controls are put in place under the
very watchful guise of our security committee, which is a committee of experts from the
member states. They had designed a security policy for us that is best practice in the EU,
rigorously applied by some very good people I have working in this area, further benefited
from the recent transfer of our agency to a brand new headquarters in The Hague, where
levels of physical security are now also very, very high. I am satisfied with that and, so far, it
is helping to protect us.
Q154 The Chairman: Have you had any cyber-attacks against you at all?
Rob Wainwright: Like many agencies, we have almost on a daily basis attempts to play with
our systems and to get through our systems but, like many agencies operating in this field,
we have a very strong firewall and, indeed, a physical disconnect between our external
systems and our internal systems. In the end, this is the most important part of our
information security.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. We are one minute ahead of the time that you said
you needed to go. I would like to thank you yet again for having given us some extremely
comprehensive and clear evidence, which will definitely help our inquiry. Thank you very
much.
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence
1. My Lords, I will preface my submission by suggesting that there are two fundamental
problems which vitiate against a comprehensive and universal European Union drugs
policy and strategy. The first relates to the area of demand reduction where there are
profound and fundamental differences in philosophy, outlook and experiences between
Member States. The second relates to the cross-cutting of spheres of responsibility and
interest between various international bodies when it comes to supply reduction, in all
its aspects which include everything from crop eradication, laboratory destruction,
trafficking interception, controlled deliveries to precursor control and money laundering.
2. As far as demand reduction is concerned, the strategy tries to do too much to be
comprehensive where it cannot. It states that the “EU Drug Strategy 2005-2012 will aim
for the following concrete, identifiable result:
“Measurable reduction of the use of drugs, of dependence and of drug-related health and social
risks through the development and improvement of an effective and integrated comprehensive
knowledge-based demand reduction system including prevention, early intervention, treatment,
harm reduction, rehabilitation and social reintegration measures.”
3. This represents a series of aspirations not a goal. Many are unachievable and cannot be
operationalised. Many would say the first part of the statement is simply a vague
unachievable aspiration because there are too many variables involved which are beyond
the control of the EU and many Member States. The problem is that fundamentally broad
aims are set out which cannot be operationalised because there is no agreement on the
underlying philosophy. We go from a zero tolerance approach of Sweden, where the
concept of harm reduction is or at least was anathema, to the pragmatism of the
Netherlands and to the policy of Portugal in relation to possession of drugs for personal
use. For many countries, harm reduction is central to their national policies, but in
others it is not. The UK in its latest 10-year plan significantly moves away from this
philosophy which it had embraced for at least 20 years.
4. What does not seem to be understood by policy writers is that behaviour is not
compartmentalised. For example the desire to stop the club scene and decrease the
extent of ecstasy use by young people, has, not only in my opinion but that of many
researchers, led to binge drinking (much more harmful than moderate ecstasy use) and
an influx of “legal highs”, which as soon as one has been made illegal, another comes in.
Policy makers do not seem to fully understand the extensive of the use of Twitter and
the internet by young people in particular and their consequent ability to access
information and to exchange it.
5. As far as trafficking and international cooperation are concerned, it seems as though the
EU wishes to be the centre of policy making and operating as “the EU” to impose a
policy on the rest of the world. The problem is the existence of the G7 (sometimes G8),
the G8 plus 5, the G20, which cross cut and supersede many of the EU aspirations. The
G8 since 2009 is now the G20 but it is not clear whether it replaces the G8 just as the
main economic council of wealthy nations, or takes part in all the other drug formal and
informal organisations set up by the G8.
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence
6. In relation to your specific questions:
7. Q1: The success or otherwise of the existing EU Drugs Strategy and Action
Plan.
As with resolutions at the Commission of Narcotic Drugs and the and the political
declaration of the UN General Assembly at its special session on drugs in 1998, all that
can be said given a very divergent set of attitudes and values, are mild expressions of
hope. Where there are divergent views, the resolutions which are passed are anodyne
which do not offend any Member State and therefore cannot be used as concrete policy
statements which can be formulated into detailed specific policy. There are no
suggestions as to how these aims are to be implemented. Without an implementation
plan, any policy can be derailed. Evaluation is all too often nominal rather than real. By
this I mean, for example, that increasing the throughput of a treatment clinic does not
mean that it is making any difference to the behaviour of drug users, but numbers and
money spent is often used as criteria to prove that something was done in fulfilling a goal.
8. Q2: The success or otherwise of EU international collaboration among law
enforcement agencies in disrupting trafficking routes.
There are no references specifically to agencies and bodies outside Europe which are
intimately involved in stopping trafficking. Plans should be much more specific; with
whom are they going to cooperate, what will be the form of this cooperation? Without
specifics there can be no plans. There is no mention, for example, of the meetings of the
HONLEAS (Heads of Law Enforcement Administrations), the World Customs
Organisation, which among other things identified 113 trafficking routes for opium and
heroin out of Afghanistan. What of Interpol and not just Europol? There seems no
awareness of the formal and informal structures outside the EU which determine policy.
The impression given is one of an inward looking group of countries who want to exert
political influence on other organisations. The UN and the Commission on Narcotic
Drugs (CND) is mentioned in passing as though there could be one EU position. What
are the Netherlands expected to do when they are attacked at the CND by the USA and
Russia? In international forums the EU can be represented as observers but not as full
members because they cannot speak for or defend a Member State’s domestic or foreign
EU level policy. The formal and informal organisations and groups that have emerged
over time are not seen as part of the whole. There is no overview or sense of how the
EU is to interact with each. The role of informal groups such as CATF, FATF the Dublin
Group and the Paris Pact are not addressed. What are their relationships to CND,
UNODC and CICAD?
9. Q3: Whether further harmonisation of drugs policy is feasible or desirable at
the EU level.
My answer is no to both and that the principle of subsidiarity should be applied, giving
individual countries the freedom to express their own experience, values, history and
pragmatic ways that they see as best for them and their citizens when dealing with the
illegal drug problem. Thus the Dutch can continue with their coffee shops, but no one
else should be obliged to do so, and certainly not the Swedes. This argument used to
rage around syringe/needle exchanges and more recently consumption rooms. The
increasing divergence of policies can be seen to some extent in so far as the possession
of drugs for personal use. There are both de jure (Portugal) and de facto (the
Netherlands( for cannabis), legalisation, plus also de facto legalisation where the police
do not enforce the law.
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence
10. Q4: The external dimension of EU policy in relation to candidate countries ,
and cooperation with third countries.
In relation to candidate countries I would urge the policy not be to make them jump
through hoops and not to demand a high level of analysis and record keeping from the
start. My experience of a consultancy in a new EU country that was a formerly under
communist control, was not that they were not able, or unwilling to learn, but that the
mindset was completely different, and adapting to new approaches was rather difficult. In
the field of drug policy, help and guidance should be offered to see them through the first
few years.
11. Q5: The multilateral dimension, including the UN Conventions.
The Conventions cannot be amended or changed, despite the impression to the
contrary. The mechanisms for change are such that even one Member State objecting to
change can stop the whole process at ECOSOC anf then there is the Vienna Convention
on Conventions! (There is ample documentation on this that can be provided.) All
efforts within the UN and the CND even to arrange a meeting to discuss the possibility
of having a formal meeting to discuss the future or reforming the three Conventions
have been consistently blocked. There are many mechanisms that can be used to do
this, particularly relating to the budget and whether it comes from the regular budget or
ACK.
12. Q6: The role of the EU in promotion by the EU, and in particular the
EMCDDA in collating data, funding research and development projects, and
sharing instances of best practice in order to increase understanding of the
problems and ways to tackle them.
EMCDDA have done an excellent job in producing an overview of the drug situation in
the EU. Through its website and the REIITOX reports we have a detailed account of
policy and practice in each Member State. It also produces a number of important
scientific reports on issues of concern and interest.
13. Q7: The role of the EU in promoting and improving the commitment of
individual member States to the principle of harm reduction.
Many countries do not subscribe to this approach, notably Sweden, and the new UK
Drug Strategy 2010 moves away from this. It is covered up by saying that the strategy
“will offer support for people to choose recovery as an achievable way out of
dependency”. With 350,000 class a drug users, the therapeutic services have not been
expanded to achieve this and the refusal of a small group of psychiatrists to block the
prescribing of heroin to heroin addicts, as called upon by the House of Commons in
2001, also hinders progress.
14. Q8: The desirability of increased promotion by the EU of drugs policy at the
local level.
It is the principle of subsidiarity, but the EU and national governments will not listen to
what local people want and believe that they need. There is of course always the
question of who pays for services and out of which budget the money comes. As with
many attempts to introduce drug education in schools, the money was vired to other
purposes either by local authorities or the schools themselves who did not want drug
education in the misguided view that it would encourage drug taking.
Professor Cindy Fazey – Written Evidence
15. Q9: The role of the EU in promoting evidence based policy in the field of
illicit drugs.
Although worthwhile, this can be very expensive to do properly, but most of the policy
is not evidence based. The main problem is that there needs to be a before and after
study – what was the position before the intervention, what after, and can any change be
attributed to the intervention or was it due to other factors? The variables have to be
tightly defined and means established for measuring them. Just because a drug education
course has been delivered in a school does not mean that the behaviour of the children
will be different six months or a year later. What was it before the course, including
their knowledge of drugs, what was it after the course and how does it compare to that
of their friends and coevals in the same town? In the treatment field there is no
agreement as to what constitutes success. For example, for some programmes, just
completing them is deemed to be a success (even if the client/patient starts using drugs
the next day). Others will argue that being drug free for three months is a success, but
even here there is no agreement, because some say the person has to be completely
drug free while others will say if that person were a heroin addict then it only matters
that they are free of heroin and smoking cannabis does not count. In short there is no
agreement as to what constitutes success for any specific drug programme or treatment,
so the very idea of “evidence based” policy is very politically correct but without
substance.
16. Q10: Licensing issues and the designation of illegal or controlled drugs.
This particular issue has produced a knee-jerk reaction in many Member States. As a
sometimes heavy handed attempt to suppress the use of particular drugs it has led to
different drugs being used, as described above. Consideration could be given to
encouraging a code of practice in the media where reports of the deaths of people
attributed to use of an illegal drug should subsequently also report the coroner’s, or
official medical verdict. Too often, sensationalised reports have proved to be untrue, as
the report in the UK of two friends dying as a result of taking Mephedrone, when the
post mortem revealed that the drug was not even in their bodies. The determination to
make “legal highs” illegal, does not always allow for adequate research to be done, and
also may take out of the research area drugs which might have some therapeutic benefit,
as with the case of ecstasy, which was used in post traumatic stress disorder counselling
and may be beneficial in the treatment of tumours. The ramifications of changing the legal
status of a substance should be thought through, and if classified, the exact
appropriateness of the level of classification be justified.
26 August 2011
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor
Alex Stevens – Oral evidence (QQ 1-24)
Evidence Session No. 1.
Heard in Public.
Questions 1 - 24
WEDNESDAY 19 OCTOBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Lord Mawson
Lord Richard
Lord Tomlinson
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Cindy Fazey, University of Liverpool, Professor Susanne
MacGregor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Professor Alex
Stevens, University of Kent.
Q1 The Chairman: Well, good morning and thank you very much for coming in. We are
really grateful to you for being willing to give evidence to us. You know what subject we are
looking into and the broad thrust of the questions we would like to go over with you. We
were very grateful, if I may say so, to Professor Fazey for her written evidence, which we
have already found to be very useful. We have, of course, had quite a lot of written evidence
submitted but that was a particularly useful contribution and thank you very much for that.
Let me just explain one or two housekeeping points which we make at the beginning of
every evidence session. The session is open to the public. A webcast of the session goes out
live as an audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the parliamentary website. A
verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence and this will be put on the parliamentary
website. A few days after the evidence session, the session we are having now, you will be
sent a copy of the transcript to check it for accuracy and we will be grateful if you could
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
advise us of any corrections as quickly as possible. If, after this session, you wish to clarify or
amplify any points made during your evidence or have any additional points to make, you are
entirely welcome to submit supplementary evidence in writing to us.
Now, it would be very helpful to the Committee if you could, one after the other, just
introduce yourselves. If you wish to make some brief opening remarks on your own behalf,
that would be very welcome, but equally, if you do not wish to do so, that is fine. We will
move then into questions and answers. Perhaps I could start with the left, which I think is
Professor Susanne MacGregor of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Professor MacGregor: Thank you, Lord Chairman. Well, good morning. It is a pleasure to
be here. I am Susanne MacGregor from the Faculty of Public Health and Policy at the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and I am a social scientist. I have worked in
the field of social problems and social policy for many years and focused on drugs and
alcohol issues. I was the programme co-ordinator for the Department of Health Drug
Misuse Research Initiative and have been a scientific adviser to the Department of Health.
I have recently held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to consider the changing shape of the
drug problem and policy responses to it, mainly focusing on Britain, but that has meant
looking also at the European context and the international context. I could mention that I
am an associate editor of the International Journal of Drug Policy. That is my background and I
am coming very much from a social policy and public health perspective on the issue.
Professor Stevens: Thank you, Lord Chairman. Thanks for the invitation today. My name is
Alex Stevens. I am Professor in Criminal Law and Justice at the University of Kent. I am also
a social scientist—a criminologist. I have been funded in the past by the European
Commission to carry out research on issues of quasi-compulsory treatment in different
countries and I am a member of the board of the International Society for the Study of Drug
Policy, which has received a small amount of funding from the EMCDDA for its conferences.
I recently published a book under the title, Drugs, Crime and Public Health, and this describes
my interest and my research on issues of drug policy internationally but also domestically.
Before we start, I would like to make one introductory comment, which is that many of
your questions that you have sent to us today relate to the evidence-based nature of
European drug policy, but I think we should also be aware of the higher level of drug policy
within which the EU and national policies operate, which is that policy that originates in the
three United Nations conventions. While we might see a desire for evidence-based policy at
the European level, we should remember that those conventions were not based on
evidence but were based on diplomatic agreements between countries, which were made at
times when we had even less evidence than now about the shape of the drug problem or
about effective drug policy responses.
Q2 The Chairman: Yes, well, thank you very much for that remark. I suppose I ought to
declare an interest as a member of the Council of the University of Kent. I do not see that
as contributing any conflict in this matter but I think I should just mention it.
Yes, what you say about the way in which the European Union’s strategy has to fit into a
wider international negotiated series of agreements is, of course, absolutely right and I think
we had some questions in the course of our inquiry which we wished to pursue. We are
trying to, but may not succeed, in taking some evidence from the UN office in Vienna but
unfortunately the Under Secretary-General responsible for that cannot give evidence, but
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
we will certainly bear that very much in mind in our inquiry. Thank you very much. Now,
Professor Fazey, please.
Professor Fazey: My Lord, thank you very much for the invitation. I began researching into
drug addiction in 1966 and, despite my attempts to escape the field I have always come back
to it. I am Visiting Professor of International Drug Policy at the University of Liverpool
School of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology within the School of Law and Social
Justice. I come to this from very much an international perspective in the sense that I spent
eight years with the United Nations Drug Control Programme. I was Head of Demand
Reduction and later went on to be an inter-regional adviser, as well as the Secretariat, with
one other person, for the United Nations Declaration on the Guiding Principles of Drug
Demand Reduction, which I drafted and which was adopted by the General Assembly Special
Session on Drugs in 1998.
I am afraid my experience would suggest that the role of the international conventions is not
as great as many would argue and as they appear to be. We can go into that later but when
you think that Portugal has, for 10 years, decriminalised possession of drugs and has been
very successful, there is great divergence. There have been two big problems with the EU
strategy. First, it is trying to impose a policy that you can only do at such an enormous level
of generality that it means nothing. Secondly, it ignores all the other structures which already
exist outside the EU; there are a number of cross-cutting allegiances which are part-EU and
part other countries. In fact, it really does play down the role of the G7, occasionally G8, but
mainly the G7, which actually internationally runs drug policy.
Q3 The Chairman: Well, that is very interesting. Thank you. Of course, I hope that, in
reply to questions where you feel that you should say something that relates to either the
UN’s activities in this matter or the G7’s, you will do so, because our own understanding of
the interface between national policy, EU policy and global policy, if one can put it that way,
is something we wish to flesh out and pull out as part of this inquiry. Thank you very much.
I think we might now then move on to the first of our series of questions, which of course
does touch very much on what you, Professor Fazey, said in your opening remarks. The
major objectives of the present EU drugs strategy have been to significantly reduce the
demand for and supply of drugs to promote international co-operation and to promote
research information and evaluation. Do you think these aims are being met? What have
been the successes and failures of this strategy, which is, after all, now coming to the end of
its period? The reason why we are holding this inquiry is indeed to try to influence to some
extent the emergence of the next drugs strategy, which we assume will apply from 2013 to
2018. What changes could be made to make it more effective? Which of you would like to
start on that, which I think all of you will, no doubt, want to say something on?
Professor MacGregor: I would like to start by talking about the aim of demand reduction
and I will leave some of the other areas to my colleagues. I think it is important to be aware
that the aims, when talking about demand reduction, are not only relating to attempts to
control the use of drugs but also very importantly to address the harms caused by the use of
drugs as well as by supply and trafficking. In that area of moves towards reducing the harms
related to drug use, I think the strategy has been very successful. It has made many
achievements in a relatively short period of time.
I think it is important to note that public health was the first ambition of the drug strategy
when Europe became interested in developing a strategy in the early 1990s and it was very
much, as you know, as a response to the HIV/Aids threat that the various developments
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
occurred. Over time, there has been an increase in the awareness of good practice in the
field of harm minimisation, improvements in guidelines regarding treatment, development of
frameworks for treatment, in particular through the EMCDDA, and a development of
indicators to measure what is happening. So on a whole series of fronts which one could go
into, I think that the area of reducing harms has been relatively successful. Obviously, there
are areas that still need more attention but the moves towards accepting that this is a key
ambition of the strategy, I think, have been really quite remarkable.
Professor Stevens: I would like to start by backing up Susanne’s comment on the success of
the European approach to harm reduction and specifically the contribution of the European
Union to assisting the newer members of the European Union, those formally of the Soviet
bloc in central and eastern Europe, who had very underdeveloped systems for monitoring
infectious disease and very underdeveloped systems for treatment of drug dependence and
harm reduction. Several countries have been able to take the opportunities provided by
European Union support to increase their capacities in these areas.
But if were to look at demand reduction as actually being reducing the level of drug use, we
might see less success, in that levels of drug use in the European Union are historically high,
if stable, and in some places perhaps declining slightly. So if we see the use of cannabis, which
is the most commonly used drug, in most countries, we are seeing a stabilisation or perhaps
even a decline. Amphetamines and ecstasy use is declining in most countries. Cocaine,
however, has a mostly upwards trend across the European Union and heroin, again, seems
stable but at historically high levels. I think this relates to whether it is a realistic ambition for
policy either at national or at international level to reduce substantially the levels of actual
drug use.
The problem we have here, as with all areas of European drug strategy, is: how would we
know if it is being successful? How could we attribute any action that is taken at a European
level given the huge chain of events and incidents that could take place between those
actions and an individual’s decision to take drugs or to use drugs in a certain way which
might be dangerous to their health?
This is an especially acute problem in the area of supply reduction. Supply reduction has
never needed to justify itself on the basis of evidence. It has been written into the UN
conventions from the start and it has always been assumed that by taking certain actions to
reduce supply, one can have significant impacts on the use of drugs. The evidence to justify
or test that assumption has never been invested in. The European Union has commissioned
studies recently which show the gross lack of evidence in this area, which is even greater
than the lack of evidence that we have around drug use and drug treatment. We have
invested substantially perhaps through the European Monitoring Centre, for example, in
systems to gather evidence about use, about treatment and about harm. We have not
invested so much in the evidence that we would need to test whether supply reduction is
successful.
Professor Fazey: There is one agreement and that is, yes, HIV has been reduced
substantially among intravenous drug users and also hep B, hep C and other diseases
associated with intravenous drug use. The rest of it is pie in the sky. It is, “We are going to
reduce demand.” How? Where is the implementation? Where are the measures? There are
none.
If you try to control variables, you forget that there are 20 others influencing the situation.
You say, “In this country, we’ve reduced the demand for ecstasy,” but we have all the legal
highs, such as binge drinking. I am suggesting you can lower, through certain activities, usually
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
police activities, the incidence of one particular drug or the prevalence of it, but you will not
do it right across the board and it will not be through simple policing actions; there are
simply too many social variables. Why did we have in the 1970s everyone taking LSD and
hallucinogens and it moved on to something else?
We have to think, I think, of longer-term analysis but also consider cultures that are totally
different even within the EU. Sweden has zero tolerance and would not even permit
methadone treatment. The Dutch have a different attitude towards cannabis. They have not
legalised it but they permit its use in the coffee houses. The Portuguese, as I have mentioned,
in 2001 legalised possession for personal use. Now, even across the EU what is defined as
personal use in terms of amount varies greatly. It is seven days’ supply in Portugal. In others,
they will do it in terms of grams. The cultures are so radically different. The philosophies are
so radically different that you cannot, in my view, have a demand reduction programme,
other than simply stating it as something to aim at but without anything that is concrete.
I mean that the EU, like the UN, cannot implement programmes. It can make suggestions
but, in the UN, it is the Member States which make the resolutions. In the EU, they are
stating generalities that are aspirations and no more than that. Whatever aspect we look at,
there is no agreement. They talk about access to treatment. What treatment? In some
countries, it is drug-free counselling. In others, for heroin it will be methadone maintenance
or methadone detox or it is—no longer here, although it used to be—heroin maintenance.
It could be cognitive behaviour therapy. The range is so great and not all countries offer the
same thing. If they say that treatment is successful, do they mean they have taken 1,000
people into a treatment facility, kept them there for six weeks and sent them on their way
again? What happens if the next day they start using drugs again? Do they still count that as
successful?
A similar situation arises in demand reduction when you are talking about education. If you
say, “Right, we’re going to put in education programmes,” if you design the programme for
the culture, for the age of the pupil and if you can get them into schools, that is another big
“if”. You then say, “Right, we’ve got 100 schools, 100,000 pupils. There’ll be 100,000 people
who have benefited from this,” but they do not do a “before and after” and the trouble with
evaluation is that it is extremely expensive. Where did pupils start from and where did they
end up? Have they changed their behaviour? The meta-analysis from big American studies
suggests that the only thing that happens is they increase their knowledge for about six
months and after that they go back to where they were because they are back in the culture
that started their drug use in the first place. Sorry, I could go on but I will not.
The Chairman: Well, thank you very much for that. You strayed a little bit into the area of
the second question, which I am now going to ask Lord Hodgson to put. Perhaps all or any
of you who respond to the second question could give a slightly judgmental nature to your
reply—namely, is the diversity a good thing or a bad thing? Is it something that the European
Union should be trying to remove or not? Lord Hodgson? Sorry—
Lord Mawson: Sorry, I was just going to ask one supplementary—
The Chairman: Oh yes, sorry. This is a supplementary.
Q4 Lord Mawson: How much is all this research and information and evaluation actually
costing us all?
Professor Fazey: Thousands of dollars.
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Lord Mawson: Do we have a number between 2005 and 2000? Do we have any idea?
Professor Stevens: It is very hard to tell, because it is split up among loads of different
budgets, so different departments of different national Governments will be spending
different amounts, but there was study done by Gerhard Behringer.
Q5 Lord Tomlinson: Do you think any of the research works?
Professor Stevens: Potentially, but there is a system for co-ordination through the Reitox
system of those research efforts.
Lord Tomlinson: So you can co-ordinate that but not how much it costs.
Professor Fazey: It depends what we are doing.
Professor Stevens: The cost of the research is tiny, minuscule, compared to the amount we
are spending on these policies. We are spending billions on supply reduction efforts of which
we have no idea of the effectiveness.
Professor Fazey: Well, going back to evaluation, I evaluated a treatment clinic and did work
for the Slovak Republic evaluating their programmes. To do evaluation thoroughly in the
treatment clinic, it took two years with two people, me and a research assistant, full time.
That is if you were taking all the details of the patients and then trying to analyse the
outcome of treatment. If you are doing a school programme, as they did in the United
States, they took two counties, I think it was in California; in one they put in a programme of
drug education and the other they used as the control group. This is where they found that
after six months there was no difference. So it depends on the number. You may be trying
to follow up 2,000 people but follow-up is extremely difficult. With kids they probably stay
around. If you are following up from a drugs clinic, they will say, “Don’t call us, we’ll call
you,” or, “No, we don’t want to see you again,” or they move. So it depends on what you
are trying to evaluate, what are the numbers are involved and to what extent you are going
to do the follow-up.
Professor Stevens: The University of Cambridge recently ran a project which was a
systematic review of research that had been done on reducing offending among drug users.
So they searched high and low for studies that had been done in this area, only to find 13
studies that were of sufficient methodological quality to include in their review and this was
a review across the European Union. Most of them—the great majority of them—were
from this country. This is not because there is any lack of ambition among the research
community to provide high-quality methodologically rigorous studies. It is because there is
no funding available to do high-quality methodologically rigorous studies of drug treatment,
let alone supply reduction.
Q6 The Chairman: Do you think that the results of what work is done is being properly
made available to people in other Member States than the Member State where the work is
done? Is the process of benefiting from research in country A by country C or whatever it
may be adequately catered for or not?
Professor Stevens: Well, if I compare the field of drug treatment and drug policy compared
to crime prevention, for example, the drug policy and treatment field is much better
supplied with European organisations to transmit that evidence across Europe. So the
European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, which has that role, has a high
profile in all the Member States that I am aware of. It is very open and transparent in the
way that it makes research available and the guidelines that it produces are being used across
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the European Union compared to crime prevention, about which it is much more difficult to
get information centrally.
Professor MacGregor: A study was done of a comparative analysis of research into illicit
drugs in the European Union. It did, in a way, support what is being said, that the majority of
studies were of interventions and this is the area where the most progress has been made,
looking at and evaluating the impact of specific interventions, specific treatments, specific
practices. This is the area where we know a lot and good practice is shared. The European
Union, through Reitox and through a whole set of activities which support the development
of networks—networks of researchers, networks of professionals—help to disseminate this
information.
The next most common category is epidemiology and we have improved tremendously in
our knowledge of the epidemiology of illicit drug use in Europe over the last 10 years. So
those areas are well covered but, as has been said, drug supply, policy, legal frameworks,
these areas have not been subjected to the same amount of research. I do not want us to
lose sight of the fact that a great deal has been achieved in developing knowledge and
information on interventions and epidemiology so that indeed we do not duplicate and we
do not reinvent the wheel. This has particularly been of great value to the eastern European
countries. The great achievement was to spread this information to the new accession
countries, through the Reitox Academy and the Reitox network, so that they did not have
to go through the whole process of discovering how to approach the problem.
Q7 Lord Avebury: As I understood it, Professor Stevens said there was no funding
available for the high-quality matters rather than for studies on demand reduction. Is that the
result of a defect in European Union policy at the highest level?
Professor Stevens: The lack is comparatively greater in supply reduction than it is in
demand reduction because the interventions which have been researched and which
Professor MacGregor mentioned are mostly in the field of demand reduction, such as
treatment, and to a lesser extent prevention, such as education, as Professor Fazey
mentioned. The lack of investment in research on supply reduction, I think, arises both at
European and at national levels, partly, I presume, because of the uncontroversial nature of
the assumption that by controlling the supply of drugs one would have an effect on the drug
market. Some of the interventions that are best researched are the most contentious. So
probably the best researched intervention that we have is heroin-assisted therapy. Because it
is so contentious, it can only happen, usually, politically, by creating a pilot study that has
very rigorous evaluations attached, which is why we know so well that it works. Because
supply reduction efforts have been much less contentious, Member States and the European
Union have not invested the research in finding out whether it actually works.
Q8 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Lord Chairman, as you said, my fox may not be
shot but it certainly limping. The EU drugs strategy accepts that the different Member States
are free to apply different drugs policies and that subsidiarity should apply. Is this the right
policy or should we be seeking better harmonisation?
Professor MacGregor: I apply the Simon Hoggart test to this. Would you want disharmony?
He usually says, “State the opposite of things.” I think a move towards greater harmonisation
developed through dialogue, through compromise, through consensus, through shared
networks, through sharing ideas and practice is the way to go rather than diktat from above.
I think no one would be in favour of an imposed harmonisation, but there certainly is a need
for harmonisation because there is a common threat. Again, although the issue of HIV/Aids
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linked to injecting drug use has been contained by the policies of the last 10 to 20 years,
there is still a huge threat on the borders of the European Union. Russia and eastern
European countries have an epidemic of HIV linked to IDU and it is very important that we
are aware that this issue has not gone away and could continue. One factor which is relevant
also, I think, may be the changes in north Africa but certainly issues to do with migration.
There is a rising problem of HIV/Aids and injecting drug use in Africa, so that as we have
greater contact, with migration from the neighbouring countries, then I think we need to
have a common approach to what is a security issue. Public health is a security issue and we
need to continue to develop. So I would argue that, yes, of course, there is diversity; there is
variation, not just at the national level but at the local and the city level, as has been said, and
these issues rise and fall. That is the nature of the drugs problem, but again we can learn
from each other. As a problem that has been experienced in one country appears in
another, we can begin to share our experience. I think another factor, just to link to
migration, is the migration of staff, certainly in the health and social care field. So we again
need harmonisation of professional approaches and good practice because we have internal
mobility of staffing as well.
Q9 The Chairman: I interpret what you say as you would favour more bottom-up
harmonisation but not top-down. So you are not basically disputing that the idea that the
European Union, as a single unit, taking detailed decisions about drugs policy is not very
realistic but you feel that a lot more could be done by those working on it in the 27 Member
States learning more from each other and applying more lessons in a similar way. Is that it?
Professor MacGregor: Indeed, but I do think the European Union has a role. I mean, I do
not think the strategy means nothing. As somebody said,“It is all just blah, blah,” but “blah,
blah” matters in terms of a statement of principles. I would say, perhaps in opposition to
some of the things that my colleagues have said, that the European Union has developed a
distinctive approach. It is not absolute consensus but there is a body of agreement to aim for
a realistic, pragmatic evidence-based approach that does reflect the European values of
democracy, transparency, human rights and so on. I think that adherence to those principles
and a constant reinforcement of those principles can be useful, but then how they are
actually implemented and applied has to be flexible and has to adapt to local circumstances.
The Chairman: Would either of the other two of you like to speak on this question?
Professor Fazey: My Lord, I am afraid I have to disagree quite profoundly with both of my
colleagues. I would press very much for the concept of subsidiarity. I agree that there should
be no imposition of policy but I think each country needs to work out according to its own
tradition and values what it wishes to develop in terms of drug policy.
When one looks at supply reduction, quite a lot has been done. An enormous amount has
been done by the World Bank on Afghanistan, talking about what can be done to stop the
supply. There have been many studies there. Also in West Africa there have been container
projects. There are a lot of projects going across, not the EU, but involving EU countries
with other countries. For example, there is the Paris Pact, which is basically the G7, or if you
include Russia, the G8, to intercept and do something about heroin coming from
Afghanistan. It is very specific and there are a lot of organisations, informal and formal,
across the world that come together on specific issues. That was Afghanistan. Others have
looked at precursor control to stop acetic anhydride getting into Afghanistan to produce
heroin from opium. We also have the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering and,
again, these are worldwide. Admittedly both of those were instituted by the United States,
but they essentially are the G7. Sometimes it is regional but sometimes it does go across the
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world and it seems that the EU is just—forgive me—a navel contemplation exercise of
looking in, looking at itself and forgetting that other organisations exist. The Dublin Group,
for example, has a formal meeting but regionally it holds informal meetings. The G7 will have
the one big meeting where they have the riots but then, for the rest of the year, they will
have meetings, say, in the Caribbean about policy in the Caribbean. There is a whole world
that exists outside the EU that the EU is not taking on board. Even places that are on its
border like Switzerland, which has for many years had heroin-assisted treatment, are
somehow ignored even though their approach to treatment might have proved to be
extremely successful.
Q10 Lord Richard: It strikes me, Lord Chairman, that this sort of veers off the question I
have down later. What do you think the institutions of the EU—because that, after all, is
what this Committee is basically concerned about—can actually do in order to try to
produce a more coherent policy? I accept totally what Professor Fazey has just been saying
about all sorts of other bits going on in the other part of the world but, as far as Europe is
concerned, what could the institutions do?
Professor Fazey: Well, EMCDDA, I think, is doing a very good job indeed. That is the basis
for saying, “This policy seems to work here.” First of all we are doing the epidemiology.
How much drug taking? In which country? What are the trends? And we have done a series
of very good research reports which inform different Member States, the researchers but
also the politicians. So they are producing the information and they are producing evidence
where they can get it but I think it is up to the individual Member States to do with it as they
see fit. But, to me, the core of this sort of information exchange is the Reitox and
EMCDDA, which has improved tremendously since it was set up.
Lord Richard: Is that the main role you see for the EU institutions?
Professor Fazey: Yes.
Lord Richard: It is research and disseminating the results of it.
Professor Fazey: Yes.
Professor MacGregor: I would not say so. Europol clearly plays a key role and the
Horizontal Working Party on Drugs has also played a very important role in co-ordinating
between Member States. The value of institutions is that they can consolidate and collate
where there is agreement and agreed values and agreed knowledge in this changing world.
There are those who argue that there might be a role for a European drugs co-ordinator.
That might be taking it too far for some people but there is a need for leadership at the
highest level to argue for evidence-based policy and pragmatism and someone who took that
role at a European level might be able to play quite an interesting role, but that might be
beyond the remit of the current discussions.
The Chairman: No, I would be very interested to hear any views on that sort of subject.
Obviously we are looking at the institutional side of things as well as the policy side of things.
Q11 Lord Tomlinson: Early on, Professor Stevens, you spoke about the level of drug use
being historically high. Now, empirically that seems to me to be evidence of failure of
policies to combat the use of illegal drugs. We are talking about all these successes and yet
the empirical evidence seems to be the evidence of failure. Now, I want to look at the
supply-side question. Professor Fazey, you mentioned Afghanistan. Why do we not have
some sort of agreement on the sort of plan put forward by the Senlis Council to convert the
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poppy harvest into medical opiates for which there is a world shortage? It seems to have
quite impressive support—no, well tell me why not.
Professor Fazey: If I can explain where it came from—
Lord Tomlinson: Yes, sorry, there was just one other point I was quickly going to make.
When I think about this EU supremo, it strikes me that his role is going to be very different
depending on whether he is Portuguese or Swedish.
Professor Fazey: I will try to be brief about this. WHO at one of its meetings two years ago
noticed that the level of medical morphine supplied mainly to Africa was very low and they
said, “Oh dear, they must be developing cancers. They must have a need for strong
analgesics. What can we do about that?” That was then taken up by the International
Narcotics Control Board which said, “We must send more morphine and heroin to Africa.”
However, the INCB later published a report saying they had been wrong, but the Senlis
Council does not mention that. The INCB realised there are few, if any, effective control
mechanisms in Africa. If you send out even a hundredweight of heroin or morphine, how are
you going to get it there? Who is going to control it? Where are the safe places it can be
locked up so that smugglers and criminals do not get hold of it and sell it on the black
market? The conclusion was that if more was sent to Africa, you would end up with a really
big black market in heroin.
Now, if I remember, you have a black market in Mauritius and in Namibia and a bit in South
Africa, but it is fairly well restricted down there because it is coming in from India to
Mauritius and on. But if you start trying to distribute heroin or morphine in Africa, you are
going to end up with a hundred times bigger problem and there is no evidence, given the
unfortunately very high death rate in Africa, that people live long enough to get these very
nasty diseases. Again, when I get back I can give you all the references and I can send you the
INCB official report saying, “No, this was wrong; they are not short,” but the Senlis Council
has never retracted officially from its stance.
The Chairman: I was also involved in a lot of parliamentary questioning of the Senlis
Council proposals, but certainly the responses that the Government gave were that, in
terms of Afghanistan, it was simply not operable because the systems of control that exist in
countries like India and Turkey, where there is controlled production, just do not exist in
Afghanistan.
Professor Fazey: Yes.
The Chairman: You are saying that the systems for control in the market destinations of
morphine or heroin do not exist either.
Professor Fazey: Yes.
The Chairman: There is a problem at both ends.
Q12 Lord Mawson: You said a little bit about this but I would just like to say a bit more.
The drug situation, it seems to me, is a global business. I am just wondering what research
has been done about this business and how it is operating. Also I know from working in the
health service for many years and trying to engage in terms of innovation that it endlessly
employs researchers and social scientists and all this and often what I find as an entrepreneur
is they make the world so complicated that really simple pieces of innovation cannot happen.
I am just wondering, if it is a business and requires new, more practical innovation—and
there are people out there who are attempting to do some of this stuff—where that
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research has got to because there are these, as I say, very classical approaches in
government to these sorts of issues. I, as a practitioner, increasingly worry that they are not
really getting to grips with the problem. In some ways, they are actually creating a screen
which does not then enable us to come to grips with the problem and think differently about
it. I am just wondering what actual research has been done about this drugs business.
Professor Fazey: Well, there are a few points.
The Chairman: Sorry, if you did not mind, I would like to let Professor Stevens in, because
he has been asking for the floor for some time.
Professor Stevens: In answer to this question, the European Commission has commissioned
research in this area. There was a report done a couple of years ago by Professors Peter
Reuter and Franz Trautmann on the state of the global drugs market and I believe they are
commissioning new evidence to follow up on some of the recommendations of that report.
So there is work being done, but it starts from a very low base of evidence because of the
problems I have previously referred to in the lack of investment in researching these flows,
patterns and efforts to reduce.
I am afraid that I would take issue, my Lord, with your suggestion that we do not wait for or
rely on rigorous research in this area. You referred to the question of health. One of the
reasons we have taken huge strides over the last century or so in public health is that we
have invested in the systems for evidence to test innovations, but there have been many
innovations in the field of drug policy which we have no idea whether they have had any
effect or not because we have not invested in research that would be necessary to find out.
So I would not counsel more innovations on the basis of intuition. I would counsel giving
countries the ability and perhaps the freedom from the strictures that the UN treaties
impose to experiment with new ways of regulating this global market in order to find more
effective ways of meeting the historical aims of drug policy.
The Chairman: Can we move on? Yes, Professor Fazey.
Professor Fazey: No, it is okay. I was just going to say that, through the HONLEAs, the
heads of law enforcement and the police exchange information through customs, through
Interpol, through Europol. The UNODC, as it is now, produces the World Drugs Report and
it shows you all the flows of the drugs. There are several problems. They are very
entrepreneurial, the drug barons. They cross borders at will. In Mexico, the latest
development is that the cartels are producing methamphetamine on an industrial basis.
Heroin has gone down in terms of threat assessment for the Americans. It is
methamphetamine. There is so much money in trafficking - we are talking about billions and
billions - that they invest in a web of corruption which is almost inconceivable and it is not
researchers who will stop that. We have an enormous amount of evidence of who is
involved, and the police know, but their entrepreneurial and organisational skills are such
that it is so difficult.
Q13 Lord Mawson: My question is whether you need an entrepreneurial response to that
issue rather than yet more research, because I am very aware that universities—if I am really
cynical—depend on all this research. Their funding and whole economic base depends on
this sort of methodology, which some of us, as you can hear, worry is achieving actually so
very little in terms of the practical consequences in this field.
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Professor Fazey: It is not the researchers in universities that are doing this. It is the police
and customs that are collecting the information. But what you say will be a good idea. Why
not send an entrepreneur in to say, “How would you disrupt this business”?
Lord Mawson: Exactly. To say, “How do you think it can be done differently?”
Professor Fazey: What can be done to disrupt the market or disrupt the transport or the
precursors or the finance?
Lord Mawson: It is what Steve Jobs did in the communications business with technology
when they all said it could not be done.
The Chairman: I am sorry for interrupting. We have now reached the end of the second
question in a number of 11 questions. I think if we are to get through, and there are many
useful and important questions further down, we really do have to be a little bit disciplined
in the discussion. So, if you do not mind, I think we will now, Lord Mawson, move on to the
next one.
Q14 Lord Mawson: You have partly answered this one. I will raise it, as there may be
other things you want to say. One of the primary goals of the European Monitoring Centre
on Drugs and Drug Addiction has been to facilitate the exchange of information on the illegal
drug situation across the Member States and to share best practice. How successful has this
initiative been and how good have the EU institutions been at evaluating drug strategy at the
European level and determining its success or otherwise?
Professor Fazey: I think it could do more if it had more finance and that is what it comes
down to. It has produced a large number of reports. It does the Annual State of the Union.
For each individual country, they put in country reports, so you can go and look and say,
“What is happening in Portugal? What is happening in Luxembourg? In Italy?” You can see
what their policies are. That, I think, is the contribution of making everything transparent to
see what is going on and to conduct or get researchers in to do particular issues. If
something comes up in the EU, they have done a number of studies, one to do with HIV, but
there are an enormous number of them, including how to conduct surveys to help Member
States and help those new states coming in to show them how to go about doing it and how
to collect the data, because some of them had no clue.
If you are coming in from a command and control, Soviet-style political culture, there are
certain things you do not do, like ask how many people are in prison. I was almost getting
myself in trouble. How many are in for drug offences? How many people are in treatment?
The fact is that you can ask these questions and they can come up with a protocol of the
sort of data that they can collect over time—not to be imposed because they have to come
round to it. I think the EMCDDA is one of the most successful European institutions in the
drugs field, if not the most successful, and I would argue very strongly for its expansion.
Professor Stevens: I think the three of us are agreed on the value of the EMCDDA and its
strength and contribution to this field. The second part of the question is about evaluations
of the EU drug strategy. As I mentioned earlier, there was a massive problem of attribution
here. Evaluations that had been done in the past have been weak because it is practically
impossible to measure what impact the EU drugs strategy might be having. So the
evaluations have fallen back on indicators of process rather than outcome. There is currently
an evaluation going on of the current EU drugs strategy, which I hope will come out in 2012,
but I do not have great optimism that it will have been able to overcome this problem of
attribution.
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The Chairman: All right, thank you very much.
Q15 Lord Avebury: Can we look at harm reduction measures that are referred to more
prominently in the Third EU Action Plan on Drugs, although they are not specifically
referred to in the overarching aims? Could you say whether this situation represents a
strong enough focus on harm reduction in the current EU drugs strategy? Secondly, could
the EU do more to promote harm reduction, for example, in the area of drugs in prisons?
Thirdly, are harm reduction initiatives comparable between eastern and western Europe?
Professor MacGregor: I think that the focus on harm reduction is well placed and has
grown and is at the right level and I think we should try to maintain that in the future. The
actual phrase “harm reduction” is a totemic phrase which produces a lot of hot air and
anxiety. I think we can discuss what harm reduction is without having to worry about the
phrase. I believe that the US drug tsar came over to the European Commission and said,
“We would like to do harm reduction but we just cannot use those words,” and the
Commissioner said, “Well, you can call it ‘cornflakes’ if you like so long as you do it.” You
know, again I think that the US position can sometimes be misrepresented as there is some
interest in developing the specifics of harm reduction.
There are problems though. On the one hand, harm reduction has focused rightly on
problem drug users and injecting drug use because of the issue of HIV/Aids. That needs to
be maintained but there is a need to expand that to pay more attention to hepatitis, which
continues to be a major problem. Many of the techniques which are effective in dealing with
HIV/Aids would be effective in dealing with hepatitis, so there is a lot to be said for scaling
up the provision that has been established.
There are vulnerable groups who are mentioned in the current strategy in the action plan
and not enough attention has been paid to them, so more needs to be done on sex workers
and people in prison, the marginalised groups like the Roma and migrant groups and a whole
range of vulnerable groups for whom specific initiatives are needed. Targeted, smart
interventions are what are needed rather than a blanket approach.
There is a danger of harm reduction being seen as just this minimal list of interventions. I
think the focus on PDUs, problem drug users, was important and has been successful but we
do need, I think, to expand beyond that particular group to consider the harms of use of
drugs by a wider population. The current issue is one where there is poly-drug use. It is not
that new but it has reoccurred, particularly the use of illicit drugs alongside the use of
prescribed medicines, alcohol and tobacco. Something to link the different networks in these
different fields and share practice between them would be very valuable because there are
techniques that work with alcohol such as brief interventions which could be used in the
field of illicit drugs. So there could be an expansion of the aims of harm reduction to
consider attempts to reduce harmful behaviour, because, as you know, we have a very big
problem with alcohol in Europe and particularly in the UK.
With the final point about harm reduction initiatives and comparisons between eastern and
western Europe, western Europe, I would say, has been successful in containing the problem,
not eradicating it. Given all the pressures that there have been to increase the supply of
drugs and increase the use of drugs, it is a relatively successful containment outcome. In
eastern Europe there is a specific problem in that many of the services which were
established in the process of accession and sometimes with support from the Global Fund
are now being closed. In Romania, for example, where there is a serious increase of HIV and
injecting drug use, services are having to close partly because of the recession and its impact
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on budgets but also because, with becoming a member of the European Union, access to a
number of sources of funding has reduced. So I think the European Union could look at
some way of continuing to support and subsidise services in eastern Europe rather than
letting them fall back because, if they do fall back, there will be a serious public health threat
to the rest of Europe.
Lord Avebury: Thank you.
The Chairman: All right, I think we might move on now to Lord Tomlinson’s question.
Q16 Lord Tomlinson: The Third Action Plan, which is very much based on the
Maastricht treaty, so the idea has been around for some time, emphasises the need for
mobilisation of European citizens in the development of drug control strategies. Is that
realistic? Is it pie in the sky? Has it any meaningful contribution whatsoever if we say to the
citizens, “You get together and devise strategies”? The whole idea of the promotion of
policies at local level sounds like an early version to me of the Big Society, but we have no
structure to put anything in place. I ask that as a question. Given the recent emphasis on the
desirability of evidence-based policy, can you see any evidence that would support that
approach in the Third Action Programme emphasis as having any meaningful utility at all?
Professor MacGregor: The mobilisation of citizens was successful in terms of developing a
European Forum, which mainly involved NGOs, so there has been an involvement of citizens
defined as NGOs and service users and so on, but the expansion to citizens is, as you say,
much more problematic.
Lord Tomlinson: Can I just very briefly react to that, Lord Chairman? I was a Member
representative of the House of Lords on the Convention on the Future of Europe and I sat
on the Working Party for Civic Society. I remember that they had to restrict the number of
people who could attend, because so many wanted to attend, so they only invited panEuropean NGOs. I asked one question, “Is there anybody here in this room who represents
an organisation that does not receive a subvention from the European Union?” There was
no one. It did not represent European citizens. It represented pan-European NGOs
defending their vested self-interest and I say that as a pro-European.
Professor MacGregor: Could I just comment on the issue of local involvement, because I
think this is a very important issue? Obviously, as we know from Britain, where we have
tried to have community involvement for many years, it is fraught with problems and can
raise a lot of conflict and contentious issues. There is a growing concern about community
conflict in a number of cities in Europe around the drugs issue, which is linked to a rightward
shift in populism and the gathering together of dislike of certain ethnic groups, ‘junkies’ and
homeless people, with some very irate citizens wanting to mobilise against them. It is a very
difficult area. I think there would be value in encouraging co-operation between mayors of
cities or city-level activities, again in terms of learning from experience. At a conference I
was at in Prague recently, someone from Berlin spoke about their policies and I felt that we
could equally have had someone from Britain talking about the kind of partnership policies
that can be effective at the local level in our cities and sharing that experience with cities like
Prague and others which are really finding it very difficult to cope with this. So I would argue
that if that were done—perhaps, through the European Commission supporting a network
of gatherings and sharing of practice between police officers and mayors and community
representatives across cities—it might help.
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Professor Stevens: If I can move to the question of evidence-based policy which you raised,
the EU has committed itself to evidence-based policy, but it cannot mandate Governments
to follow the evidence that the EMCDDA provides.
Lord Tomlinson: Absolutely.
Professor Stevens: For example, in the field of prisons, where I have done some work, it
can share information on the effectiveness of providing needle exchange in prison, but it
cannot force Governments, who are largely unwilling to provide such effective measures. It
can encourage but it could do more to encourage by providing more evidence, especially in
the areas of gaps in evidence that we have identified, such as those gaps Professor
MacGregor talked about earlier. I would like to emphasise here that we could continue what
has been an entrepreneurial, unevidence-based approach. The problem with this is—
The Chairman: Entrepreneurs who develop things do deal with evidence.
Professor Stevens: They have a bottom line and the evidence of their bottom line. We do
not have a bottom line. We cannot produce an innovation in drug policy and measure its
impact on our sales, our turnover or our profits. We have no direct way currently of
providing evidence or providing innovation without a research structure to measure its
impact to know whether that innovation is successful or not. That is the basic problem that
we have in evaluating all the efforts, whether at local, national or European level. Without
that research infrastructure, we could innovate from here until doomsday and still not know
whether that was doing anything to reduce the drug problem.
The Chairman: Professor Fazey, would you like to step in for this one?
Professor Fazey: I shudder where this might be going. I totally agree with Lord Tomlinson. I
think at the lower level all you can do is try to get not major policy, but certainly a forum for
citizens to talk to the police and maybe to talk to mayors, because at the local distribution
level this is where it affects the individual. They are seeing dealing on the street. They are
having their houses broken into. This is how it affects them and this is where they want
something done. They have no clue about the convention or ideas for demand reduction. It
is very practical on the streets. Some police forces are very good at this and have very
sensitive liaison, because there are areas of dealing where even to talk to the police is seen
as a form of treachery, so no information is forthcoming. There are others where the people
on a particular estate may say, “We are being plagued by this group of people, please help
us”, and that is where I think we can involve people, at a local level, but not much beyond
that.
Q17 Lord Richard: The next question has partially been answered but the answers were
a bit bleak. Perhaps I can put the question again. Clearly, there is a current lack of consensus
between Member States on how to treat drug use and drug users. Do you think the
institutions of the EU can ever present a united position on drug policy, at an international
level, or hope to have influence in the area of global drug policy? To what extent do you
think they can produce something that is coherent, that is unified and that is presentable and
arguable for in international policies?
Professor Stevens: I could refer to one empirical case of an attempt to do this that is in
preparation for the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in 2009. The European Union, largely
co-ordinated by the UK, attempted to negotiate the insertion of the term “harm reduction”
into the declaration from that CND meeting and, in doing so, prepared a coalition of EU
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Member States who were looking as if they would press strongly for the introduction of
harm reduction, which, after all, has been included in other UN areas, and the drug policy
area has fallen behind in terms of its respect for human rights, which “harm reduction” fulfils.
In the face of this, the US Government’s mission at Vienna sent a cable to the Home
Department asking for US embassies around the world to put pressure on the EU Member
States to try and break up this consensus and, specifically, to put pressure on the UK
representative, to isolate the UK representative. In the end the US effort was successful in
that Italy reneged on its agreement to press for harm reduction and harm reduction was not
included in the final declaration from that meeting. There have been efforts by the European
Union and the Member States of the European Union to influence international drug policy
in ways that reflect the principles and standards that have been developed in Europe, but
they face significant opposition from a particularly powerful player in the field of global drug
policy.
Professor MacGregor: I would just say there was some achievement there in that
compromise was reached. It is true that “harm reduction” produces these reactions, but the
compromise was to include the word “care”. I am obviously coming across as a step-by-step
pragmatist in arguing that compromise can work, but I think that there is more consensus at
the European level than is perhaps being implied in some of the discussions.
Lord Richard: How can you foster it?
Professor MacGregor: We can foster it through the kind of collaborative network that I
have been referring to and through continuing to emphasise the principles that are important
of transparency and human rights. I think the emphasis on human rights in the international
sphere is very important. One area is with regard to capital punishment in some countries
where I think that the European Union could perhaps be more emphatic in arguing that this
is not acceptable.
The Chairman: The European Union has a very clear position on capital punishment, of
course, generally, and puts a lot of effort into proselytising that in places like the United
Nations and that, therefore, covers, obviously, capital punishment for drug offences, by
definition.
Professor Fazey: In 1998, when we were drafting and negotiating the Declaration on the
Guiding Principles of Drug Demand Reduction, the American delegate came up to me and
said, “Look, Cindy, we’ll support this as long as you do not use the term ‘harm reduction’,
else we will stop it dead. It will not go to the General Assembly.” I said okay, I talked to
other Member States’ representatives and they said, “We’ll put in ‘reducing the negative
health and social consequences of drug abuse’.” I think the 2009 resolution would have gone
through the Commission on Narcotic Drugs had the terminology of 1998 UN Declaration
been used.
Reading the evaluation, I think it was, the EU were trying to say, “As a representative, we
are speaking for the EU.” But when they got to the Commission for Narcotic Drugs, no,
they were not. The Netherlands spoke for the Netherlands, and when they said, “We
distinguish between hard and soft drugs,” the Americans turned round, thumped the table,
and said, “There’s no such thing,” and none of the EU representatives came to help the
Netherlands. They were out on their own.
The other thing is that the Commission has 53 Member States but nearly everybody else
turns up anyway, so you have maybe 150 representatives. No one takes a vote. You also
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
have representatives of ILO, WHO, the Holy See, and the EU, and all NGOs. In my time—it
might have changed radically since—it was the individual Member States that counted, not
representatives of the OAS, the Organisation of American States. CCAD was usually there.
You had a whole number of people who were representing organisations, but in the plenary
session you did not have the Holy See saying, “We are representing all the Roman Catholics
of the world,” in the same way that the EU simply cannot go forward and say, “Yes, we
represent Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK”. Those latter
countries will have their own agendas and their own agreements, because they will meet, as
you know, as the WEOGs – West European and Other Governments - first. Or they will
meet as the EU and then as Western Europe and Others Group, the name of which they
may have changed since. You have these outbreak meetings of regional groupings meeting
with the EU—they are split between several different ones—and then you have the G7 or 8,
versus the Group of 77. The EU representatives cannot go in there, in my view, and say,
“We are speaking for the EU.” It is pie in the sky.
Lord Richard: They can speak for the Commission.
Professor Fazey: Yes, but the other Governments do not take it seriously. If the
Netherlands are saying, “We want our cafes,” if the Portuguese are saying, “We are going to
keep our non-prosecution for possession,” if the Swedes say, “We do not like harm
reduction and will only have zero tolerance,” everybody knows the different positions
because they have been there since before the EU even. Yes, I agree with Susanne, there is
some coming together with exchange of information and a shifting in attitudes, but they are
still radically different.
The Chairman: The point you are making is very clear—after all, we have discussed it in
terms of EU drug policy internally. Naturally enough, if you have a great diversity of internal
policies, as we do in the EU, then you are going to have great difficulty in presenting a single
view externally. I think that is quite well understood.
Q18 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: If you could turn to the fight against drug trafficking,
this represents an area in which individual Member States have been able to agree on
minimum penalties for traffickers and on the application of a strongly controlled and
oriented policy, so there is some consensus there. Has this resulted in success, for example,
in disrupting drug trafficking routes across Europe or reducing the amount of drugs available
within Europe and has this been affected at all by the lack of border control among the
Schengen Member States? Whether this is a factor or not, please could you comment on the
whole question?
Professor Stevens: My answer is: how would we know, given the state of knowledge of drug
trafficking routes or the effectiveness of blocking them? How would we know whether
national efforts, let alone co-ordinated international efforts, are having impacts? The earliest
British diplomats who were involved in the negotiations of the predecessors to the current
UN conventions were aware of the balloon effect that if you pushed down on supply in one
area it pops up in another. There is no reason to suspect that that effect has changed. There
is very good evidence to suggest that it is still currently in operation. While there may have
been successes, such as increasing seizures of heroin that are coming through Turkey, we
have no way of knowing whether those process indicators result in any impact on the
availability of drugs within the European Union.
The Chairman: Surely the price factor is some indication.
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Professor Stevens: The price factor is something, but we would need to have the purity
adjusted price at export, import, wholesale and retail and some estimate of proportion of
consumption in each country and of the flow through that country to other countries that is
seized before we could make reliable estimates of the impact of supply control measures.
We have very, very little of that information available to us as researchers, or within law
enforcement agencies. The law enforcement agencies are spending more money on this
evidence than research institutions are. SOCA has spent a lot of money on testing drugs and
trying to find out where they come from, but still this information is not being made available
for use to provide reliable evidence on the effectiveness of control.
Professor Fazey: Can I add one quick comment on price? The tendency certainly with
heroin is, if there is a shortage, they just adulterate it more. They cut it more, so you keep
the price. Therefore, and the person who is buying the drug will say they got a bum deal, the
dealer has done them in. In fact, they have gone from purity level at, say, 50 to 25, and that is
how the dealers and shippers manage it.
Q19 Lord Avebury: Do you also have consensus among Member States on the
implementation of some control options against newly discovered psychoactive substances,
such as mephedrone and BZP? Would you say that EU policy regarding new psychoactive
substances is effective and is the emphasis in this area appropriate?
Professor MacGregor: There is some effectiveness in the sense that the early warning
system that was developed in the late 1990s has helped in identifying new substances and
then moving to conduct risk assessments that complement those carried out at the national
level. Whether or not the response is appropriate is a very important question. Something
like 40 new substances are being produced each year. It does present a challenge to the
existing system of control where you add an increasing number of substances to the list
every year. It makes it almost impossible to operationalise. There is an issue. Another
question is whether or not cracking down too quickly on a new synthetic drug may move
users to use more harmful drugs rather than to use the less harmful new synthetic drug, as
appears to be the case with some of these. There is also the issue that it does not reduce
the use; it simply has moved users to the black market rather than through the internet.
My view is that this whole phenomenon is one that will pose a big challenge for the next
drug strategy. During the period of the next strategy, there needs to be thought given to
how to develop a different framework for controlling new synthetic drugs that would link to
the wider question of links between the use of all illicit drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and
perhaps being able to develop other legal measures and frameworks to assess the harm and
to control availability. It requires a lot of thought. It seems to me that this is something that
could be given a priority, while maintaining our existing achievements, in the next action
plan.
Q20 Lord Avebury: Is it only synthetic substances that we are looking at here? Do we
ignore the problem of khat, which has become an increasing question that has to be faced in
European countries because of the large Somali populations that we now have, particularly in
the United Kingdom?
Professor MacGregor: Yes, khat is a very controversial issue again.
Lord Avebury: Does it come within this field?
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Professor MacGregor: Khat could and other substances, organic as well as synthetic drugs,
would also be on the agenda. Khat is an issue that links very much to community
involvement and the very different views that are held at the community level on these
substances. I think the dangers of criminalising the use of khat and criminalising a high
proportion of, say, the Somali population would really be something to worry about, but the
Somali women have strong views arguing for control. It is something that requires a lot of
discussion. There is not an easy answer, as it does require, I think, some consideration of a
new framework and new conventions that would link medicines, supplements, alcohol and a
whole range of psychoactive substances that can be harmful or that are more or less
harmful. There would be an argument for developing a Harmful Substances set of controls
but it would require a lot of thought.
Professor Fazey: I agree with Susanne. What bothers me is that, as soon as a new drug
comes out, whether it is BZP or one of the piperazines, it is banned, so something else
comes out. Apparently most of them are coming from China; they have very good chemists
and all they do is design the drugs. They chop one little bit off the molecule and add
something else and you have a new drug. This can go on and on and on until the issue is
addressed.
The other big problem is that some of these drugs that we keep banning may be very useful
therapeutically and we do not know because they keep being banned. Of late, LSD is being
considered in Russia for use in therapeutic terms. Ecstasy has been said to be used in posttraumatic stress disorder but because of its illegal status people are afraid to do the
research. By jumping in too quickly where there is no evidence of serious harm, I think we
may be doing a disservice to young people because there will always be another drug on the
market for them, whereas perhaps they should be allowed to take it for a few months, or
whatever, and see what happens. The other thing I think we forget is mobile phones,
Twitter, Facebook, the internet—all these means whereby information flies round groups of
young people about the latest drug, and they know before Government knows, or even
research knows, what the new drug is. We are just pushing them from one to another
without sitting down, as I think Susanne has said, and thinking, “Is this the right approach?”
Q21 Lord Mawson: At this time of economic difficulty, is it particularly important that the
drug policy should be cost-effective and is currently the drug policy cost-effective? I just
wonder if each of you would be interested in having a response to this. Do you think we are
at a time where we do need a really serious, more radical rethink about this whole issue?
Professor Stevens: In terms of cost-effectiveness the social costs of drug use and its control
are high in most countries of the European Union, usually measured, when they are
measured, in the order of billions. The potential return to government investment is huge if
we can find, as we seem to have found, some effective policies such as drug treatment, which
returns a good return on the investment, but the potential is also there for huge waste on
policies that were expensive and not effective. For example, the label “drug expenditure”, as
reported by the EMCDDA in 2008 across the European Union, was €4.2 billion, but we are
also spending much more unlabelled public moneys on things like drug controlling law
enforcement and that is probably around at least £2 billion in this country alone and we do
not know if that is effective.
There are emerging cost-benefit analyses coming out from various research institutions
which suggest that the investment in, for example, the criminalisation of cannabis is not costeffective in that it costs hundreds of millions of pounds and it does not produce returns to
society that are commensurate with that investment. On that utilitarian level, we could
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
justify the argument for a rethink in terms of some of the money that we are investing. At
the European level, to the extent that the European Union action encourages cost-effective
responses in national Governments, as EMCDDA actions that we have talked about do, then
European level action could also be considered cost-effective. To measure the relative
contribution of the EU action, compared to national action, to the development of those
cost-effective policies would be very difficult indeed.
Q22 The Chairman: Forgive my ignorance, but I assume that the direct spending from
the EU budget in these areas is pretty small and presumably includes the costs of the agency
in Lisbon, but most of the measures that are talked about are applied nationally and,
therefore, both the costs and the benefits accrue nationally. That is correct, is it?
Professor Stevens: Correct.
Q23 Lord Avebury: Can I get this clear? Are you saying that decriminalisation of simple
possession of cannabis would be a cost-effective measure and can you put a figure on that?
Professor Stevens: The emerging analyses I have seen, which are yet to be peer-reviewed,
suggest that, yes, decriminalisation of cannabis would be cost-effective because it would
reduce the costs that are associated in criminalising cannabis while not increasing costs in
other parts of society. The figure to be put on it, I believe, will be presented at the All-Party
Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform on 17 November.
The Chairman: They are giving evidence to the Chair of the All-Party Group and various
All-Party Groups are giving evidence to us later on in our process.
Q24 Lord Tomlinson: If it is so clear cut about cannabis, why do you think that the last
Government made such a mess of its policy?
Professor Stevens: Because it was using policy to send out messages.
Lord Tomlinson: Yes, but sending a message and then reversing it.
Professor Stevens: The debate was all about the message. The message is irrelevant to
cannabis users. I have interviewed many drug users—many teenagers who use cannabis.
They do not know or care whether cannabis is in class B or class C. As previous
Committees of the House of Commons have found, there is no evidence to suggest that
using the classification to send messages about cannabis use has any impact on the scale of
the problem. This was a political problem that the last Government got itself into. It was
using drug policy as a proxy for its politics rather than as an evidence-based way of reducing
the level social harm or cost that is attributed to cannabis.
Professor Fazey: Could I add to that? What was interesting when cannabis went in this
country from B to C was that the incidence dropped; the number of cannabis users reduced.
But they put it back up, as I understand it, because there was a newspaper tirade of, not
evidence, but individuals, usually mothers, saying how their son who was an upstanding,
bright young member of the community, started taking cannabis and ended up psychotic. It
was that anecdotal; you cannot even call it evidence that the newspapers stirred up. They
said that if there was this relationship between cannabis and psychosis and/or schizophrenia,
then we must protect young people. The evidence does not suggest there is a causal
relationship. One precedes the other. It may have precipitated what was going to happen
anyway, but because of this panic and so many newspaper articles, they put it back up to B.
They said it was because it was a stronger form of cannabis that is skunk, but in fact it was
Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
not. There is no evidence from the seizures that we were having more high THC cannabis in
use.
Lord Tomlinson: Was the decline in use reversed?
Professor Stevens: No.
Lord Tomlinson: You said that when it moved from B to C there was a decline in its use.
When it went from C back to B, was that decline in use reversed or did it stay?
Professor Stevens: It had already started declining, it continued to decline and it has
declined since, supporting the argument that many people have made that cannabis use is
completely unresponsive to the classification standard, and you could say the same about
ecstasy.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, all three of you, for coming along and giving us your
views and your responses to the questions that we asked. It has been extremely helpful to
us. This is the first in a considerable series of evidence sessions we are taking and I hope that
at least our report will not fall under the category of opinions not supported by evidence,
because that is what we are in the business of trying to achieve—evidence-based reports.
Anyway, thank you very much indeed. It has been very helpful.
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
Evidence Session No. 10.
Heard in Public.
Questions 295 - 311
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
João Castel-Branco Goulão, Director of Instituto da Droga e da Toxicodependência, the
Portuguese national drugs agency, part of the Ministry of Health
Q295 The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along and for being prepared to
talk to us this afternoon. Perhaps before making a few formal remarks I should begin by
explaining a little bit about the background. We are the European Union Select Committee’s
sub-committee on home affairs. That is to say, we cover quite a bit of the home affairs area,
including drugs, but we do not cover the whole of it. It is a little bit like the Commission; we
have a split, with another sub-committee that does justice and we do home affairs, including
drugs. We scrutinise all Commission proposals and indeed other member state initiatives
that occur in the field that we cover, and then we either clear them after scrutiny and tell
the Government that that is fine and their policy is the right one or we criticise the
Commission’s proposal or our Government’s policy. Our relationship is with our own
Government and only indirectly with the European institutions.
We also do thematic reports, of which this is one. In the first half of the year, we did a
report on the internal security strategy—cybersecurity, organised crime and so on. Now we
are doing this one on the future drugs strategy. Our objective is not so much to look at the
past or the present but to look and try to make a contribution to shaping the future drugs
strategy. We are assuming that the Council will wish to have a strategy to succeed the
present one from 2005-12. So that is what we are taking evidence about, and your
contribution will be very welcome on that.
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
We are getting pretty close to the end of our evidence taking. We saw the vice-president of
the Commission yesterday and we also saw Mr Sócrates, as well as António Costa of the
UN organisation, who has retired but only very recently and who gave us some good
evidence. We have seen academics and people from civil society, our own Government and
senior officials. Next week we will see the Minister at the Home Office who deals with this
policy. So we are getting close to the end and we will produce our report in February or
March—that sort of period. I hope that it will be found useful by all concerned. But
obviously your part in this is an important one, because we are very well aware of the
initiatives taken on drugs policy by Portugal some years ago and are anxious to understand
the background to that and the experience that you have had from those decisions, whether
they are, in your view, here to stay or whether they could be changed or what.
This is a formal meeting of the home affairs sub-committee of the House of Lords European
Union Committee and a verbatim transcript will be taken of your evidence. This will be put
on the parliamentary website. A few days after this evidence session you will be sent a copy
of the transcript to check it for accuracy. We would be grateful if you could advise us of any
corrections as quickly as possible. If after this session you wish to clarify or amplify any
points made during your evidence or have any additional points to make, you are welcome
to submit supplementary evidence to us. I do not know whether you would like to make
introductory remarks; there is absolutely no need to if you do not wish to, but if you do
wish to that would be very welcome indeed. We have a lot of questions that we would like
to run through with you, which would be very valuable to us, but it is your choice as to
whether you would like to make any introductory remarks or whether we should go
straight into questions.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Thank you, sir. Good afternoon to all of you. Thank you for
your interest and the opportunity to discuss Portuguese strategy and our views on a
broader approach to drug policies in Europe and in the world. I apologise that my English is
not as good as I would like.
The Chairman: It is a lot better than my Portuguese, anyway.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes, I think it must be so. Let me introduce myself. I am a GP,
and I have been working in this field since 1986. I started with half of my time being
addressed to the addiction field and step by step I came to be full time on this issue. My
colleague, Manuel Cardoso, is also a medical doctor of public health; he is my colleague on
the board of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, IDT, which is the national institute
that deals with the drug problems. It is an institute under the Ministry of Health that deals
with all the aspects of the drugs policy, not only in defining policies but in co-ordinating a
national group with 11 ministries represented. We also have units on the ground that deal
with direct attention to drug addicts, not only in terms of treatment but also in terms of
prevention and so on. We deal with all the aspects of the problem in Portugal.
I read the questions you want to ask me but, if you will allow me, I would like to add
something. I know that you talked with Mr Sócrates, who was a very important person in
defining our present policies and we worked directly with him some 15 years ago. I shall give
some historical background. As you know, we had our democratic revolution—the
carnation revolution—in 1974; before that, we had almost no problems with drugs in
Portugal. In fact, we had a very closed society, and some of the movements that happened in
other parts of the world did not touch us, because we had a very closed society, it was very
difficult to get in touch with young people from other countries. We were not a very sexy
destination for tourism. We did not have as many visitors as other countries in Europe, so
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
some movements just did not touch us, such as the hippy movement or the students’
movement in France in the late 1960s. Only some more informed people had some contact
with those realities. Suddenly in 1974, at the end of our colonial war, everything changed.
Suddenly the soldiers in our colonial war came back from Angola and Mozambique with
some habits of using at least marijuana or cannabis. Among the colonists it was very usual to
use that kind of substance. They brought tonnes of it when they came back to Portugal. That
fact, along with identifying its use with the idea of freedom, led us to an explosion of
experimentation, mainly in terms of cannabis. A little later, criminal organisations came into
our territory to explore a new and emerging market. That is where we were completely
naïve about drugs. It was very easy to shift from one to another, because we did not know
the differences. Whereas in other societies people had the opportunity to learn how to deal
with drugs, here everything was new. I was 20 at the time, so I know what I am talking
about. It was very easy to experiment with cannabis, for instance, and then shift to another
drug. “Here’s another one, a new one—heroin. Do you want to try it?” “Okay”. I did not
know the difference. So this led us to an explosion of experimentation and drug addiction.
We in Portugal had always had one of the lowest prevalence of drug use of all illicit drugs. At
one time, we had one of the narrowest gaps between total prevalence of drug use and
problematic drug use. Almost everybody who experimented became an instance of
problematic drug use. Then this was made much more complicated with the emergence of
AIDS at the beginning of the 1980s. We had a real epidemic among intravenous heroin users.
It was really a catastrophe in our society. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was estimated we
had 1 per cent of our population with problematic drug use, heroin use mainly. We are
around 10 million and around that time we had 100,000 people on heroin—that is a not very
sharp estimation. This was really dramatic.
The state took some time to start offering responses to the problem, but the first responses
in terms of care were in the Ministry of Justice. In 1986, the first response from the Ministry
of Health was created here in Lisbon, at a big centre with a lot of facilities to offer. Then we
started to open more and more centres all over the country to respond to this problem, but
we did not see a response. That is why, in 1997-98, when Mr Sócrates was responsible for
youth policies—as you know, that is a close problem for the EU—he invited us and some
other colleagues and we had some discussions on how to address the still growing problem.
We are offering more responses and spending more money and things seem to be getting
worse and worse. What do you do? What do you propose? We did not reach a consensus
about that. Then he decided to invite a group of experts in several areas, from judges to
psychiatrists, nine people, and I was included in that group. It was a very interesting
experience, and he asked us to do a report on the Portuguese situation in terms of drugs
and strategic proposals—in terms of supply reduction and demand reduction, which was the
main aim of the strategy. There were proposals in terms of prevention and addressing
treatment with the option of substituting treatment when needed, as well as reinsertion and
harm reduction. We proposed all that, assuming that a drug addict is mainly someone who
needs health and social support rather than criminal conviction, assuming that a drug addict
is a sick person.
So in line with this, we proposed the decriminalisation of all drug use, of all drugs,
maintaining a clear sign of social disapproval by maintaining penalisation. We proposed
decriminalisation but in a framework of penalisation in terms of an administrative offence.
The strategy was adopted by the Government, but the question of decriminalisation had to
be discussed in Parliament. I must say, at that time, the general population accepted very well
the idea of decriminalisation. It was completely transversal to our society, the existence of
these drug addicts. It was almost impossible to find a single family that had no problems
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
inside or in close proximity. People knew that João or Manuel, their son or their nephew or
their neighbour, was not a criminal but was someone who needed help. So the idea of
decriminalisation was very well received by the general population. It was different in terms
of the political discussion in the Parliament, where the ideological points of view were quite
extreme. We had a big discussion with Parliament on that matter, but it was voted and it
was accepted by the left-wing parties, against the votes of the right-wing parties of the
time—the same parties that form the present coalition. I do not want to bother you, but I
think that it is important to understand—
The Chairman: No, it is very valuable.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I think it is important to understand a little bit of the
background of this decision because we felt we had to change something in this paradigm.
I must say that it was very important having the support of Mr Sócrates on these ideas. The
only framework he gave us was, “Whatever proposal you offer, you must stick to the United
Nations conventions. We do not want to break them; we do not want to get out of that
framework”. So we asked for juridical advice from the biggest specialists in Portugal, to tell
us exactly whether maintaining the penalisation as an administrative offence would still
honour the conventions. They told us, yes, we can do it and still keep in line with the United
Nations conventions. That was the support for this decision. I must say that among the
members of the commission that formed the strategy was a judge from the supreme court
who had been a member of UNODC before. We knew that the spirit of the conventions
were involved, but I must say that he voted against this decision. It was the only point of the
strategy that he felt he had a reserve about.
Since then, I think you know a little bit about what has been decided. The use of drugs and
their possession for use is not a crime. It is out of the penal system, but we created some
administrative bodies that can apply penalties. From what I know of other countries that
have some drug courts—some light courts to evaluate those crimes—what I think is the big
difference between this body, the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction, and
those drug courts is that our bodies are under the Ministry of Health and the main goal is to
evaluate people’s needs. They act a little bit like a referee who shows the yellow card and
profits from the contact with a drug user to evaluate what kind of needs he or she has. If we
have a drug addict in front of us, we try to evaluate whether he accepts the need for or
seeks treatment. He has a facilitated life if he wants to start the treatment—or restart it, as
several times we find that people have relapsed, having been under treatment, and come
back to drug use. We try to profit from this contact to invite people to undergo treatment
or, if we are dealing only with some recreational or occasional user, we try to evaluate
whether, along with drug use, there are any other kinds of problems—social, familial,
personal or psychological—that can lead to the possibility of becoming an addict or
problematic drug user. As and when possible, we try to address these people to adequate
responses in the community, not in the sense of treating their drug addiction but in a
community response to the kind of problems that he or she may have.
I do not know whether this idea is clear but with this, it is one of the gates to enter the
system of treatment, with the potential reduction of any kinds of problem—physical, mental
or whatever problems this population of drug users may have. I must say that, reading the
questions, you address that. But you stress in several questions the idea that we are
approaching the drugs problem in view of harm reduction only; that is not true. That is one
part of our policy. I must say that our policies are based mainly on treatment. I personally
believe that treatment is the main tool to prevent the spread of drug use, because drug use
behaves very much as an infectious disease. We have to treat the victim to stop the infection
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
spreading, so it is very important to offer—for free, for as many as it is available as
possible—the treatment, for everybody wants to be treated. We proactively search for
people to join our treatment facilities, so our harm reduction strategies are mainly based on
that idea. If they do not mobilise to come to us, we go there and try to bring them to the
treatment facilities.
Along with this, we invest a lot in prevention at the school level and among marginalised
populations, offering alternatives to drug use. We also have a strong investment in terms of
reinsertion: social reinsertion, employment and so on. At this moment, we have some
problems with that kind of policy. In a moment of recession when we have severe
unemployment in the general population, it is difficult to fight for positive discrimination in
favour of the employment of the drug addict population because people would say, “Well, I
have to become an addict to get a job”. It is difficult in these times, but over several years
we have had quite a successful policy in this field. I think also that decriminalisation led to the
fall of the stigma and increased the possibility for drug addicts under treatment to get a job.
This is a long speech, and I apologise for that.
Q296 The Chairman: No, it is very helpful. Thank you very much indeed. I think we
have all learnt a great deal from that and it sets a framework for our questions, which we
would like to put to you. I think we understand better now, after having talked to the
former Prime Minister and with what you have said, where the balance is in your policy. I
want to start with a general question, if I could. The current EU drugs strategy—the one
from 2005-12, whose successor we are talking about—accepts that different member states
are free to apply different drugs policies, so in a way this is what in the EU is called
subsidiarity. Do you think that should continue on that basis, or should there be a greater
effort at harmonising national drugs policies at the EU level?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I think the EU strategy must give only the framework and
general principles and member states must be able to define their own strategies. We can
discuss our indicators. I think the indicators of the evolution of the phenomenon in Portugal
are in line with most European countries. We cannot say that we are having a good
evolution in our indicators because we have decriminalised; what we can say for sure is that
decriminalising did not affect the evolution of the indicators in a bad sense, and we feel much
more comfortable on this framework.
That takes us back to the fascist period. When I started treating drug addicts, it was very
common to have someone in front me and when I asked him his name he would say only, “I
am Manuel”, or João or Joaquim, and nothing else because they were afraid of being referred
to the police. In some countries in eastern Europe, that happens now. They still remember
the past. Now, if I ask my patient, “What’s your name?”, he will give me his ID and complete
identification with no problems. Patients know that they will not be referred to the police.
On the other hand, for professionals, it was quite disturbing to have a criminal in front of us
and not refer him to the police—as a civil servant, I should denounce criminals to the
police—but give him a syringe in the name of the same state to keep on with the same
crime. Both professionals and patients are really much more comfortable talking about a
disease that has to be addressed in terms of health and other responses and not to have the
spectres of prison, police and criminal prosecution. We are talking about drug users, not
about drug dealers. I believe that each country must be able to define its own policies, within
general lines that are accorded at European level.
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
Q297 Lord Tope: Before I ask my question, is there any likelihood that the Portuguese
policy may be going to change and that decriminalisation may be changed? Is there any
suggestion of that?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I do not believe so. It is very well accepted by the population.
There is no clear debate on this now. We have had 10 years of decriminalisation. Clearly,
the coalition is now in power. Decriminalisation entered into force in 2001. In 2002, this
coalition came into power and was still there in 2005, but it did nothing to change the law.
That was the beginning. Now the evolution is positive. I think there are no reasons to go
back.
Lord Tope: And there is no public debate?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: No.
Q298 Lord Tope: The major objectives of the current 2005-12 EU drugs strategy are
significantly to reduce the demand for and supply of drugs, to promote international cooperation and to promote research, information and evaluation. To what extent do you
think they have been met?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I think we and all the European countries have made a lot of
improvements in those areas. In terms of supply reduction, I think there is an increase in the
efficiency of the police and the customs forces by co-ordination among them. In Lisbon, we
have an important agency in dealing with aspects of supply reduction. In terms of
international co-operation, there are difficult problems that are being addressed, such as the
legal highs that we are now facing all over Europe. It is a difficult problem to deal with, and
we are trying to find responses.
We meet and discuss here at the centre. In terms of research, information and evaluation,
this centre is very important for the Portuguese. Having them here is an added value that is
very important for us. We have very great relations. We profit as much as we can from
having this centre here. Yesterday, we had a session in our institute. One professional from
this centre went out to talk to our professionals about those legal highs and about what is
being done at European level, the items under discussion and the control measures. It is very
important. We profit.
For instance, we are launching the process of external evaluation of our strategy. We also
profit from one of the services that the centre can offer us in building the call for tenders for
that external evaluation. What items should we evaluate that helped us in doing this? It is
very important. We are making a lot of progress. I think we should move into a broader
mandate for the centre. We think that alcohol issues can also be addressed by the centre.
When we make surveys on drug use, we almost always include questions on alcohol use.
We can profit from that level of information in treatment, so we intend to profit from all
that information and to use more outputs from the survey. In general, I would say that
during this last strategy, which we are leading, we made a lot of progress on these matters.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. I think that Lord Avebury’s question has been
answered. It was the one that you answered about the role that the agency plays in adding
value to your decision making at a national level. Is there anything else on that?
Q299 Lord Avebury: I have a supplementary on it. Earlier on, you said that any country
should be free to make its own policy. But at the same time, you are arguing that Portuguese
policy, by concentrating on health as the primary issue—even to the extent of searching
people out and bringing them into the health system, so that drug problems can be
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
treated—has been so successful that no one in Portugal could think of altering it. Why do
you not think that that policy could or should apply in the rest of Europe?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: That is a very interesting question but I think that the
historical background of our country gives us special conditions for this evolution and for
this decision. Each country must look for its own decision—its own way to address this. It is
a possibility to take this step towards decriminalisation and to look at this mainly as a health
problem. But the question of trafficking and of the criminal organisations that distribute
drugs—hundreds of criminal organisations—
Q300 Lord Avebury: That is a separate matter. I am talking about users. If we are looking
at evidence-based strategies, presumably you would say that the outcomes of the policy you
decided to adopt all those years ago have been superior to anything that could have been
obtained by alternative means. Logically, that ought to apply elsewhere. There is something
else that I would like to know. When you decided on this policy, it must have been very
expensive. What is the present budget of Portugal not only for the health systems that are
treating all these drug addicts but also for other programmes that, as you said, are reaching
out to those in society who have not yet been approached and have not come forward to
say that they need treatment? Is this not a colossally expensive policy?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: It is not very expensive, I must tell you. It is quite difficult for
us to get clear numbers for what we spend on the judicial system—it is difficult to find the
numbers. What we spend on health I can tell you because it is the whole budget of our
institute. We are now spending on the whole system—treatment, prevention, harm
reduction, research, international relations and national co-ordination—€75 million a year,
which is 0.1 per cent of the budget of the Ministry of Health.
Q301 Lord Avebury: What does that amount to per head of the drug-using population?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: If we are talking about 50,000 problematic and potential users
and addressing the general population in terms of prevention and all the activities addressed
to recreational users, I would say it is very cheap indeed. For all the activities in all those
areas, we can divide the figure.
Lord Avebury: €15,000 per user.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: If we are talking only about treatment. But we are talking
about all the areas of intervention.
Q302 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: My question was very thoroughly answered in your
introduction. It was about how you came to introduce the policy of decriminalising personal
drug use. I will ask a question regarding a little-discussed category of person. They fall
between people who are apprehended for possessing drugs for personal use—who go
through the administration process of dissuasion et cetera and are not criminalised—and the
criminals, who are the traffickers, the dealers and others who have committed a crime and
been sentenced. In between there must be a category of person who is a drug user but has
also broken the law. They will have to go through the justice system and perhaps go to
prison or pay a big fine; something will happen to them, depending on their crime. How are
they then treated for the use of drugs?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: We established a border for rough evaluation: this is a drug
user, this is a trafficker. This is the amount of drugs that someone has on them when they
are intercepted by the police. Above that amount of drugs, we assume we are dealing with a
trafficker. It goes through the judicial pipeline. Under this amount, we assume that we are
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
dealing with a drug user and it goes to the committee. In either instance, evidence can be
produced to the dissuasion committee that, for example, this guy is not a drug user but a
smuggler. Perhaps police saw him flagrantly dealing. Then the case can be sent to court. It is
also possible when a guy has more than the amount he should have for the case not to go to
court that there is evidence that his possession is for personal use. He went to Morocco and
bought some hashish for himself, for instance. If there is no evidence and no history that
points to this person smuggling and dealing drugs, he can be sent to the committee. There is
a possibility in the two instances to cross the mandate according to the evidence.
Q303 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: I understand that, but there must still be another
category of person who has broken the law, but not because they are dealing in or trafficking
drugs. They have to go to court and be sentenced. Perhaps they got caught up in a pub
brawl and hurt somebody badly. They take drugs but have never dealt in them. They need
treatment but they are also in jail. What happens to them?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: People who commit acquisitive crimes can go to court and
jail: for example, people who rob. In jail they can benefit from treatment. They can be
treated in prison or they can go for treatment by order of the court. They can have
treatment in the community as an alternative to prison—but by order of the court.
Q304 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Is it mandated that if you are a drug user and you
have committed a crime that has nothing to do with trafficking, you will receive treatment?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: It is laid down in law that you should receive treatment?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: It is not mandatory, but if someone wants treatment we will
assist them.
Q305 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: The policy was adopted in 2001 and it is important
to know what effect it has had. Have its aims and objectives been met and have attempts
being made to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of what is no longer a new strategy but one
that has been in existence for 10 years?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I will invite my colleague to help. We try to assess exactly the
costs and benefits. It is difficult to identify exactly the costs of other ministries and what
changes have happened. We intended to make a study this year but did not. With the
budgetary cuts there is no possibility for us to develop this.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: But presumably there were initial aims and objectives set
out that were to be achieved by the new strategy. Would you say that they have largely
been met?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes. One of the main goals was to reach all the drug users
who needed and wanted treatment. Now we have a lot of treatment facilities that are easily
accessible without waiting lists, and for free. Everybody who wants to be treated can be. We
now have a record number of people under treatment. We increased the relationship
between the proactive search for people and harm reduction, outreach work and so on,
because people believe they can approach us without fear. We have a decrease in the
average prevalence of drug use of all different drugs among young people between 15 and 19
years-old, and a decrease in the prevalence of experimentation among all drug users. We
had a dramatic decrease in AIDS among injecting drug users. Our clients are no longer the
main contingent of infection. Now heterosexual infection rates are much higher than those
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
of drug users. We have an enormous decrease in injecting use in the 30 days before the first
consultation. In 2000, we had 36% by intravenous use. In 2010 it was 7%.
On the other hand, a curious feature of this is the result of supply reduction. In the first few
years after decriminalisation, our police forces were quite lost. They had to change the way
that they worked. They had an important source of information: the street drug users, the
“small fishes”. Through the process of preparing the files for the court, they had important
information that allowed them to go one step higher in the chain of drug traffic. Losing that
source of information, they had to learn how to work differently. Instead of going bottomup, they had to work top-down. They improved their efficiency and seized big amounts of
substances. Instead of getting one gram here and two grams there, they got tonnes. They
improved their capacity to work with police forces in other countries. They got intelligence
about where it really hurts, with sharks instead of small fishes.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So that is good evidence.
Q306 The Chairman: We have seen written evidence that suggested that some of the
drug use in Portugal really has increased under the new policy. We were told that EMCDDA
data for 2001 to 2007 showed that the proportion of Portuguese people who used heroin
during the previous 30 days had doubled, and the proportion of people who used cocaine
had tripled. Those are not very big figures but, nevertheless, they are big increases. We have
talked about this to Mr Sócrates, and he simply said that he did not recognise those figures
at all. Can you comment on them?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: We have different data. The general life-long prevalence in
2001 was 1.1%; in 2007 it was 1.1%. In the past 12 months, in 2011, in was 0.3%. In 2007 it
was 0.4%. The past-30-days figures are that in 2001 it was 0.2% and in 2007 it was 0.3%—a
slight increase. The impact on drug use in the general population of Lisbon was a dramatic
decrease in visibility and in the impact on family life and on society life, and a decrease in
criminality, from 2001 to 2010. It was an open scene 15 years ago. Lisbon had dramatic
visibility in the public impact of the phenomenon. Now, assuming that these figures are
meaningful—I do not know whether they are really very representative when one—
The Chairman: Could you let us have those figures so that we make sure that we describe
them in a proper way, in the way that you wish to describe them?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes, of course; I have the figures for cocaine.
The Chairman: That would be very helpful. Are those figures that the ECMDDA has seen?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Those are the figures that we sent, yes.
The Chairman: They are much more recent than these other ones, so that would be
really helpful.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: They came up in 2010, did they?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: No, this is from 2001 to 2007.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: There is none more recent?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: The figures that we have, we can provide you with. I do not
have them with me now.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: If you have more up-to-date figures, that would be helpful.
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
João Castel-Branco Goulão: The updated figures are from the treatment facilities. We
made general surveys in 2001 and 2007. We are now launching a new survey. In six months
we will have the results.
The Chairman: In any case, it would be helpful to have those figures. That would be really
kind.
Q307 Lord Tope: Quite a lot of people from many countries have come to Portugal to
learn from your experience. Do you think there is any likelihood that a Portuguese-style
decriminalisation policy will be introduced elsewhere in the European Union?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: I think our experience is already inspiring some decisions in
other countries, not simply for all drugs, as we did, but some steps have been taken that I
think our experience inspired. Some countries send us several delegations. Norway, for
instance, is preparing a new strategy; some politicians, including the Health Minister and
Justice Minister, came to visit us to see what is happening. I do not know exactly what their
decision will be, but they were very enthusiastic. In Poland, they took some steps to
decriminalise cannabis use. The Czech Republic and Argentina are watching what we have
done and will take their own decision. As I said, each country has to find its own way. Of
course, our experience can inform those decisions.
Q308 The Chairman: You have been a strong advocate yourself of the participation of
local citizens, even illegal drug service providers and users, in implementing drug policy.
What evidence exists to suggest that this is bearing fruit and being useful? Do you think that
more should be done by the EU itself to encourage developments in this area and to
encourage civil society organisations and so on to work together across national boundaries?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: It is important in the design of the responses. To understand
this, as our director Wolfgang Götz used to say, we are shooting a moving target. It is
important to have clear information from the ground. What are the tendencies, what are the
needs, what are the fears and what are the dangers? Scientific evidence and breakthroughs
take a long time to come to us, and we sometimes lose years in addressing slight changes in
our policy if we are not attentive to the needs of the common people, the users and the
beneficiaries of the policies. National and European strategies would benefit from having
such a forum where those organisations can be heard and express themselves.
Q309 Lord Avebury: What do you think the new Commission communication Towards a
Stronger European Response to Drugs means for future drug policy in Europe as a whole? In
particular, I draw your attention to the fact that one of the legislative proposals coming out
of the Commission communication seems to be entirely concentrated on legislation. One of
the things it is asking for is an improvement in the definition of offences and sanctions,
possibly a more detailed breakdown of sanctions. Do you think that that means that the
European Commission will attempt to define as offences things that you no longer consider
to be of a criminal nature in Portugal? Will you ensure that Portugal has a voice when it
comes to making these decisions?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Well, this question is quite difficult. We are very much
concerned with some new phenomena in Europe and all over the world. One is the question
of legalities, and also the views of disputes and legacies. We will keep in mind with our
partners in Europe how to address these new trends more efficiently, certainly maintaining
our view predominantly on health. What is the best way to help our citizens to play a part in
these kinds of problems—the kind of complications that the users of substances can come
João Castel-Branco Goulão – Oral evidence (QQ 295-311)
across? Personally, I do not think that addressing these things as criminal behaviour is the
best way to do it.
Q310 The Chairman: To make sure I have understood this, I assume you are saying that
the Portuguese approach, which is not to criminalise use, ought to continue to apply even if
the European Union were to declare certain substances that are currently legal to be illegal.
You would think that the policy should merely be applied to people who deal or traffic in
those substances, but not to people who use them. Is that the right understanding?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes.
The Chairman: So Portugal would not be saying, “No, you mustn’t make it illegal to traffic
in new substances that are invented by clever chemists in their laboratories and so on”. You
might well say, “That is right. It should be illegal, but the penalties should not be applied to
the people who use them, only to people who deal and traffic in them”. Have I got that
right?
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes. Thank you for helping me.
The Chairman: I thought that was the division. So there is not necessarily a contradiction
in the European Union criminalising a certain substance—the trafficking and dealing in it, but
you would be averse to them criminalising the use of it.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes.
Q311 Lord Avebury: But the definition of offences could include either trafficking and
offences connected with dealing, or offences connecting with using. I do not know what the
Commission has in mind, but it seems to me that Portugal will note the fact that proposals
are being brought forward to improve these definitions. You have to ensure that nothing in
the proposed new definitions would inhibit you from continuing to pursue the polices that
you already have.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Yes. That is the idea. Of course, we go along with the
decisions and proposals of the European Union. We discuss with our partners and all
member states that thinking of criminalising the use of something is out of the question. That
is our current understanding.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for being so patient, and for having explained
to us a lot of things, such as the history, the background and the way in which you approach
these things. It has been of great value to us. We have benefitted enormously from it, and I
hope that you will find that we have properly understood it when we come to write our
report. Thank you very much indeed.
João Castel-Branco Goulão: Thank you, my Lords.
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence
1. HIV, Harm Reduction and the European Union
• 750,000 and one million people in the EU currently inject drugs 52
• Western Europe rates of reported newly diagnosed cases of HIV in injecting drug
users on the decline, HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia – 1 in 4 injectors is
believed to be living with HIV accounting for 57% of all infections. 53
• Hepatitis C prevalence 54 reaching 60-90% among people who inject drugs who have
been tested for Hep C
• Prisons – prevalence of injecting drug use in prisons ranges from 6% to 38%, 55 while
evidence based HIV prevention remains very limited in prison settings
2. Despite harm reduction being firmly established in the current EU Strategy on Drugs 2005
– 2012 56 57the level of services varies considerably across the EU. This is reflected in rising
rates of HIV amongst people who use drugs across the Eastern region of the EU. 58
3. The glaring disparities between HIV prevalence in Western and Eastern Europe in
particular, have been attributed to the relative action and inaction of governments on harm
reduction. For example, early adoption of harm reduction measures in the Netherlands,
Switzerland and the UK have led to relatively low national HIV prevalence among people
who inject drugs. 59
Evidence for Harm Reduction
4. Evidence-based prison health programmes, including harm reduction interventions such as
needle-syringe exchanges programmes (NSPs) and opioid substitution therapy (OST)
significantly reduce drug-related harms, including transmission of HIV, hepatitis C and other
blood-borne viruses among vulnerable populations. 60
5. Needle and Syringe exchange Programmes (NSPs) provide people who inject drugs with
access to sterile injecting equipment (needles and syringes, swabs, vials of sterile water) and
offer access to health education, referrals, counselling and other services.
6. Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST) in its different forms has become a widely accepted
drug treatment and harm reduction measure for people who use opioids. OST substitutes
illegal injected drugs with legal oral substances with similar actions, thus reducing the harms
related with injecting. 61
EMCDDA (2010) Drugnet Europe 71, European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2010. Lisbon
UNAIDS, WHO, Fact sheet: Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 2009, Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS
54 EMCDDA (2010) Trends in injecting drugs in Europe, European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction, 2010.
Lisbon. Table INF-2 . Prevalence of HCV antibody amongst injecting drug users in the EU, 2008 or most recent year
55 EMCDDA (2010) Trends in injecting drug use in Europe
56 Council of the EU, Council recommendation on 18 June 2003 on the prevention of health related harm associated with
drug dependence (2003/488/EC)
57 The EU Drugs Strategy 2005 -2012
58 EMCDDA (2010) Annual report on the State of the Drugs Problem in Europe 2010, EMCDDA: Lisbon 2010
59 UNAIDS (2009) AIDS Epidemic Update.
60 WHO, UNODC, UNAIDS (2007) Interventions to Address HIV in Prisons: Comprehensive Review.
Evidence for Action Technical Paper. Geneva: WHO
61 WHO, UNOCD, UNAIDS (2007) Interventions to address HIV in prisons: drug dependence treatments. Evdence for
Action Technical Paper. Geneva WHO
52
53
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence
Value for money
Cost benefit analyses of harm reduction
7. An important argument for the implementation and scale up of harm reduction services
across Europe is the cost effectiveness of harm reduction.
8. NSPs directly averted 32,050 new HIV infections and 96,667 new HCV infections in
Australia between 2000 and 2009. For every dollar invested in needle and syringe exchange,
more than 4 were returned in health care savings. 62
9. The benefit return for methadone maintenance treatment is estimated to be around four
times the treatment cost. According to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Research
has demonstrated that methadone maintenance treatment is beneficial to society, cost
effective and pays for itself in basic economic terms’ 63
Evidence for the benefits of implementing harm reduction in prisons
10. Evidence-based prison health programmes, including harm reduction interventions such
as needle-syringe exchanges programmes (NSPs) and opioid substitution therapy (OST)
significantly reduce drug-related harms among vulnerable populations. Since the early 1990s
a number of countries have introduced these interventions to reduce HIV and HCV in
prisons. 64
11. Following a comprehensive international review the WHO, UNODC and UNAIDS
recommended that NSPs should be urgently introduced and scaled up in countries
threatened by HIV epidemics among people who inject drugs. 65 The review also
recommended that ‘prison authorities in countries in which OST is available in the
community should introduce OST programmes urgently and expand implementation to scale
up as soon as possible.’
12. NSP’s currently operate in 5 countries across Europe (Portugal, Spain, Germany,
Luxembourg and Romania). 66 Systematic evaluations of the effectiveness of NSPs for
addressing HIV-related risk behaviours in from ten prison programmes demonstrate that
NSPs are feasible in men’s and women’s prisons and prisons of all security levels and sizes. 67
Existing research shows that provision of sterile needles and syringes is readily accepted by
people who inject drugs across a variety of prison settings, significantly reduces syringe
sharing and resulting infection with HIV and other BBVs and facilitates referral to drug
62 Australian Government, Department for Health and Ageing (2009) Return on Investment 2: Evaluating the CostEffectiveness of Needle and Syringe Exchange Programs in Australia. Canberra, ACT: Department of Health and Ageing
63 National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA International Program, Methadone Research Web Guide (last accessed March
2010)
64 Jurgens, Lines and Cook (2010) Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Global State of Harm Reduction. International Harm
Reduction Association
65 WHO, UNODC, UNAIDS (2007) Interventions to address HIV in Prisons: Needle and Syringe programmes and
Decontamination Strategies. Evidence for Action Technical Paper. Geneva: WHO.
66 European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (2010) Statistical Bulletin: table HSR-7. Availability and
provision of selected health responses to prisoners in 26 EU countries, Norway and Turkey (expert ratings)
67 Jurgens, Lines and Cook (2010) Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Global State of Harm Reduction. International Harm
Reduction Association
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence
dependence treatment programmes. 68 69 70 There is no evidence to suggest that prison-based
NSPs have negative unintended consequences, including increasing levels of drug use or
injecting, or use of syringes as weapons. 71
13. OST provision is much more extensive with 18 countries implementing this intervention;
however service coverage varies extensively within countries.. 72 As in the community, OST
programs in prisons are effective in reducing the frequency of drug use and associated risk of
infection through the sharing of injecting equipment, if a sufficient dosage is provided. 73 The
majority of countries provide OST in the form of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT). A
recent comprehensive review has demonstrated that OST, and in particular MMT, is feasible
across prisons settings. 74
Recommendations for EU Drugs Strategy 2013-2020
14. Ensure policy principles outlined in European Parliament recommendation to EU council
on the European strategy for fighting drugs (2005 – 2012) such as evidence based policy
approaches are reaffirmed and put into action. 75
15. EU level:
• The EU (led by European Commission) should use WHO/UNODC/UNAIDS 76
endorsed indicators for the evaluation of EU member states compliance with the EU
drugs strategy (2005-2012)
• Targets should be set for new EU drugs strategy to measure the implementation of
the strategy by member states
• The current strategy is undergoing evaluation by the EMCDDA – recommendations
from the evaluation should be taken into consideration by the commission when
drafting the new strategy
• Harm Reduction should be explicitly named in the new EU Drugs strategy as an
effective intervention to prevent HIV. Interventions such as needle and syringe
exchange programmes (NSP) and opioid substitution therapy (OST) should be
specified.
• EC should take into account overall coherence in upcoming EU drugs strategy with
the EU Communication on Combating HIV/AIDS in the EU and Neighbouring
Countries (2009 – 2013) 77
68 Jurgens et al (2009)Interventions to reduce HIV transmission related to injecting drug use in prison. Lancet Infectious
Diseases 9: 57-66.
69 Menoyo C et al (2000) Needle exchange in prisons in Spain. Canadian HIV/AIDS Policy and Law Review 5(4):20-21.
70 Stover H (2000) Evaluation of needle exchange pilot project shows positive results. Canadian HIV/AIDS Policy and Law
Newsletter 5(2/3):60-64.
71 WHO (2005) Effectiveness of Sterile Needle and Syringe Programming in Reducing HIV/AIDS among Injecting Drug
Users. Evidence for Action Technical Paper. Geneva: WHO.
72 Jurgens, Lines and Cook (2010) Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Global State of Harm Reduction. International Harm
Reduction Association
73 Dolan K et al (2005) Four-year follow-up of imprisoned male heroin users and methadone treatment: mortality, reincarceration and hepatitis C infection. Addiction 100(6): 820-28.
74 WHO, UNODC, UNAIDS (2007) Interventions to address HIV in Prisons: Needle and Syringe programmes and
Decontamination Strategies. Evidence for Action Technical Paper. Geneva: WHO.
75 European Parliament (INI/2004/2221) European Parliament recommendation to the Council and the European Council on
the EU drugs strategy (2005 – 2012) (EP non-legislative resolution)
76 European Parliament (INI/2004/2221) European Parliament recommendation to the Council and the European Council on
the EU drugs strategy (2005 – 2012) (EP non-legislative resolution)
77 Commission of The European Communities (2009) Combating HIV/AIDS in the European Union and neighbouring
countries, 2009 – 2013, COM(2009)569 final
Harm Reduction International – Written Evidence
•
•
The current strategy references human rights but does not state which rights and for
whom. The new strategy should be more specific and call on member states to put
human rights impact assessments in place.
Harm reduction interventions should be scaled up and implemented in all prisons
across the EU
26 August 2011
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Evidence Session No. 11.
Heard in Public.
Questions 312 - 361
WEDNESDAY 7 DECEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Mawson
Lord Richard
Lord Tomlinson
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Lord Henley, Minister of State for Crime Prevention and Anti-Social Behaviour Reduction,
Home Office, and Mr Gus Jaspert, Head of the Drugs and Alcohol Unit, Home Office
Q312 The Chairman: Good morning, and my apologies for keeping you waiting for a
few minutes, Minister. Welcome to you and to Mr Jaspert. We have already taken a lot of
written evidence from various sources and those have all been available to you. We, of
course, had a session with the Home Office and took oral evidence. That was an extremely
helpful session, I should add, which we very much welcomed, and the supplementary
evidence that the Home Office produced thereafter, on a number of issues that were raised
during that session, was useful to us. This is the last of our evidence sessions before we start
writing the report, which we hope will be available around about February/March. We have
been to the Commission, we have been to the EMCDDA and, as I say, we have had a very
wide measure.
As you know, the session is open to the public. A webcast of the session goes out live as an
audio transmission and is subsequently accessible via the parliamentary website. A verbatim
transcript will be taken of your evidence and this will be put on the parliamentary website. A
few days after this evidence session, you will be sent a copy of the transcript to check for
accuracy. We would be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as quickly as
possible. If after this session you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during your
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
evidence or have any additional points to make, you are welcome to submit supplementary
evidence to us but, again, as quickly as possible.
As you know, it is entirely up to you whether you make an opening statement or whether
we go straight into the questions that the Committee will have to put to you. Which would
you like, Minister?
Lord Henley: Thank you very much, my Lord Chairman. I do not think I need introduce
myself, because I think I know everyone here perfectly well, but I think I ought to just make
it clear that I am the Home Office Minister responsible for drugs. I have been there since the
middle of September when I took over from Baroness Browning. I also chair the interdepartmental ministerial group on drugs, which is a group of Ministers from a wide range of
departments, starting with health and going on to education, work and pensions, and others.
It is a group that meets monthly and, in my experience, has a higher turnout of Ministers
actually coming to that meeting than some other inter-departmental ministerial groups that I
have been part of in the past at one stage or another. I think that shows that there is a fairly
wide commitment within government from Ministers from a whole range of departments to
try and get on top of drugs and drugs problems in the way it affects government as a whole.
I hope what will come out is the fact that in government we want to look at this holistically,
not just silo-ise in each department, and I am very grateful for that. I do not think I want to
say anything else at the moment, but I look forward to taking all your questions.
Q313 The Chairman: Thank you very much. So you are indeed the horse’s mouth.
Lord Henley: I am the horse’s mouth.
The Chairman: Could you just clarify, does the inter-departmental ministerial group
include the Ministry of Justice?
Lord Henley: The Ministry of Justice are there, as are the Department for Education, the
Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health and Communities and
Local Government. There are others: the Cabinet Office, the Treasury. One should never
forget the Treasury.
Q314 The Chairman: I will start the ball rolling. The EU past and the potential future
drugs strategy, which we have been examining, accepts that different member states are free
to apply different domestic drugs policies. This is an area where that elusive concept of
subsidiarity actually applies. Is it right that this should continue to be the basic approach of
the European Union, or should we be looking for greater harmonisation of at least some
aspects of national drugs policies at the EU level?
Lord Henley: Put very simply, yes. We think it is right that different member states should
address these things in their own way because different member states have different
problems according to their history or to the nature of where they are—a whole range of
different things. Different countries want to do different things, but we also feel that there is
a role for the EU both in making sure that there is practical co-operation between member
states—I think I will come back to the words “practical co-operation” again and again—and
the fact that member states can learn from each other. On top of that, I think we also have
to recognise that drugs, by their very nature and by the existence of the drugs trade, are a
global matter. Therefore, co-operation between individual EU member states is very
important, but we also need co-operation that goes across the board worldwide. We are
not particularly looking for EU legislation, but we are looking for ways of working with other
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
member states to seek that practical co-operation at the right level and opportunities to
learn from each other.
Q315 The Chairman: Thank you. We will come on to the issues about EU legislation in
subsequent questions, and there is the Commission’s recent proposal for handling some of
the new substances that have appeared, which we will pick up when we get to that point. I
assume that you are not saying that we reject any idea of EU legislation, merely that we want
to look at it on a case-by-case basis.
Lord Henley: Definitely. There might be a case for legislation and we will look at that. We
think we have a pretty good story here in the UK in what we have achieved over the last 15
or 20 years. We think that if we can learn from others, we have a lot that we can teach to
others. I do not think that legislation is necessary, but we will look at it on a case-by-case
basis.
Q316 Lord Judd: As we understand it, the major objectives of the 2005-12 EU drugs
strategy have been significantly to reduce the demand for and supply of drugs, to promote
international co-operation and to promote research, information and evaluation. To what
extent do you think these aims are being met?
Lord Henley: A number of areas show that the objectives of the EU drugs strategy are being
met, as are the objectives of our own UK drug strategy. We are more or less at the first
anniversary of the launch of our drugs strategy in December last year.
Regarding the supply and demand for drugs, it is quite a complicated picture. We are seeing
falls in the recorded levels of drug use. I hasten to say that all statistics in this area have to
be taken with a degree of caution because they are very difficult to estimate, but recorded
levels of drug use in the adult population since measurement began are now at their lowest
level. Individuals reporting use of any drug in the last year fell from somewhere around 11%
to somewhere around just below 9%. That is a significant drop and is encouraging. The price
of some drugs, particularly cocaine, has been increasing. At the same time—so I am told, I
have no direct proof of this—the purity has been coming down, so it is getting harder to get
hold of cocaine and what you are getting is not as good as it was, because they are mixing it
with other things so that they can make more money. That again seems to indicate that
progress is being made.
The EU drugs strategy and its evaluation, research and all that, which you asked about, have
been very useful in highlighting the importance of research, information and evaluation. We
are also doing our own evaluation, which is important, and through this are encouraging
member states to improve their own data collection, because, as I said, data in this area
always have has to be treated with some caution. That is leading to more comparable
information and is quite usefully done at an EU level so that we can compare the data that
we have with the data that other countries have—again, something that is very often quite
difficult to do.
Certainly you will be familiar with—and I think some of your colleagues have visited—the
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which I think is based in
Portugal, is it not?
The Chairman: Lisbon.
Lord Henley: Yes, and I think, my Lord Chairman, you visited it?
The Chairman: We visited last Tuesday, yes.
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Lord Henley: That produces a wealth of evidence that we think is useful: statistical bulletins,
country summaries and all the other things. It does help to have that knowledge to compare
and evaluate just what our individual strategy is achieving in the UK.
Q317 Lord Judd: I was very impressed by what you said not only about the interdepartmental meeting but about the level of commitment for that meeting. Personally, I
think that is good news. Within that context, are other countries doing the same thing or do
some of the countries concerned still see drugs as a sort of watertight compartment? You
emphasised that you are impressed by and listen to the evidence from places such as
Portugal and Spain. I would be reassured if you could tell us how far you believe the
implementation of the strategy or, indeed, the modification of the strategy is based upon
evidence and not prejudices, public opinion, popular press and the rest.
Lord Henley: I am very grateful for what you say about the level of commitment of my
ministerial colleagues. I ought possibly to add a little caveat to that. It has not been universal
and I am tempted to keep almost a school register of Ministers’ attendance, because one
department, which I will not name, has not always attended as regularly as it possibly ought
to, but we have sent out a message to say that we would prefer greater attendance by that
unnamed department.
As for other countries, you mention Spain and Portugal. I mentioned Portugal only in
relation to EMCDDA—however we pronounce that. The European Monitoring Centre on
Drugs and Drug Addiction is based in Portugal and we are very grateful for the work that it
does. I do not think I can comment on what other countries are doing to get interdepartmental ministerial co-operation on this, but I hope that they are, and if they are not I
hope they will be able to learn from what we are doing, because I believe that our interdepartmental ministerial group is a good one and has the appropriate commitment. It is very
important to think of this as an issue that involves not just crime but education. In fact,
virtually the first visit I made as the Home Office Minister was to part of the world that you,
Lord Judd, and I are familiar with—Whitehaven—to see some educational programmes in
schools in relation to drugs. I am grateful for the commitment of the Department for
Education, the Department of Health, the Department for Work and Pensions, and others,
and we must all work together on that. From that, all I can say is that I hope other countries
will do the same.
Q318 Lord Judd: Is there still a problem about existing prejudice and attitudes of
significant parts of the media?
Lord Henley: I am sure there is prejudice. A lot of people have very strong views that are
not necessarily based on evidence about drugs and are about what they think. The interdepartmental ministerial group is making sure that we are working throughout government
to recognise this not just as a law and order problem, despite the fact that the Home Office
leads on it, but as a health problem, an educational problem and others.
Q319 Lord Mawson: I have been listening to and involved in some of this drugs debate
for about 30 years. In many ways, some of the research and presentations that have been
made to this Committee are quite predictable and quite traditional. We have just touched a
bit, but not very much, on the fact that this is a multimillion-pound business. A lot of the
research often does not involve experience of business and is not digging into how that
might or might not be working. I wonder what the government are doing to dig into it in
practice to understand how this business is actually working and what other methods of
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
breaking into some of that there might be out there. I have heard very little about that
matter as we have done this research.
Lord Henley: Lord Mawson, you are right to stress that it is very big business and that there
are very large sums of money involved in it. It is organised crime at the highest level. Again,
we are very grateful for all the work done by SOCA—the Serious and Organised Crime
Agency—on this. It is one of the reasons why in answer to the previous question I talked a
bit about the cost of drugs, to the extent that we know it, and the effect of restricting supply
and the effect that has on sending the costs up. Also, I hope that as we restrict demand as
demand for drugs goes down, that will similarly have an effect on the price and bring it
down, but we would always gratefully receive any business advice that you can offer us. I
think SOCA is doing a very good job in the area of the drugs trade as organised crime, as big
business.
Q320 The Chairman: We had evidence from Europol who devote something like 30% of
their resources to work in this area, and we heard from the Home Office and from Europol
on both sides that this co-operation was working pretty well.
Lord Henley: I am interested in that figure of 30%. Something like 30% of criminal assets
recovered is related to drugs rather than to other crimes, so it is major crime.
Q321 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Lord Henley, can you tell us how the
European drugs strategy and the action plans have added value to the development of drug
policy at a national level generally across Europe? Do the Government believe that these
strategies have had that effect in the UK? Coupled with that, a related question is how you
will look to the next eight-year strategy and what the contents of that strategy are in the
future, if you have given some thought to that.
Lord Henley: I believe that it has worked. The important thing is that it has added value in
helping to facilitate practical co-operation to reduce demand and tackle supply, as well as to
build up the research base. We were talking about the work of the EMCDDA and the
research base across Europe. I think that one of the strengths of the European strategies and
the action plans is the practical co-operation that we are getting between member states
that all that involves. I was grateful for what the Lord Chairman said about the work of
Europol, but I also believe that there are other ways in which we can co-operate at a
national level. Again, SOCA, which I think is our representative on Europol 78—and it will be
the National Crime Agency in due course—will make that clear.
Ministers have also taken part in a number of events. In October this year my colleague
James Brokenshire attended the Crimestoppers anniversary event. That was the launch of
Operation Captura, which was based in Madrid. That campaign locates serious offenders in
Spain, where we have a number, as you probably know, and relocates those serious
offenders back to face justice in this country. That was a partnership between the UK charity
Crimestoppers, the Spanish Government, the police, the UK Government and law
enforcement agencies.
Specifically, the EU strategy sets out a much clearer remit for the Horizontal Drugs Group—
I never particularly liked the word “horizontal”; I never quite know why it is called the
Horizontal Drugs Group because it seems to give a rather odd twist to it—and highlights its
role in co-ordination, pursuing and monitoring the implementation of drugs policy on behalf
78
SOCA represent the UK at Senior Europol fora and they also host the Europol National Unit.
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
of the Council. Put very simply, we think that it does add value and we are grateful for it, and
I should add that it shares intelligence as well.
Q322 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: The second part of the question is: are you
looking for anything in particular in the next eight-year strategy?
Lord Henley: I would like to continue with those themes and improve that practical cooperation and the sharing of intelligence. There might even be a need for more joint action
across borders, because we know that this is an international problem that goes beyond
even Europe, and obviously work has to be done there. We need to continue and improve
that co-operation and—I touched on this earlier—continue that process whereby we can all
learn from each other.
Q323 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: I thought you might have said the
standardisation of the collection of data so that we compare apples with apples.
Lord Henley: EMCDDA is doing a lot of work on that—and, yes, we do want to be able to
compare apples with apples.
Q324 The Chairman: A lot of our witnesses have said that the nature of national
statistics is unsatisfactory at the moment—you are for ever up against an apples and oranges
problem and the statistics are not collected on a coherent and comparable basis. The
EMCDDA said that, too. There was a general feeling, which I rather take it you share but
perhaps you can confirm that, that one of the things the new strategy could do is to put a bit
more pressure on Governments to sort out their statistical approach in a way that makes it
more comparable so that other countries can derive more evidential material from it.
Lord Henley: I would endorse that, but add the caveat that one does not want to get to a
position where we cannot compare our own statistics with our previous statistics if we have
changed the method of doing them. However statistics are collected, we always want to
make sure that we can see what the trends are. If we change them too fast and in too
violent a manner, there is the danger you could lose that.
Q325 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: One of the issues that we face here is that a
lot of this is an expression of good intention. There is not much measurement of what
success looks like. When we talk about another European strategy, do we have anything
harder? Are we going to try for a more specific idea as to how we could say, “This has been
successful”, as opposed to a general expectation of hope?
Lord Henley: A general expectation of hope?
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Of progress, sorry.
Lord Henley: I gave some figures at the very beginning indicating some sort of decline in
drug use. As I made clear, in my view one should treat a lot of statistics in this area with a
degree of caution because these things are very difficult to measure and depend on a whole
range of different things. We certainly want to, and we are in the process of evaluating our
own drug strategy just to see what it is and what progress we are making. I think this should
also be done at an EU level to make sure that we know what we are doing. Evaluation is
very, very important in terms of—as you put it, Lord Hodgson—knowing where we are
going and what we are doing.
Q326 Lord Tomlinson: If I can move on then, Lord Henley, the recent Commission
communication Towards a Stronger European Response to Drugs suggests that stronger
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
controls in the areas of drug trafficking, of new psychoactive drugs, of drug precursors, and
of criminal assets and money-laundering are needed. What I really want to know is whether,
in those assertions, you believe that the Commission is right.
Lord Henley: I accept perfectly well that the Commission has a right to initiate legislation.
That is clear from the Lisbon treaty.
Lord Tomlinson: Although it is going to be ignored a little bit on Friday, is it not? Sorry,
that is an aside.
Lord Henley: I could not possibly comment. They obviously have a right to initiate
legislation in this area and there might be occasions when that is the right thing to do. As I
made clear earlier in response to my Lord Chairman’s question, we want to look at any
example on a case-by-case basis and what we really want to focus on is practical cooperation.
You mentioned three areas, including the new psychoactive substances. Again, this is an area
where I think we are probably in the lead. We have produced our own legislation trying to
deal with this in a generic way that makes it easier to catch the new drugs as they change
very rapidly. Again, I think other countries could learn from us.
In terms of criminal assets and money-laundering, we have pretty robust and wide-ranging
powers under the—I forget which Act it is—Proceeds of Crime Act to deal with these
matters. The figures I gave earlier are that last year we recovered something of the order of
£161 million, and that approximately 30% of all the confiscation orders were drugs-related.
There is could be more international co-operation in this area. We are very keen to drive
up performance and we look to working with the Commission on that basis. We think the
Commission could assist. I understand that it intends to publish a package of measures on
confiscation and asset recovery, and there is also a review of the EU money-laundering
directive, but perhaps we could say a little more about that later.
You also asked about drug precursors: legal drugs that can often be the building blocks for
illegal drugs. Further work needs to be done by member states in this area to tackle the
diversion of precursors from the licit world into the illicit world. This is an area in which I
suspect there could be a degree of exchange of information between member states. Before
I was familiar with the drugs world I was told, for example, about some perfectly licit
substance that is bought in large numbers in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland because it turns red diesel—in the case of the Republic of Ireland blue diesel—into
white diesel. It was only when people suddenly noticed that, for some odd reason, large
quantities of this perfectly legal substance were going somewhere where there seemed to be
no need for it that people realised what was going on. Similarly, across Europe we need to
be able to gather evidence on licit substances that are suddenly being exported in large
quantities to somewhere else where there does not really seem to be a need for them.
Q327 Lord Tomlinson: I will, if I may, just follow up briefly on two of the phrases that
you have used and emphasised: practical co-operation on the one hand and—I noted this
down—the need for more co-operation across borders. The director of Europol suggested
that to do properly the tasks that are asked of him, his budget was deficient by about €20
million. Do you regard that as being very small beer? You emphasised in your answer to the
first question the fact that £161 million of the money received from the seizure of criminal
assets was drug-related? Do you not think that Europol, to meet that need for better cooperation across borders, should at least have a movement in its budget to meet the
objectives that you and I both share?
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Lord Henley: A great many bodies always think they could achieve their objectives in a
better manner if they had more money, so I am not going to comment on the director of
Europol’s particular demand for another €20 million, or whatever. There will always be
arguments as to how much money we are putting into the whole problem of drugs. It is very
difficult to evaluate just how much money we are putting in because some of it is going in
through policing, some through education, some through health and some through other
routes. If Europol feels that it needs more money in this area, it will make a bid for it
through whatever means. I am not aware how it is funded precisely.
Lord Tomlinson: Through the European Union.
Lord Henley: Through the EU, so that is obviously a matter for the Commission to address
in due course. If we really do feel that we are making very good progress in this area, money
that we recover might be directed for that, but I am not going to comment on any specific
sums that have been demanded by any specific body.
Lord Tomlinson: That is fine, thank you.
Lord Henley: Could my official clarify a point in case I have misled you?
Mr Jaspert: Just to clarify, the £161 million of confiscated assets is across total organised
crime, of which 30% is estimated—
Lord Tomlinson: So it is only 30%?
Mr Jaspert: It is 30% of the £161 million.
Lord Henley: I apologise for misleading you.
Lord Tomlinson: It is still a profitable activity.
Q328 The Chairman: On the question of psychoactive drugs, presumably that is an area
on which we could come to the view that it was desirable that European Union-wide
measures should be taken to deal with such drugs, particularly given the very great rapidity
with which new drugs are introduced and the fact that trade across the European Union is
very free these days. Would that not be an area on which we could perfectly easily come to
the conclusion that a European Union-wide decision would be desirable?
Lord Henley: It could be that they just simply copied us and adopted our legislation, which I
think—
The Chairman: In that case, presumably if it was a directive we would simply be—
Lord Henley: We would then be compliant.
Q329 The Chairman: Yes, but what I mean is that our national interest could be that
other member states should similarly take a legal action against certain substances that are
being misused.
Lord Henley: It certainly could be argued that it could be in our national interest that that
would be the best approach. If that was the case, we would not object to the Commission
going down that route and producing a directive.
The Chairman: Yes. A directive or a decision or whatever it was.
Q330 Lord Mawson: Minister, you said in your opening words that the Government are
trying to look at this issue holistically, which means Ministers coming together and talking
about it. Certainly, a lot of my work in my life has been about developing joined-up
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
approaches to things. I know from experience that it is one thing to talk about these things;
developing projects that actually do it in a joined-up way, with teams that come from
different disciplines and engage with the discipline, is quite a different matter. Certainly, all
my experience tells me that Governments are not very good at doing that. I wonder
whether more room is needed for innovation and more joined-up practice. Sometimes
Governments and Europe may think that this is about stronger controls, but it might actually
be about new ways of working that challenge some of the traditional silos in which these
operations could work.
Lord Henley: First, I will say a word about government and how it works. Coming back into
government after 13 years in the wilderness or whatever it was, I have found that Whitehall
works in a very different way from the way I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s. In
those days the departments were much more silo-ised, to use that awful expression. I do
not think that the first department I ever served in, the Department of Social Security, ever
talked to any other department other than the Treasury, or rather the Treasury talked to us
and probably that meant gave orders. Coming back in—and I do not know why this is,
whether it is because of improvements made by the previous Government, whether it is as a
result of the coalition or just that things have developed this way—I have noticed that there
is much greater talk around government, and I think the inter-departmental ministerial group
on drugs is an example of that.
Having said that, one should not think of these things as being purely a matter for
government, and at our inter-departmental ministerial group, which meets monthly, as well
as having Ministers there we frequently have groups from outside—groups such as our
Advisory Committee on Council on the Misuse of Drugs, or others—coming to talk to us
and to give us their views. Similarly, the police might; there are a whole host of others.
Obviously, we want to go wider than just government in how we talk, but I think
government itself is better, even if at times it can be slower in how it does things, at looking
at things from a holistic point of view.
Q331 Lord Mawson: Can you point to a piece of practice that government is coming
behind that deals with some of these issues in a more joined-up way, because it is one thing
to talk, it is another thing to do it?
Lord Henley: I would give one example, and that is looking at payment by results for some
of the education or health projects that we mount in the drugs world, where throughout
government we all come together to see that here is a wonderful programme that, say,
Health is going to do. Let us see whether it does work and then let us pay according to the
results. The same could be said of some of our initiatives in education, although those take
much longer and it is far harder to work out what the results are. For example, when you
are talking about going into the schools to talk about drugs, you do not see the benefit for
some years to come.
Q332 Lord Avebury: Continuing with the discussion on the communication, you said
earlier on that you were not particularly looking for legislation, whereas the communication
is concerned entirely with legislation. It says that the treaty of Lisbon allows the EU to
provide a bolder response to drug trafficking by adopting directives, establishing minimum
rules on criminal offences and sanctions. That is described as a major step forward. Do the
Government sympathise with that approach, and do you support such a proposal?
Lord Henley: The EU does not have exclusive competence in this area. As I have made
clear, we accept that under the Lisbon treaty member states obviously have a right to
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
legislate in this area. We think that in the main most things should be left to member states.
When you are talking about something such as drug trafficking cross borders, obviously it
might be appropriate, but we want to look at anything on a case-by-case basis. We will want
to look at anything that the EU proposes with care. Obviously there might be a greater need
for an EU-wide role in relation to drug trafficking than in other fields because drug trafficking
by its very nature, by its very definition, is cross border. It also goes outside the EU borders,
so work with other countries is also necessary.
Q333 Lord Avebury: In other words, the Commission proposals on this subject are not
sufficiently precise for us to say whether we would agree with them or not. We have to wait
and see what the exact legislation that they propose will be?
Lord Henley: It is certainly a case of wait and see to see what they propose and then
decide.
Q334 Lord Avebury: Would similar reasoning apply to the proposed legislation on
confiscation and the recovery of criminal assets, strengthening mutual recognition of freezing
and confiscation orders and money-laundering, which apply not only to drug trafficking but
to all serious crime and, as such, are part of The Hague and Stockholm programme? Would
the Government support this approach?
Lord Henley: We have to wait to see what comes. Legislation is not always the only option.
I go back to the idea that there should be practical co-operation between the countries. I
hope I am not boring the Committee by constantly emphasising practical co-operation, but
that is the key to it: getting countries to work together at police level or in a whole host of
other ways. It is practical co-operation, shared intelligence, that we need. There might be
some occasions when we need legislation, but until we see the precise details we cannot
comment on what we want.
Q335 Lord Richard: Lord Henley, I think we are all agreed that subsidiarity applies in this
particular field. I think we are also all agreed that if ever there was a supranational problem it
is this one. You really cannot just isolate one country and say that we will only look at what
happens in the UK or whatever country it may be. I do not quite understand why you have
set your mind against the establishment of minimum rules for criminal offences and
sanctions. It would seem to me that if you could get a situation in which all the countries in
the EU, broadly speaking—not in detail but broadly speaking—had a similar approach to
criminal offences and what you do about certain types of criminal offences in this field, that
would probably help rather than hinder.
Lord Henley: I am not sure that it would make that much difference for us in the UK
because I think our criminal sanctions, our rules, are already tight enough. Would it make a
difference for us if we brought the others up to our level; i.e. is it in the UK interest?
Possibly it would do us no harm. I am not opposing EU legislation full stop; I am saying, in the
main, that there are other more important things, such as practical co-operation, shared
intelligence and so on. Please do not see me as one who has a gut reaction against any
legislation from Europe. It is just that I do not think it is necessarily particularly helpful.
Q336 Lord Richard: I do not quite understand. It seems to me that if you have a broadly
similar set of criminal sanctions across the whole of Europe then the chances are you would
get better enforcement than if you have a set of 27 different ones, basically because a lot of
the crime in this area is transnational anyway.
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Lord Henley: It is transnational. As we were discussing earlier with Lord Avebury’s
question, I can certainly see a role on drug trafficking. There might be a role because
obviously drug trafficking goes across borders, but when it comes down to how an individual
country treats the use or misuse of individual drugs, I think it is probably better decided at a
national level. Different countries have different problems with different drugs for a whole
host of different reasons.
Q337 Lord Avebury: Do you think that we should formalise this better exchange of
information that you have talked about—going back to the earlier question—either on
precursors or on new psychoactive substances? For example, there is nothing on either of
these subjects in the EMCDDA’s massive tome on reduction of harm. Presumably that
means that member states are not reporting their experience on new psychoactive drugs or
precursors. Would it be a good idea if we asked all member states to provide this
information to the EMCDDA?
Lord Henley: It is an interesting idea. I do not know how you would suggest formalising it.
On the new psychoactive substances, legal highs, we have developed an early warning system
that links into the EU one, which would help. Could that be extended to the other areas? I
suppose it could and that it might be of some use.
Q338 The Chairman: I think there are plenty of cases across EU policy where the
provision of statistics is a legal requirement imposed by the European Union. One only has
to think of the problems that arose over the Greek statistics in the eurozone crisis to see
that that can be very important. What Members of this Committee are looking for is
whether getting to a situation where the statistics are more comparable could involve some
legislative underpinning. Obviously it would need to be very carefully drawn if it was not to
impose costs to no real benefit, but I think it is not inconceivable that it could.
Lord Henley: It is not inconceivable, no. I would fully accept that.
Q339 The Chairman: I wonder whether we could turn to the main international
instrument to combat money-laundering, the Warsaw Convention, which is a Council of
Europe convention. In its response to our report, published in May, the Government stated
that the UK already had in place legislation that was, “essentially compliant with, and largely”
going “beyond the minimal requirements of, the Warsaw Convention”. Why, then, has the
United Kingdom not signed or ratified the convention? Is this going to change now that we
are steering the Council of Europe ship for the next few months? As I am sure you are
aware, I should draw attention to the fact that the previous Government gave a commitment
that “implementation will be finalised as soon as possible in 2010”. I have to say that I do not
think any of us quite understands why we are delaying our signature and ratification of
Warsaw.
Lord Henley: Obviously I cannot answer for the previous Government, and they ceased to
be the Government early on in 2010. We are pretty confident that we do comply with the
convention. We are pretty sure that the Proceeds of Crime Act deals with that, and it is
widely seen as a model by many countries. Put very simply, as I understand it the real
problem comes down to the fact that, to be absolutely certain that we are compliant, we will
need to do a forensic article-by-article survey of the entire convention, and that will be a
fairly resource-intensive exercise. Although we think we are compliant, finding the resources
to do that at the moment is not something we consider to be a priority.
Q340 The Chairman: Surely you would recognise that if every country that belonged to
an organisation that had a convention like this took the view that it was broadly compliant
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
and therefore was not going to sign it, you would not have much of a rules-based system,
quite honestly. I do not think anybody around this table has the evidence to suggest that we
are not compliant, but I do think it is inadequate to reason that because we think we are
compliant we do not need to worry about signing and ratifying the convention. Applied
across the board, this would have very, very damaging implications.
Lord Henley: We are not alone in not signing. Other members of the Council of Europe—
Germany, for example—have not signed. I cannot give any commitment as to when we will
sign. As I say, it does mean that we have to devote resources, which are limited at the
moment, to double checking that we are compliant. Subject to competing demands, I would
hope we would do so within the next year or so but I am not going to be any more precise
than that. I can go no further.
Q341 The Chairman: If I may be rather critical, I would say that that is better than
nothing, but I do think that, as a country that seems to be in the lead of international efforts
to prevent money-laundering, it is a continued weakness if we have not signed and ratified
one of the major instruments that exist for this. It just weakens our advocacy of tighter
controls on money-laundering.
Lord Henley: In effect, I will have to take that on the chin from you, my Lord Chairman, and
say that we will do it when we can but we have to make decisions within the department
about resources and what we devote to various matters. I accept the criticism that is being
doled out.
Q342 Lord Tomlinson: One very brief supplementary question to that is: when you are
doing this extensive study, which I cannot believe has not started, if you discover an area in
which you are not compliant, will that spur your department to make sure that you become
compliant in that area, or would it be used as a reason for continued failure to sign?
Lord Henley: It would cause us great embarrassment because, as I said, we are fairly
confident that we are compliant, but as I stressed earlier on, we believe that we need to do
a case by case, article by article analysis of the convention before we can be sure.
Q343 Lord Avebury: I wonder whether you have to carry out the evaluation of
compliance in-house or whether you could find some distinguished lawyers who would be
prepared to do this for you pro bono.
Lord Henley: I imagine there are distinguished lawyers who are prepared to do work pro
bono. None has approached us so far.
Lord Avebury: I mean I think you would have to take the initiative.
Lord Henley: It is a very interesting suggestion and if that is possible I will make inquiries.
Q344 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Minister, I imagine it is assumed that the 22 states
in which the convention is now in force have all gone through this very thorough exercise of
making sure that they are compliant in every degree.
Lord Henley: I very much hope that they did so because I think it would be wrong to sign
up to a convention without going through that process. Obviously, I cannot comment on
those other 20 countries. I can only comment on the processes that we go through here.
Q345 Lord Mawson: The UNODC document From Coercion to Cohesion concedes that
the global drug problem is less of a crime issue and more of a health issue. Do the
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
Government agree? How do these two different conceptualisations of the illicit drug
problem relate to each other and are their fundamental aims in conflict?
Lord Henley: No, and I think it is clear that rather than health and crime being in conflict
with each other, it is only when dealing with these issues holistically, which I was trying to
get over earlier, and making the links between the two that progress can be made. That is
why we have the inter-departmental ministerial group on drugs and we have a large number
of departments being involved. It is not just the Department of Health and the Home Office
that are involved, it is others, but you do need to look at this holistically.
Q346 Lord Dear: Lord Henley, you carry the portfolio in the Home Office for crime
prevention and anti-social behaviour reduction, which is—put very broadly—prevention
being better than cure. Along that theme, we have come across the issue of harm reduction,
in the area that we are looking at, as something that is receiving increasing attention both
here at home and at the European level. I wonder whether you consider, from the Home
Office view, that that attention is justified. If so, how should challenges, such as drug use in
prisons, which concerns us greatly, and the inadequacy of harm reduction measures in the
eastern European member states, be met? Particularly the issues of prisons and eastern
Europe interest us a great deal.
Lord Henley: We are very keen to share our experiences and information with all others,
and I hope in that way that we can provide assistance to problems in eastern European
countries. I would not want to be drawn into commenting too much on the state that they
are in there, other than that we could offer advice. Our own strategy focus was on very
much, and I quote from it, “support for people to choose recovery” as an achievable way
out of dependence. That is recognition that we can and should do more than just reduce the
harms caused to individuals through their misuse of drugs. The EU drugs strategy also
emphasises that importance of reducing dependence and drug-related health as part of that
integrated approach. I stress that I am very happy to share information with all other
member states, particularly with those who have inadequate measures, which might be some
of the eastern European ones.
There is quite a serious problem with drug use in prisons. Many factors contribute to the
supply of drugs there and it is essential to do quite a lot of different actions, some of which
we are in the process of addressing, such as reducing the illegal use of mobile phones. It
would be great if we could stop the mobile phones getting in there in the first place. As you
will be well aware, that is quite difficult but, even if we cannot stop it, if we can make it
difficult to use them while they are in there. As you know, there have been a number of
trials blocking phone signals within the prison area but without causing inconvenience to
people living nearby, which is a particular problem with some of our urban prisons. We also
need an effective strategy to disrupt the activities of corrupt staff in prisons, and again that is
one of the reasons why I was very grateful for your query as to whether the MoJ was
involved with our inter-departmental ministerial group on prisons. Yes, it is and it is well
aware of the problems. We also need to work very closely with law enforcement agencies
to disrupt criminal activities—organised crime—and, again, I am grateful for the work that
SOCA does.
Finally, we are looking at—and I am hoping to visit one soon—piloting drug-free wings in
prisons and recovery wings because with—
Q347 Lord Dear: Dare I ask whether you are in dialogue with the Prison Officers
Association? I recognise that it might not actually be in your remit, but clearly drug use in
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prisons has a lot to do with supervision, and the issue of staff, which you have mentioned, is
critical to that. I wonder whether you are able to give us a view on how co-operative the
POA has been.
Lord Henley: I could not comment on that at the moment, but no doubt—
Lord Dear: It is outside your brief?
Lord Henley: No doubt I will have to write an extra letter to the Committee to address
one or two points afterwards, but I will certainly consult colleagues in the MoJ as to how
they have been getting on with the Police Prison Officers Association.
Lord Dear: It might be helpful.
The Chairman: It would be very helpful if you could cover that.
Lord Henley: Crispin Blunt would be the appropriate Minister, but I will take advice from
him and feed that back to the Committee.
Lord Dear: Thank you very much.
Q348 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: We have also been looking at the other end of
the supply chain, and we are interested to find out what measures are in place to ensure that
the supply reduction initiatives in Europe do not contravene international human rights laws,
and whether there are any performance indicators in place to measure the effectiveness of
these law enforcement measures at the European level.
Lord Henley: This is a difficult one. I suppose I could start by quoting what Lord Richard
said in response to my colleague Mandie Campbell when she gave evidence. He said, “When
one is dealing with international action of the sort you have in mind then there are going to
be unintended consequences. You cannot guarantee that there are not but you do your best
to make sure that there are not. So far you have no evidence that there are any”. Mandy
said, I think that is exactly right. It is a difficult area, and as you know human rights crop up in
the Home Office with some frequency, but we have no evidence that EU-level anti-trafficking
policy can end up, for example, supporting corrupt local regimes or may be in breach of
human rights issues. As you know, in the UK and in the EU we take human rights abuses and
corruption very seriously in drugs work.
Q349 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Lord Henley, the EMCDDA was referred to earlier
during this session, but it would be good if we could talk just a little more about it. On the
visit we were very impressed by both the people who were heading up the organisation and
the work that they were doing. The questions are: what role does it play in the development
of drug policy in the United Kingdom; what further information could be provided by it if it
had the powers—and the resources—and would the Government support a modest
increase in funding if proper justification were provided? It was being extremely sensible
about funding and would do its utmost to continue to use the resources that it had to the
maximum, but if its resources were increased it could obviously put more into research,
particularly with the advent of the psychoactive drugs that, as you know, are such a moving
target.
One area that EMCDDA stressed, which is relevant to the question from Lord Richard, was
that the law enforcement agencies wanted it to do more analysis for it because it has the
tools to do this analysis, which law enforcement agencies do not have to the same extent.
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
The other area that was most impressive, and which it funds already, is translating some of
its key material into all the languages that cover the whole of the 27 member states. I just
thought it was worth giving that bit of background from my experience last Tuesday.
Lord Henley: I am very grateful for your comments. We are very grateful for the work that
the EMCDDA—that is such a mouthful, and there is no way of saying it in a short way—
does. It provides a very useful overview of the drug situation in Europe, which enables us to
improve our understanding of the position in the United Kingdom in comparison with other
EU member states. It also very successfully identifies European-wide drug issues, such as the
apparent recent heroin shortage, and we are grateful for its work on the new emerging
drugs, which is a very difficult moving target, as you have described. It is all relevant for
developing policy at a UK and European level and ensuring that trends in other countries can
be identified and the learning applied to the UK, where appropriate, and I hope that other
countries can learn from us.
It would also be good—and this is in response to something that Lord Mackenzie was asking
earlier—to see the EMCDDA making further advances in improving its comparability so that
we know whether we are talking about apples or oranges, as Lord Mackenzie put it. That
would increase the reliability of information as well as making comparisons within the EU
more meaningful. As regards any increase in funding, we will consider any future proposals
within the context of the spending review. I am not prepared to go any further than that, but
I would say that in general it is very good to see the work that it is doing. I am confident that
our data are is pretty good and we are pleased to see that others, with a lot of support from
the EMCDDA, are catching up.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Thank you. I think it is only fair to the EMCDDA to say that
it was not begging for more resources; it was answering a question about what it would do if
it had more resources.
The Chairman: Its director said, with admirable frankness, that he did not quite see where
the resources were going to come from at this present time. He was answering a question
about what the EMCDDA would do if it had more resources and whether it would be
valuable work, and his answer—I think, to our satisfaction—was rather positive, but it was
not bidding for more.
Lord Henley: Right. Thank you.
Q350 Lord Mawson: In our own projects, where we have often had researchers come
and look at them, we have become aware of the strengths and the weaknesses of that
approach. A lot of my work in recent years has been very much about creating
environments where you learn by doing, not just by looking at things. I wonder, at this
present time, what is being invested in new ways of thinking about this. On this whole
question of innovation, there is a moment when we need to think about some of these
things in new ways, and with new sets of eyes really. I wonder what work government is
doing on new ways of doing research, particularly around practice.
Lord Henley: I am not sure I quite follow you. What evaluation are we doing at the moment
to see whether—
Lord Mawson: No. I am wondering about this point about new ways of research at this
present time. Large amounts of money are spent on this stuff and, as I say, having observed it
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
myself in my own area, it has some value, but there is also a need for innovation. It is a bit
like IT, really; you learn about it by doing it, by being involved in the practice of it. How do
you create more innovative thinking about how you do research in this field? My question is
therefore partly about what government is doing to invest in innovation and new ways of
thinking about this. Are there any examples of that? There is a ring, again, of fairly
predictable ways of working.
Lord Henley: Across government we have a research group that sits under the IMG, and we
are also doing our own evaluation of our own drugs strategy. I am still having problems
getting at what precisely you mean. But in terms of innovation, I believe that our fairly
localist approach to a lot of drug treatment work allows for different ideas. It is almost a
sort of Maoist approach of letting 100 flowers bloom. One does see different projects
producing different ideas, some of which work and some of which do not work, in which
case they can be dropped. For that reason, very often centralist approaches do not work.
Q351 Lord Mawson: I know from experience how difficult it is when you innovate. I
innovate a lot. I have been doing it for a quarter of a century and I know how difficult it is
for practitioners of traditional methodologies in government to understand innovation, to
get into it and replicate it and help you grow it. Even when you demonstrate all sorts of
things, it is massively difficult for government, with its silo-like approaches, to really get
behind some of that stuff. It just seems to me that there needs to be some new thinking in
this area, and also with the money available. Does there need to be some new thinking
about how one does some of that? As I said, this has the ring of fairly predictable ways of—
Lord Henley: That is a perfectly fair comment, but again, as I said, if one can one should try
a whole range of different things, not just the centralist approach, and then evaluate different
programmes, whether they be in health, education or policing, see how they work and see
what progress you are making. Different things will work in different ways.
Q352 The Chairman: Some of the evidence we have had has supported the idea that
there could be rather useful co-operation, not just between the 27 Governments and the 27
Ministries of Home Affairs, or whoever is doing this, but between, for example, a city in
Britain and a city in the Czech Republic, or somewhere like that, where local programmes
could be pursued in a co-operative way. Our feeling was that the initial evidence we had
from the Home Office was rather restrictive on this and talked about everything being
channelled through the Home Office, but I know that when we took evidence from your
officials they said that had not been their intention. One of the things that strikes us is that
there are some very interesting projects around Europe, pilot projects and others, in
different cities—mainly in cities, but not exclusively—and that our cities could also benefit by
direct co-operation, as there is much direct co-operation between urban administrations.
Lord Henley: I suppose the whole twinning of cities, or twinning of towns, might be a
vehicle for this.
The Chairman: It is something like that.
Lord Henley: I happen to know that Bristol is twinned with Bordeaux for their various
historical links to the wine trade. They might have similar interests in the drug trade and find
that they had something to learn from each other, but I have a sneaking suspicion that
probably ought to be left to the local level. I am a genuine localist.
Q353 The Chairman: Our tentative feeling was that although the EU drug strategy is not
a legal or a binding document, it can set a kind of direction of travel, and the question that
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we have been putting, and which I am putting to you, is whether it would be useful to
encourage people to do this kind of more grass-roots co-operation across national
boundaries and not just sit waiting for their Governments to agree to do something.
Lord Henley: As a believer in localism and a believer that one authority can learn from
another authority—I felt this very much when I was responsible for waste—this is definitely
an approach that could be pursued. The example that I gave of Bristol and Bordeaux—
Q354 The Chairman: What we are looking at is merely some encouragement from the
new strategy, not anything prescriptive of course. It would be entirely up to people in
different cities whether to go down that road, but Governments, or the EU collectively, can
give a momentum to that.
Lord Henley: Governments and the EU could certainly encourage that and, as I said earlier,
let 100 flowers bloom.
The Chairman: I think that is very encouraging.
Q355 Lord Dear: Minister, my question is hard on the heels of what we have just been
discussing. As we all know, the EU generally has a whole raft of research programmes and it
would be helpful to know whether the Government feel that, within that group of research
programmes, enough priority is given to research that is drug-related.
Lord Henley: The Commission provides the funding, in the form of grants to projects or
organisations, that helps to implement EU policies. Do I think that it is putting enough into
these particular ones? The Drug Prevention and Information Programme has a budget of, I
think, some €21.5 million between 2007-2013, which will help quite a number of different
projects on drug use, on actions aiming at reducing drug rates, on harm, on the use of
treatments, on providing the most up-to-date scientific knowledge. Other research
programmes will also have an interest in drug policy but as part of broader funding, and it is
not possible to estimate how much is going in. What you are really asking is whether there
is enough, and whether there should be more.
Q356 The Chairman: It is not a question about whether the EU research budget or the
framework programme for research should be bigger. We accept that that is decided on a
multiannual basis and that you cannot just add things on to it.
Lord Henley: Is there a sufficient process?
The Chairman: The question we are asking is: is the drug-related research that is being
done sufficient, or should it be given greater prominence within a quantum, which we are
not seeking to contest in any way? It is not for this Committee to do so of course.
Lord Henley: It would be dangerous for me to say, “Yes, I would like to see more” because
obviously there will be competing areas that also require funding for research. I would not
say that everything should go into drug-related research because there are other equally
important matters. I am satisfied with what is going in at the moment, but obviously if there
was more, that would be useful.
Q357 Lord Dear: What you said right at the end of that comment probably answers the
question—that you are satisfied—I guess you are speaking for the Government on that. I
know that the word “balance” has come up very much in a forum that you and I were
involved in within this House very recently. In a sense, the question is all about balance, and
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priority and balance are very similar in this context, I know. I do not want to flog the
question to death, but if drugs are seen to be as serious a problem as we all believe—and I
think you have indicated that the Government also believe that—then in a sense the more
we know about it and the more we look for innovation and new approaches the better, and
of course all that comes off the back of the research programme. But I make my own point
and perhaps it is unfair to ask you to comment further.
Lord Henley: I do not think that I could comment further. You are right to stress the need
for getting the balance right. It is a question of priorities, and there is no absolute answer.
The Chairman: You will have a chance to comment again because I would not be
surprised if it appears in our report, and the Government will have another opportunity to
comment.
Lord Henley: I am sure there will be a debate.
Q358 Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts: Can I ask whether we have organisational
structures to put the results of the research to work? You have the research, you find out
the information, and then it is a question of how you apply it in the real world, but I am
slightly following Lord Mawson’s point. To give an analogy, when we looked at the
cybersecurity area, one of the graphic examples that was given was that cybersecurity
organisations are flat, organisational structures, and the people young, engineering-oriented.
Governmental structures are hierarchical, age-related and arts-oriented, and therefore all
the sort of myths disconnect. I do wonder whether we do not have some of the same
problem in the drugs area: that is to say, do the people who have to decide to apply the
results of the research understand that it will require some very unusual organisational
forms to do it?
Lord Henley: I think, if I follow you, that you are probably right. But I hope with any
research that we just look at the results of a project and at what works and what does not
work, recognising of course that with some projects, particularly those in the educational
field, you are talking about a pretty long lead time before you begin to see results. I go back
to the comment I made to Lord Judd about visiting a school in Whitehaven and seeing its
drug educational programme. It seemed to be absolutely excellent stuff. It was partly about
drugs and partly alcohol. But we realised at the end we would not really know whether it
had worked with alcohol until we saw the West Cumberland Hospital no longer head of the
league for alcohol-related admissions in A&E on Friday and Saturday nights, and that is going
to take 10 years before you see it.
Q359 Lord Mawson: But it might. I cannot speak to that specific example, although I do
know that hospital. Some of these innovative approaches might fit within an education box.
There might be an education part. There might be an enterprise part. Often when
Governments research them they get interested in this one little bit of it but do not
understand that, to make that piece of innovation work, there are all these other pieces that
are connected to it, all of which have connections into government. I think the reason why
this innovation stuff is to a large degree not getting beyond talk into practice is because it is
massively difficult to do and it is then very difficult to get a machine that is like this to
connect with it. In my experience, the only way we have ever enabled it to happen in our
work has been down to an individual Minister, or someone who took ownership and
responsibility for the problem and engaged with an attempt to bring those things together.
The question is therefore partly about how we move into the world in which this generation
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is actually living, and yet government is that interface. That is the critical thing, it seems to
me.
Lord Henley: I hope that a Home Office Minister visiting an education project was some
small sign that there was a degree of interconnect and that it was not just the Education
Ministers doing this, or the Home Office Ministers visiting some peace project or whatever
in that area. I am beginning to see this problem of the interconnect, which both you and
Lord Hodgson have mentioned. Obviously it is something that we must try to direct within
government. I go back again to that inter-departmental ministerial group on drugs, which I
chair, and I think that is a sign of an improvement.
Lord Mawson: Can I just say that it is absolutely a step in the right direction? All I am
trying to do is push to the next stage where we go from that into real practice, because
innovation needs drive and responsibility. It will not happen by magic.
Lord Henley: We are always prepared to be pushed in the appropriate direction.
Q360 Lord Judd: We are in the midst of very severe cuts in public expenditure. How will
this impact on research in these areas, and does this not relate to the repeated question that
in the midst of the arguably essential short-term cuts we may be increasing long-term costs,
because we are not researching the means that will become more effective in dealing with
the problem and therefore we will go on wasting money in the future. We have heard quite
a lot in the evidence to this Committee that the health rather than the criminal dimension of
the drugs issue should be taken more seriously. I somehow get a little bit of a feeling that
this has become an intellectual argument, a “health” against “criminal” approach. You have
said that you take an evidence-based approach as being absolutely essential.
If there is this strategic debate going on, which suggests that we may be getting it all wrong
and that we ought to take a big change in direction—perhaps I slightly overstated it, but you
will understand the point I am making—is it not crucial that there is no cutback in the
research into how far such a change would be right and what kind of results it would
produce?
The Chairman: Before you answer that, I think this question goes a bit further than just
research. It is also whether the cuts, which of course are being felt all over Europe, are going
to impact negatively on existing programmes dealing with drugs, particularly harm reduction
programmes, which are of course expensive programmes by definition but which I think
many people believe have brought some real benefits.
Lord Henley: All I can say is that cuts are obviously very difficult and that it is very difficult
to achieve them. But it does at least provide one with the opportunity to focus very, very
carefully on, I hope, what really is working and what is not working. Obviously very difficult
decisions will have to be made and I hope that we do not go for—as you put it at the
beginning of your question—short-term gain, which might have a very long-term negative
effect, particularly on health, later on. I cannot guarantee that we will always get that right.
The same would be true for all countries in Europe, all of whom are facing very difficult
decisions.
Data on the various budgetary allocations that different countries make for interventions in
drugs are very difficult to find, but we have seen some from 19 countries. Of those, 15
reported reductions in funds available for some areas of drug policies in 2008, but those cuts
varied—and again, it is a sort of Professor Joe question: it depends what you mean by cuts—
from 2% to 44%. Again, the other difficult thing is evaluating what your overall spend on the
Lord Henley – Oral evidence (QQ 312-361)
whole drugs policy is, because it is partly a health matter, partly an education matter, a
police matter, a prison matter, and so on. I could list a lot.
Q361 Lord Mawson: Some of it might not be new money. Some of it might be money
that is already there but that is being used in a more joined-up way.
Lord Henley: This is what I mean. Very difficult decisions have to be made about how you
spend the money that is available. Again, since you mentioned the dichotomy between health
and criminal effects, some are long-term, some are short-term. The easiest way of looking at
that in a very simple way is focusing not so much on drugs but on alcohol. Our interest in
alcohol in the Home Office is what happens on Friday and Saturday night. Quite rightly, the
Department of Health’s interest is what happens long-term with damage to the liver,
increased mouth cancers and those sorts of matters. I hope that together, and that is what
the inter-departmental ministerial group on drugs means, we can make balanced decisions
about which of the areas we want to target to make sure that the cuts in the Home Office
do not cause long-term damage to health in 20 or 30 years’ time, but I cannot guarantee we
will ever get it right.
The Chairman: Well, thank you very much indeed, Lord Henley, for the evidence you
have been able to give us this morning. We are really grateful for the very thoughtful way in
which you have been able to respond, and for the fact that you have demonstrated, I think
so clearly, that you are very much a hands-on person in this area and are directly involved in
it. That will be of great value to us and thank you very much.
Lord Henley: Thank you very much indeed, my Lord Chairman. I will be writing in due
course—I hope relatively soon—to clarify one or two points. There was a specific one. I
have forgotten what it is now, but a note has no doubt been taken. I hope you will get that
sooner rather than later. Thank you.
The Chairman: Thank you so much.
Lord Henley – Supplementary written evidence
Lord Henley – Supplementary written evidence
I very much enjoyed the evidence session on the EU Drugs Strategy on the 7 December and
I welcome your forthcoming report as a result of your thorough inquiry. During the session,
I undertook to write regarding the dialogue with the Prison Officers Association. I am now
taking the opportunity to add more clarity to this issue.
The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) takes seriously the issue of drugs in
prison. It has a comprehensive strategy in place to reduce both prisoner demand for drugs
and the supply of drugs into prisons. Whilst there is more to do, a great deal has already
been achieved – drug misuse in prisons as measured by random mandatory drug testing has
declined by 71% since 1996/7 79.
Measures to reduce the supply of drugs into prisons include searching, drug testing, drug
detection dogs, intelligence systems and close working with law enforcement agencies.
There are also strategies to address illicit mobile phones and staff corruption in prisons,
both of which can facilitate the supply of drugs into prisons.
NOMS officials meet regularly with representatives of the Prison Officers Association
National Executive Committee (POA NEC) at Whitley meetings. 80 A prison security Whitley
meeting is held at which security issues relevant to tackling drug supply are discussed. At the
September 2011 meeting NOMS presented to the POA NEC its recently developed training
package for prison staff on corruption. The package includes advice to staff on recognising
corrupt practices, reporting wrongdoing and avoiding and managing situations where
prisoners may seek to corrupt staff. The package was well-received by the POA NEC, which
remains supportive of NOMS efforts to root out corrupt staff and to tackle the availability of
drugs in prisons.
Please do let me know if I can provide you with any further information that would be
helpful to the committee.
14 December 2011
79 In 1996/7 the random mandatory drug testing (rMDT) positive rate was 24.4%. In 2010/11 the rMDT positive rate was
7.1%.
80 Meetings between employers and those staff represented by trade unions in matters affecting the efficiency of the
Department, the wellbeing of the staff and to provide machinery for dealing with grievances, bringing together the
experience and different points of view)
Home Office – Written Evidence
Home Office – Written Evidence
The success or otherwise of the existing EU Drugs Strategy and Action Plan
1. The purpose of the EU Drugs Strategy 2005-2012, is to bring together in one, visible
document, the wide range of activity on drugs in the EU; to provide a mechanism to
ensure that what should be happening is happening; and to provide a motor for the
development of EU activity. Activity at EU level is not intended to form a free-standing
drugs policy independent of those of the Member States.
2. Responsibility for the actions in the Plan lies with the Commission, Presidencies, EU
agencies and Member States. Progress on achieving it is monitored annually by the
Commission (which will report to the Council), using indicators that the Action Plan
attaches to each action. The Commission recommend alterations to the plan as required,
so the Plan is not a static instrument, but a dynamic one that can be adapted according
to circumstances.
3. The strategy clarifies that the role of EU action is to support the efforts of Member
States in reducing drug trafficking and misuse and the harms that they cause to individuals
and society. It provides a base for the development of Action Plans that clearly define
operational responsibilities and deadlines for implementation that can be translated into
clear indicators of progress. The Strategy also sets out a much clearer remit for the
Horizontal Drugs Group, highlighting its role in co-ordination and in pursuing and
monitoring the implementation of drugs policy on the Council's behalf.
4. The EU Drugs strategy has worked well; member states are keen to cooperate on drugs
issues, and the EU Drugs Strategy also provides a framework for the EMCDDA to
operate and is important in giving a context for their work. The EU has recently been
active in promoting the research agenda which has been very welcome.
The success or otherwise of EU and international collaboration among law
enforcement agencies in disrupting trafficking routes
5. The UK continues to work closely with partners in the EU and more widely to disrupt
drugs trafficking routes. Such upstream efforts form part of the “golden thread” of law
enforcement in the UK – the connectivity from local, neighbourhood policing through to
international work – and allows end-to end disruption of organised crime groups. In
2010/11, SOCA and its partners achieved a sustained impact on the drugs markets,
through the delivery of high-quality, targeted investigative and preventative activity, based
on a foundation of partnership with law enforcement and others, in the UK and
upstream. These efforts have led to reports of heroin shortages in several locations
across the UK and wholesale prices have increased throughout the supply chain. Similar
upstream work against cocaine, in conjunction with international partners, has
contributed to a positive impact on the availability, price and purity of the drug in the
UK. Wholesale cocaine prices are now at an all time high, with a kilogram reaching
prices of over £50,000. Average purity at dealer level has also fallen sharply from 62% in
1999 to around 20%.
Home Office – Written Evidence
6. The role of the EU-funded MAOC(N), based in Lisbon, is to coordinate the law
enforcement and military assets of its EU partner nations (UK, Italy, Ireland,
Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain) in joint counter-drugs work in the Atlantic and off
the coast of West Africa. MAOC(N) has facilitated the seizure of more than fifty tonnes
of cocaine and over forty-five tonnes of cannabis since 2007. In June 2011, acting on
intelligence provided by SOCA and the French Customs Investigative Service (DNRED),
UKBA officers at Southampton seized 1.2 tonnes of 90%-pure cocaine from a pleasure
cruiser from Venezuela which was being transported by container ship from the British
Virgin Islands to the UK en route to the Netherlands. A Dutch law enforcement
investigation was then carried out, assisted by SOCA and UKBA, to identify the group
attempting to traffic the cocaine. Six arrests were made on 2 August 2011. Links with
DNRED, the British Virgin Islands Police and MAOC(N) were crucial in this operation.
7. Other examples of successful collaboration with EU and international partners include an
‘international day of action’ in May 2010 involving 750 officers, coordinated through a
Joint Investigation Team (JIT) between UK, Spain, Ireland and Belgium. The operation
targeted a network suspected of trafficking both large quantities of drugs and firearms to
gangs across the UK and Europe, and of laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in
criminal proceeds. Dawn raids across Europe resulted in 35 arrests. In the UK, around
230 SOCA officers searched business and residential addresses and 10 people were
arrested. The man believed to be the head of the network was arrested in Spain.
8. In West Africa, work has been aimed at enhancing the ability of the local authorities to
tackle maritime trafficking. The SOCA-led International Liaison Unit (ILU) in Ghana is an
international platform with a mixed European and US membership, designed to help
coordinate law enforcement activity and share operational or strategic intelligence.
UKBA leads a training programme to improve host countries’ drug interception
capabilities. The Liaison Officer Platforms in Ghana and Senegal provide a platform for
joint working, sharing of intelligence and a coordinated approach to capacity building.
The platform in Dakar is led by the French whilst the UK has the lead in Accra. The
Accra ILU has led to recent seizures of over one tonne of cocaine headed from South
America to Benin. It has also led to the dismantling of a significant cocaine route through
African and European airports. The ILU are currently working on developing drugs
interdiction capacity on a regional basis in response to the displacement of trafficking
activity, particularly in Benin and Togo.
Whether further harmonisation of drugs policy is feasible or desirable at the EU
level
9. Although it is important for individual Member States to develop policies in the light of
domestic circumstances, harmonisation can be useful. We welcome the Commission’s
review of the EU Council Decision 2005/387/JHA 387 (on the information exchange, risk
assessment and control of new psychoactive substances). The purpose of this procedure
is to ensure EU wide control by requiring all EU member states to invoke domestic
controls following a Council’s decision, on a substance by substance basis. However, the
current process was not keeping pace with the market – for example, the Council called
for all EU countries to control mephedrone in December 2010, when the UK had
already controlled it in the preceding April. It is essential that we coordinate more
effectively and in a more timely way at European level to combat the threat from new
Home Office – Written Evidence
psychoactive substances and we welcome the Commissions proposals to refine the
process to be quicker and more streamlined.
10. In the UK, we have developed generic legislation that captures not only the substance
encountered, but the family of related compounds (as we know that manufacturers will
‘tweak a molecule’ with the intention of falling outside of drug controls.) In the margins
of the last EMCDDA meeting there was a discussion by some Member States about the
merits of controlling similar drugs by generic clauses – this is a concrete example of
Member States learning from each other.
The external dimension of EU policy in relation to candidate countries, and
cooperation with third countries
11. The EU Drugs Strategy emphasises that the Union should strive to encourage candidate
countries and potential candidate countries to participate to the fullest extent possible in
existing structures (including EMCDDA and Europol) and to adopt the EU acquis. The
European Commission produces annual reports which track the progress made in each
aspirant Member State, and the most recent reports (published in November 2010)
noted that further efforts are needed in the fight against drugs. With significant EU
funding available to support such reforms in the candidate countries, the accession
process remains an effective catalyst to drive such reforms.
12. With regard to third country drug programmes, the EU Drugs Strategy calls for a
comprehensive approach that includes eradication, demand reduction, alternative
development and law enforcement. Europol has already established a number of bilateral
agreements with priority third countries that further strengthen the EU’s capability to
fight international organised crime groups involved in drugs trafficking, and existing
mechanisms (such as EU-LAC (Latin American and the Caribbean)) support the ongoing
delivery of the other drug-related objectives.
The multilateral dimension, including the UN Conventions
13. The EU Drugs Strategy 2005-2012 places emphasis on a regional, international and
multilateral approach to tackling the threat from drugs. This approach is consistent with
the Government’s view of the value the EU can add within the context of multilateral
engagement. By engaging effectively with its international partners, the EU has an
important role to play in addressing the global supply of and demand for narcotic drugs,
whilst respecting Member States’ responsibility for drugs policy at a national level.
14. We recognise the value of coordinating within the EU with a view, where possible, to
agreeing common positions amongst EU Member States, in order to maximise our
influence in other multilateral fora. The UK is an active member of the EU Horizontal
Drugs Working Group where Member States discuss and agree common positions on
drug policies. The EU also engages in bilateral and multilateral dialogues on drugs policy
with third countries and regional groupings. Such meetings, of which the UK is an active
participant, provide a platform for strategic discussions and co-ordination on tackling the
world drug problem. The UK is also an active participant of the Dublin Group, an
informal coordination mechanism for strategic discussions on drug policies across the
world. It is made up of 25 EU Member States, along with Australia, Canada, Japan,
Norway, the United States, the European Commission and the UN Office on Drugs and
Home Office – Written Evidence
Crime (UNODC). The Dublin Group works at a central level in Brussels and at a local
level with regional Dublin Group’s in priority locations to develop initiatives to tackle the
drug problem.
15. Though not a signatory to the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961 or the 1971
Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the EU is a signatory to the Convention against
Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. The EU is
particularly active at the UNODC and is recognised as one of the main donors to the
organisation. In 2010, the EU donated US$ 15.6 million to the UNODC, which included
funding for the UNODC programme to combat illicit drug trafficking in West Africa.
The role of the EU, and in particular the EMCDDA, in collating data, funding
research and development projects, and sharing instances of best practice in
order to increase understanding of the problems and ways to tackle them
16. The EMCDDA (the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction) is
(rightly) held up by the World Health Organisation as a shining example of a regional
monitoring centre which benefits individual Member States, the EU as a whole and the
wider international community. The UK is represented on its management board and
finance sub-committee by a department of health official in order to provide assurance
that its activities assist in the delivery of UK priorities and that funding is being used
effectively.
17. Since its establishment in 1993, the EMCDDA has developed a wide and impressive
range of instruments which it has used to collect information about the drug situation
across Europe in comparable formats. This work has been assisted by a network of
National Focal Points (also referred to as the ‘Reitox network’) who act as national
partners to the EMCDDA. The Focal Points help to develop the instruments, assemble
the information at national level and transmit it to the Agency.
18. The UK Focal Point is based at the Department of Health and submits a wide range of
data to the EMCDDA each year as well as an extensive Annual Report in the format laid
down by the Agency. The report is available on the web and is used by those working in
the drugs field as an up-to-date and comprehensive reference source of the latest
developments in the UK. With a a long involvement in interventions in the field of drug
misuse, a large research community and long data series the UK has also contributed
much expertise to the work of the EMCDDA since its inception.
19. The UK therefore has access to a vast range of information on the drugs situation, best
practice, interventions, policies and laws across Europe which is of great help in the
development and formulation of its own policies and interventions. The UK has also
contributed much in terms of its own experience and expertise which has probably been
of particular benefit to the newer EU Member States with less well developed sources of
information, policies and responses. However the tendency for problems arising from
drug misuse readily to cross national borders means that the UK’s significant
contribution is also in its own national interest.
20. The EMCDDA make available statistical tables on a range of indicators at a national level
on a yearly basis. These statistical tables provide valuable trend data and allow EU
countries to develop an understanding of the ways in which different national contexts
Home Office – Written Evidence
and legislation have contributed to changes in drug use and drug related harms over
time. The absence of this useful resource for regions other then the EU is notable. The
EMCDDA has also begun collating national strategies and publishing reports on national
approaches to drug policy, most recently on Portugal. Again these reports provide
valuable information on how drug policy in individual countries has changed over time
and allow researchers to interpret changes in drug use and associated health outcomes
appropriately.
21. The EMCDDA also compiles an annual report, on the state of the drug problem in
Europe, which collates information from across the region and provides a narrative of
changes in drug use and associated harms across the region, as well as informative
information on regional averages and trends. This information is extremely valuable to
the UK.
The role of the EU in promoting and improving the commitment of individual
Member States to the principle of harm reduction
22. It is important that all Member States reduce the harms caused by the misuse of drugs,
and that they do so by interrupting supply, effective prevention and treatment, and by
low threshold services such as needle and syringe programmes which can be an
individual’s first step along the road to recovery. The EU Drugs Strategy provides a clear
framework for such collective action.
23. Whilst harm reduction measures are always helpful, the UK strategy looks to have a
greater ambition by looking to support people to recover and presently there is no
similar ambition in the EU strategy.
The desirability of increased promotion by the EU of drugs policy at the local
level
24. It is appropriate for the EU to coordinate action between Member States at national
level. There is a risk that increased interventions by the EU at local level might duplicate
or contradict national efforts. Our view is that the EU work at local level might be best
be channelled through national portals for the immediate future and reviewed in due
course when localism approaches are better defined across Member States.
The role of the EU in promoting evidence based policy in the field of illicit drugs
25. The development of a large evidence base of broadly comparable information on the
drug situation at EU level, as compiled by the EMCDDA, has been essential to the
formulation of previous EU drug strategies and action plans, to the evaluation of the
current strategy and to the formulation of a new strategy.
26. Countries considering the adoption of specific responses also have access to the
comprehensive information maintained by the EMCDDA on national policies and laws
across Europe. While not necessarily providing evidence of effectiveness, this does offer
the opportunity for Member States to explore relatively easily the experiences of other
countries before finalising their own proposals.
Home Office – Written Evidence
27. Inter-country research can provide useful comparisons or control groups. Given that
Randomised Controlled Trials are very difficult to construct for drugs research, and that
much drugs research is observational, the opportunity to increase the population
observed can increase the power of research significantly, so the EU has a key role to
play here.
Licensing issues and the designation of illegal or controlled drugs
28. The licensing system prescribed for controlled drugs operates under the auspices of the
Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and its associated Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001. The
categorisation of controlled drugs (CDs) is an area of domestic competence; the UK
works closely with the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) in Vienna. CDs are
classed under the MDA 1971 according to the level of potential harm, and scheduled
under the MDR 2001 on the basis of their type or ‘medicinal indication’.
29. Licenses are issued to cover ‘Schedules’- groups or categories of drugs and not in
respect of individual substances. This ensures the licensing approach is flexible and
readily adaptable/ responsible to the addition or designation of new controlled drugs. No
amendment to the licensing regime itself, or existing licenses is required, should a
substance be designated. In the event a previously unlicensed company or establishment
wishes to use a newly-designated controlled drug, they will need to apply for the
requisite licence via the designated process.
30. The licensing/ registration regime operational for the 23 Precursor Chemicals is
governed by EU legislation and enacted into UK law through two Statutory Instruments.
This ensures constancy of approach across EU Member States in terms of the PCs
controlled and the control regime applied to them.
31. Whilst EU ‘competence’ and classification of precursors encourages collaboration and
Member State co-operation, it can mean designation of new substances is slow. That is
alleviated to some extent by the parallel operation of “voluntary monitoring” lists and
good cooperation between the regulatory bodies and the industry/ business sector.
32. The operation of a domestic licensing regime and a parallel system of individually licensed
imports/exports ensures that we effectively discharge our international obligations to
reduce the risk of the diversion of drugs from the licit to the illicit market at the
domestic, EU and Global levels. We monitor trade and flows of controlled drugs in the
course of the licensing regime. The development of collaborative working relationships
with international and national delivery partners ensures alignment of both the UK and
EU Drug Strategies.
26 August 2011
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Evidence Session No. 2.
Heard in Public.
Questions 25 - 59
WEDNESDAY 26 OCTOBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Blencathra
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Mawson
Lord Richard
Lord Tomlinson
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mandie Campbell, Director of Drugs, Alcohol and Community Safety, Home
Office, and Emma Haddad, Deputy International Director, Home Office.
Q25 The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along to help us. As you know, we
are going to take evidence from the Minister on 7 December. This is a very useful
preparation for that, but I hope it will also enable us to drill down into the detail. I will start
before making the normal introduction by thanking you at the Home Office very much for
the memorandum that you gave us dated 26 August, which I personally found extremely
useful; it is very much what the Committee needs at this stage of its inquiry. Thank you for
that, as it is helpful. I cannot say that I agree with everything in it, but we will get to those
points through the questions. Other than that, I should begin by saying that we are glad to
see Miss Haddad again. She appeared in a previous session on a rather different topic. As you
know, the session is open to the public. A webcast of the session goes out live as an audio
transmission and is subsequently accessible via the parliamentary website. A verbatim
transcript will be taken of the evidence, which will be put on the parliamentary website. A
few days after this evidence session, you will be sent a copy of the transcript to check it for
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
accuracy. We would be grateful if you advise us of any corrections as quickly as possible. If,
after the session, you wish to clarify or amplify any of the points made during your evidence,
or if there are any additional points to make or you agree to give the Committee additional
material, you are very welcome to submit supplementary evidence to us. Perhaps you could
start just briefly by introducing yourselves and telling us what your functions are. Then, if
you have anything that you would like to say at the start, that would be fine. If you do not
wish to do so, we will go into the question and answer session.
Mandie Campbell: My name is Mandie Campbell. I am a director at the Home Office in the
crime and policing group. I have responsibility for the UK drugs policy and alcohol when it
relates to crime and disorder.
Emma Haddad: Good morning, I am Emma Haddad. I am deputy international director in
the Home Office. I am responsible for overarching EU strategy and engagement, and our
engagement with countries across the rest of the world.
Q26 The Chairman: Thank you. Do either of you want to say anything before we go into
questions? No. The first question I want to raise with you is that the EU drugs strategy
basically accepts, if I understand it rightly, that different Member States are perfectly free to
apply different domestic policies on drugs, and that this an area, effectively, where the
concept of subsidiarity is recognised by everyone—by the institutions and the Member
States. Is that policy the right policy in the period ahead? We are looking of course at the
future drugs strategy from 2013 onwards for, say, five years. Or do you think that we should
be encouraging a greater harmonisation of national drugs policies at EU level?
Mandie Campbell: It is important that the EU drugs strategy adds value to national policies.
Looking at the main aims of EU drugs strategy, it is about co-ordination of effort,
international co-operation and, importantly, reducing demand and supply and improving the
evidence base. All of those are component parts of our own national drugs strategy. It is
important that individual countries are able to focus their own national strategies on the
things that are most relevant to them, in particular the harms and challenges that they are
facing. For example, if we look at the challenges faced by the Czech Republic, they have a
very big problem with methamphetamine. Therefore, they have to be able to tailor their
strategies and responses to that particular problem, whereas in the UK we are simply not
facing that problem from that drug. We have other challenges.
In relation to harmonisation, there are areas where we could encourage and are encouraging
greater harmonisation. In areas such as new psychoactive substances, there is quite a lot of
work going on at the moment. From the UK perspective we are very keen that we should
look to work together to have standards for the forensic side of categorisation of new
psychoactive substances so that we are not all doing different things across different Member
States. In summary, the approach of subsidiarity is right. We should be able to continue with
policies that best suit our domestic situations, but we should always look to those areas,
particularly new areas, where we could harmonise more.
The Chairman: That is a very clear answer if I may say so. It is a balance, really, between
the two approaches to European policy. Do you have anything to add, Miss Haddad?
Emma Haddad: No, thank you.
Q27 Lord Dear: Good morning. Can I talk to you about supply and demand? It is a fact
well known to all of us in this room that the EU drugs strategy is all about reducing supply
and demand. It is an interesting point as to whether demand comes before supply or vice
versa; you might want to get your mind around that one as well. It is all to do with obtaining
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
that point with international co-operation, the promotion of that, and looking for better
research information, evaluation and so on. Those are laudable aims. I do not suppose that
anyone would argue with them. In your view, keeping supply and demand as the guiding star
in your answer, are those aims being met?
Mandie Campbell: What is really encouraging is that the most recent data we have shows
that drug use is actually falling in a number of countries across Europe—certainly not
everywhere, but England is showing some of the biggest reductions of drug prevalence
across the EU in our most recent data. We also have some very good evidence around
demand; in particular, the most recent figures of the numbers of people in this country who
are presenting for treatment are falling for the most serious drugs. So the numbers seeking
treatment for heroin and crack cocaine use fell last year. Certainly for young people under
35, the numbers now presenting for the most serious drugs—heroin and crack cocaine
addiction—have fallen by about a half in the past five years. In terms of the demand side, that
is very encouraging.
International co-operation is obviously key to the supply side of the equation. Again, we have
good co-operation with a number of other European Member States. One example of that is
the work that we are doing in West Africa, and the work that the Serious and Organised
Crime Agency’s liaison officer network is doing overseas. There is a liaison platform in West
Africa that is manned by a number of Member States and colleagues from America. They
work together to gather intelligence and share operational experience, and to disrupt drugs
flowing across from South America, into Europe and onwards to the UK. They have had
some really impressive recent successes. For example, they recently disrupted a tonne of
cocaine going through to Benin in Africa.
Lord Dear: Having started life in Columbia, going over to West Africa.
Mandie Campbell: That is right. There has also been important work disrupting trafficking
routes through African and European airports. That is a really good example of that working.
Where we all recognise that we need to do more, and I know that we will perhaps come to
talk about research in more detail later, is on the amount of research on supply-side
interventions. We know certain amounts of data about certain aspects of drug trafficking,
but we need to know more. The work that the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug Addiction is doing is a really important part of how we improve the amount of
research and evidence that is available to us in making our decisions about where to focus
our effort: on demand or supply.
Q28 Lord Dear: You talked about basing some of your conclusions on the number of
people presenting for whatever the drug was. Do you take street price into account as well?
That is a clear indication of supply and demand, whether it goes up or down; one does not
need to tell you what the conclusions are. Does price come into that equation at all?
Mandie Campbell: It does indeed. We know that our law enforcement colleagues have had
some fantastic success in disrupting large amounts of cocaine coming towards the UK. As a
result of that, the wholesale price of cocaine in this country is the highest it has ever been,
and the purity levels at street level, the amounts that people are buying, are the lowest that
they have ever been. Most of the seizures that we are now seeing at street level have a
purity level of 20% or less, significantly below where it was some years ago. That is a clear
indicator of the success that law enforcement colleagues have been having in that disruption,
in getting cocaine off the streets of the country.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Q29 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: I was going to ask what your view of the fall in
demand was, and I think you have touched on it to some extent. If we look at drug use as
having spin-off problems, such as the commission of crime to get money for drugs, the
increase in the price of drugs would, I suppose, mean that some people would commit more
serious crime to get the money to pay for their habit. Is there any view that you have on
that side of it?
Mandie Campbell: We tend to associate drug use with acquisitive crime, so a lot of our
policies are focused around helping people to get into treatment so that they stop
committing acquisitive crime. We know that acquisitive crime has fallen by a third in the past
10 years. That is obviously a key part of a lot of the treatment that has been made available.
At the same time as that acquisitive crime has been going down, our treatment provision has
more than doubled in this country.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: What is the period of the fall in demand for this
country?
Mandie Campbell: For heroin and crack cocaine, the fall is quite recent.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Can you tie that to the economic situation?
Mandie Campbell: The pattern has been that the demand for heroin and crack cocaine for
young people has been declining. We are seeing heroin use in this country much more in an
ageing population, so that the numbers of new presentations for treatment for heroin use
are generally people in the over-40 age group: people who have had a long-standing problem
with heroin. As I mentioned before, for younger people, certainly in the under-35 age group,
over the past five years use has been steadily declining. I see that as a very positive thing.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: That is very helpful, thank you.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Though that statistic is for the UK, not the EU.
Mandie Campbell: That is for the UK. Drug use is very different across Europe. Again,
perhaps we can talk a bit more about how we monitor data, but one of the big challenges
for us in the EU strategy is that different Member States collect different information in
different ways. It is difficult for us to make direct comparisons of policies and interventions
in one country to policies and interventions in another. For example, we are able to give
quite robust evidence for this country because we collect quite robust data, and we do it on
a regular annual basis across a range of areas: law enforcement, drug treatment and the
British Crime Survey. A number of other countries collect data only every five years and
they collect it from smaller subsets in different ways. So it is quite hard for us to say directly
whether we have had more or less success than others.
The Chairman: Is this one of the areas where you think a greater degree of similarity
between statistics would not just be a case of producing more bits of paper with more
figures on them, but would actually have some value added?
Mandie Campbell: I do indeed. If we could move to a situation where we were measuring
the same things in the same way across different Member States, we could see that different
interventions had a direct effect.
Q30 Lord Avebury: You mentioned as an example of success on the supply side the
work of the EU liaison unit in West Africa. Can you quantify that in terms of outcomes? Has
there been a reduction in the amount of drugs that reach us from West Africa as a result of
the presence of the liaison unit there? Have they extended their work into assisting West
African police forces, whose competence has been subject to public criticism?
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Mandie Campbell: Yes, in terms of whether they are having an impact, the evidence that I
gave about cocaine prices and purity and some very large seizures that have been made as a
direct result of their activity, there is evidence that they are making a difference to drug
flows towards the UK. Certainly, their work there is in co-operation and collaboration with
the law enforcement officers on the ground. I do not know whether Emma might want to
say a bit more about the specific issue of police forces in Africa.
Emma Haddad: I have nothing to add at this stage.
Q31 Lord Judd: I wonder whether, in the overall statistics that you gave, which are very
encouraging, there are any social and geographical variations within the countries, including
our own.
Mandie Campbell: There are certainly many variations, including in this country, in terms
of presentations for drug treatment and the types of drugs that people choose to use. For
example, in some countries in Europe there is a much higher use of methamphetamines—we
could take the Czech Republic as one example—whereas we do not see that as a problem in
this country. Other Member States have other challenges.
Lord Judd: I meant within countries like our own. You give an overall statistic of the fall,
but are there are areas of Britain where the fall is greater or less? Also, are there social
groups within which the fall is greater or less?
Mandie Campbell: We do not monitor data by region. We only have a national statistic for
the numbers of people entering and leaving treatment. We know that in different parts of
the country there are problems faced with different types of drugs. For example, in a
particular part of the country, the principal drug that might affect them is the abuse of
anabolic steroids, whereas in another part of the country the abuse might be much more
focused on heroin addiction. The falls will be seen in those areas.
Lord Judd: Forgive me, but are there any statistics which show, for example, that the fall is
greater in, say, groups A and B socially, or whether it is greater in groups C and D?
Mandie Campbell: No, we do not have that information, I am afraid.
Q32 Lord Richard: I will follow up on a point that the Chairman made on the collection
of statistics in the different Member States. You said that there was a good case for greater
co-ordination, so that you could compare like with like. Are any attempts being made to get
that co-ordination? Is it being raised in one of the groups? If so, which one?
Mandie Campbell: It is, yes. This is the principle of the European Monitoring Centre for
Drugs and Drug Addiction, which was established in 1993 and has been working very hard
to try to encourage Member States to collect more robust data and do so more frequently.
Unfortunately, it is obviously only in a position where it can encourage rather than require.
Lord Richard: Are they getting anywhere?
Mandie Campbell: The information is getting better. There is an annual report, which is a
collation of a huge amount of information and statistics from across the Member States. The
report is now internationally recognised as being extremely valuable for giving a picture of
the entire region, something that is lacking across other parts of the world. There is still
some way to go but it is certainly improving. The World Health Organisation has made a
point of saying how important this information that they now produce annually is.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Q33 Lord Dear: I was interested in your comment about terminology, because the need
for common terminology right across the EU is a problem that we have bumped up against
in this Sub-Committee on a range of issues that are nothing to do with drugs. I suppose that
leads me into the short question I have. I do not know whether you have a definition for
“drugs” within the EU. I am particularly interested, and should have asked you about it early
on, in whether “drugs” also includes, in your definition, synthetic drugs—so-called designer
drugs—as opposed to crack cocaine, cocaine and all the opiates that one knows about. The
rise of pill popping, particularly in the under-30s, I suspect, goes on almost like a forest fire.
Can you get a handle on that at all? Is that part of your statistics?
Mandie Campbell: The statistics are included if they are controlled substances.
Lord Dear: That is the problem, is it not? That underlies my question.
Mandie Campbell: Yes. We have information on presentations for treatment, about people
presenting for problems with new psychoactive substances. The majority of those
presentations are for substances that have already been controlled in the UK, such as
mephedrone, for example. The numbers are still very small, but there are numbers for
people who have presented themselves for treatment for that particular drug. Also, there
are—again, relatively small numbers—people presenting for ketamine, which is another drug
used by young people. As Committee members may be aware, we have legislated to bring in
a temporary banning process, which will be enacted next month, to enable us to take instant
action against those psychoactive substances when they are identified as being harmful. The
idea will be that if a new product is detected that young people are starting to take—we
hhad this problem with mephedrone—that identification will be referred to the Advisory
Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Within a very short period, we hope much under 20
working days, they will come back and give advice on whether we ought to temporarily ban
that product—that is, to classify it so that people cannot buy it—while they conduct further
investigation into the full properties of that product and the wide range of harms that it
might cause. The idea is that we take very rapid action rather than wait for a drug to take
hold of the young population and then become a problem, as we were starting to see with
mephedrone.
Lord Dear: I gather from the way in which you have answered that that there is an
interchange of information within the EU, country by country, on that sort of action.
Mandie Campbell: There is indeed. There was a question about that later, but if you would
like me to talk about it now, I am happy to. There is a lot of work ongoing with colleagues
across Europe on new psychoactive substances. It is widely recognised that this is the next
big challenge for us all, not least because they are synthetic products, so you do not have to
grow and harvest them; you simply create them in a laboratory. It is quite simple to slightly
change the chemical compound to try to take them out of any legislation system, either in
the UK or in Europe. We have seen the numbers of these new substances rise. Colleagues
around Europe notify each other of new substances as they are detected. In the past year,
over 40 new substances were identified, so they are quite significant numbers. We in the UK
were able to share with European colleagues the work that we have been doing, which is in
a lot of ways quite far ahead of where some of our European colleagues are. That is not only
in relation to some work that we have been doing on a early warning system, where we
have been doing a lot of work to gather together and test new substances as they are
discovered around the UK. We do proactive testing, so we went to Glastonbury music
festival, for example, and did testing of products that were identified there. We are building
up a forensic library so that there is a quick reference point for when products are detected.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
I mentioned the legislation for temporary bans, so that as soon as a product is seen to be
harmful we can take very quick action against it.
The other area where we have been quite forward in our approach is by legislating to pick
up related compounds of substances. Rather than, as many countries do, legislate for a
particular substance, when we looked at a product called “Spice” a little while ago, a
synthetic cannabinoid —like cannabis but created synthetically—we legislated for any
number of related compounds to the ones we saw in the UK, so that if the chemists tried to
make a slight alteration to the drug it would still be within our definition and therefore
illegal. It would be unable to be brought into the country. That is really important. Because
the world is changing, it is possible, especially for young people, to buy products over the
internet and simply get them posted to you from anywhere in the world. If those products
have been defined and classified within our legislation as illegal, or been placed under an
import ban we can obviously intercept those products and therefore prevent them from
being sent into the country.
The Chairman: Thank you; that is very good. I think it covers one of the later questions.
Q34 Lord Blencathra: That was absolutely fascinating. I have one follow-up point on
that. You keep talking about new substances. I was trying to buy little polythene bags
recently to store garlic in the fridge. I was automatically reassigned to a website that had lots
of legal, industrial chemicals, such as Ajax, Vim or photographic chemicals, but they were
also selling little polythene bags at the same time. There was a clear indication that if you got
one kilo of this legitimate chemical, you could smoke or drink it, or do other things. Are you
aware of that? I presume that you are. Will your new automatic, urgent legislation deal with
legal substances intended for chemical or industrial use?
Mandie Campbell: Yes, we are very aware of that. Certainly, a number of products that we
have subsequently legislated for have been sold in the past as plant food or bath salts. They
are advertised as a whole range of things, often with “not for human consumption” written
on them, where the very clear reality is that this is not what the people selling the product
are intending them to be used for. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs published
a report only yesterday on new psychoactive substances. They presented it to the Home
Secretary. We will obviously now consider that. There are a number of really important and
interesting recommendations within that report which should help us look at how we can
take the quickest and most progressive action in those sorts of cases.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. We must be just a little bit careful about not going
too far into UK drugs policy, but that is very interesting.
Lord Avebury: Can I just polish off my later question, Lord Chairman? We covered quite a
lot of the substance of question 15. Can I just polish it off so that we do not have to ask it
later on?
The Chairman: I would rather catch up with it, because Lord Blencathra has to go. If you
do not mind very much, we will see where we have got to by the time that we get to
question 15 rather than continue.
Q35 Lord Blencathra: I hear that one of the American states last week banned bath
salts; I now know why. A lot of the preliminary opinion we have had in this Committee, and
some of the papers that I have read, suggest that the enforcement policies in Europe have
not been working, that Europe and Britain are still awash with drugs and that availability has
not diminished one iota. You, in your initial answer to Lord Dear, suggest that that is not the
case, and that in the UK enforcement seems to be working—and, I think you said, in some
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
other European countries as well, although you then went on to say that we did not have
great statistics from many of those countries. I, for one, would like a paper from you—
although it is up to the Committee to decide—on these statistics. Do you think that
enforcement policies in Europe are working? Does the whole strategy need to be revisited?
Could, in some cases, the enforcement policies actually be causing harm in your opinion?
Mandie Campbell: The control policies are just one aspect of the approach to trying to
tackle drug misuse in Europe and, certainly, in the UK. They are a very important part, but
not the total response. As I said in an earlier answer, the EU and UK drugs strategies have
aims and objectives that cover control, and therefore the supply side, but also demand and,
for the UK, recovery as well. I have mentioned a number of successes that EU partners have
had together in disrupting flows of illegal drugs into the European Union towards the UK,
and the impact that that has had both on the price of drugs and on availability. If purity levels
fall, that means that there is less of the product available to go around. There is good
evidence that some policies are having a very direct and positive impact.
There is more that can and should be done. We do not have enough evidence about the
supply-side interventions. We do not have enough evidence to say, “If we do this, this is the
consequence.” One of the difficulties of that is the counterfactual evidence of, “What if you
do not do it?” If we intercept a large quantity of drugs in an overseas country—in West
Africa, for example—it is very difficult to say that those drugs would definitely have been
coming to the UK, or another country in Europe, and that this would be the consequence.
All we can do is use our intelligence about drug flows and use in each country to determine
whether we think that that is a legitimate claim or not.
I do not think that there is any evidence that our current control policies are causing harm
anywhere in Europe. As I said, we have some emerging, encouraging evidence that drug use
is falling. Drug use is certainly falling in the UK, and in a number of other countries. I see that
as part of a more holistic drugs strategy; that is, both control and treatment.
The Chairman: Which other countries is it falling in?
Mandie Campbell: I have some data. I will write to the Committee to give the data that we
have from the European Monitoring Centre. In the Netherlands for example, the last data
that we have from 2005 highlights that, there is an issue; our most recent data is from 201011. It is falling there. In different countries, the use of different drugs is falling rather than the
overall amount. Certainly, England is showing the biggest signs of a drop across the countries
that I have mentioned.
Q36 Lord Blencathra: In your last remarks you said that we can, on the one hand, have
control and, on the other, treatment. Do you see them as inconsistent? We have heard
some preliminary evidence that one has either a harm reduction strategy or a control
strategy, and that you cannot have a bit of both.
Mandie Campbell: From a personal perspective, no. I think you can and should have both.
Our policies in this country are certainly to reduce the harms caused by drugs, but we are
also now much more ambitious about what we want to do on illicit drug use in this country.
The European strategy sets out very clearly a harm reduction principle, which is right. There
are different aspects of harm. In the UK, we have looked particularly at the harms caused by
crime associated with illicit drug use. A lot of the figures that we use are made up of the
harms of crime, in terms of houses being burgled and the cost of crime to this country. Our
new policy is saying that, as well as providing treatment and other policies to reduce those
harms, we also want to go further and help people to recover fully from their addiction.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
That is quite an important distinction, which is shared by some other European countries
but not all. Sweden is another example of a country that is very focused, as we are, on
getting people off drugs for good rather than reducing the harm from drugs. But our control
policies—that is, “Let’s intervene and stop the drugs coming into the country in the first
place”—are an important part of that total solution.
Q37 Lord Tomlinson: I would like to turn to our working relationships with the EU. As
you stated in the written evidence, which was very much appreciated, the UK is an active
member of the EU Horizontal Drugs Group, where Member States discuss and possibly
agree common positions on drug policies. Can you tell us a little more about the workings of
the group—where it agrees, where there is unity of opinion, where there is disunity—and
how this helps to inform drug policy at the national level?
Mandie Campbell: We see the Horizontal Drugs Group as very valuable in relation to
tackling illegal drugs. We go to that group monthly; it meets monthly. It has very good
representation from across all EU Member States, but also representatives from the
Commission, Europol, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction and
others. That forum is used to exchange information, intelligence and best practice and to talk
about how Member States may work together to tackle the problems that we are all facing.
One area where there have been some very productive discussions is on the new
psychoactive substances, the “legal highs”, and what we might do together to tackle those
issues. We all recognise that it is a very big problem across the Union, and that we need to
have consistency in approach to make inroads and tackle that. It is also useful to enable us to
work with countries outside the European Union. For example, members of the European
Union meet as a group with colleagues from Latin America and the Caribbean. We are able
to do that as representatives under the auspices of the Horizontal Drugs Group so that we
can discuss how we might work with those countries to tackle the drug flows coming from
those areas. That is really important.
Where are we in accord and where are we not? Without doubt, all countries across Europe
are very focused on getting drug users into treatment, as we are in the UK. One area of our
policies where we perhaps differ is on decriminalisation for possession of drugs. It is well
known that the UK has a very firm position on classified drugs and possession being an
offence. Some other European countries have taken the decision that that should not be so.
Lord Tomlinson: What is the balance of argument on that?
Mandie Campbell: Well, there is obviously lots of reporting in certain other European
countries about what has happened in their countries as a result of decriminalisation. As I
mentioned, drug use in England has fallen by a greater amount than anywhere in Europe that
has put forward decriminalisation as an answer to drug misuse. I think we have very good
evidence to show that the more holistic policies that we adopt in the UK—a combination of
strong control, a wide availability of treatment and a focus on recovery—are working and
putting the figures in the right direction.
Q38 The Chairman: Could you say something about whether the Horizontal Drugs
Group is making a real input to the new strategy for the next five-year period? Is there a
way in which you feed your collective thinking into the Commission? Is there any sign that
they actually pay any attention to it?
Mandie Campbell: Yes, the group is very active in a number of areas. For example, in the
JHA Council, which is taking place tomorrow and Friday, there is a proposal which has come
through from the workings of this group for an EU drugs pact on psychoactive substances.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
There is a very clear direction to say, looking forward to the new strategy, that this is where
we really need to focus our efforts. I know that this relates to a question at the end, but the
Council has recognised that the current Council decision on psychoactive substances agreed
back in 2005 needs to be refreshed to take account of the very real challenges that we face.
The Horizontal Drugs Group is part of the working that will be driving that forward to make
sure that we end up with a Council decision that reflects the challenges of the speed of
these new substances and how Europe reacts to that.
The Chairman: Does the Vice-President of the Commission who is responsible for this,
Vice-President Reding, ever come to the Horizontal Drugs Group to hear all your views?
Mandie Campbell: I am afraid that I do not have the answer to that. I do not attend it
myself. In fact, my colleague here represents the UK.
Emma Haddad: Vice-Presidents or Commissioners would not come to this level group.
They would intervene at Council level. But Commission representatives, their heads of unit
and directors, would come to this group.
The Chairman: It might be better if they did come to them, but still.
Q39 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: We have already touched on the importance
of the sharing of intelligence and dissemination at European level. You have mentioned the
European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in previous answers. Can you
elaborate on that and tell me how the data that you get from it has benefited the work at
the Home Office in terms of your conduct in dealing with the illegal drugs situation at
national level here?
Mandie Campbell: Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the big value in their work is in bringing
together the picture from across Europe. It enables us to look at what is happening across
different Member States and to track whether different products are increasing in
prominence, for example, and moving to get a foothold in different countries. It is really
important for us because we always have to, hopefully, be ahead of the game and try to
anticipate what is next. If we can see a particular type of drug that is getting a foothold in
different countries, coming towards the UK, or with nationalities with a large diaspora in the
UK, it is important that we know that and are looking for it. Methamphetamine is a good
example, where we have very active monitoring, working with police colleagues. It is a
product that has serious harmful consequences in a number of EU Member States but which
really has not managed to get a foothold in this country. That type of information is
particularly valuable to us, for anticipation and as an early warning. We recognise, though,
that we are often giving back perhaps more than we are getting. We are in a very fortunate
position, as I mentioned, that we have lots of good data and evidence. We have a very
extensive liaison officer network around the world and, again, we get good information flows
from that. We are able to give a lot of information, a lot of evidence of what works and best
practice. That really helps some of the newer Member States that are perhaps not quite as
well developed in their policies and responses.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: So other countries probably get more value from it
than we do.
Mandie Campbell: Well, I think they would certainly get a lot of value from the information
that we put in. But because drugs travel very quickly across Europe towards us, it is really
important that we help other countries to build up their response to illegal drug trafficking.
Ultimately, we will be a beneficiary.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Q40 The Chairman: Everyone speaks very positively in your written evidence, too,
about the EMCDDA and its work. But the evidence that we have had so far has tended to
be quite backward-looking. Are there areas where you think that it could be more active? I
think that you have already talked about the harmonisation of statistics; we have very much
heard what you had to say on that. Should the EMCDDA be doing more research in the fiveyear period that we are looking at—2013 onwards? Are there things that would be good
from Britain’s point of view if this agency was either conducting or sponsoring more
research?
Mandie Campbell: There is more that could be done. Certainly, in terms of encouraging
Member States to increase their capabilities in gathering data and evidence, the EMCDDA
has an important role to play. Looking forward, some work is happening on a new research
network that is being set up. A proposition will go forward next year for a bid for funding,
with the idea of co-ordinating research across the European Union. I am trying to think of
what the letters stand for, but it is called ERA-NET; I have it here, so I will find it and come
back to you. Essentially, that co-ordinates research activity in different Member States. The
bid to Europe will be to fund some central support in the middle and to try to co-ordinate
what research is done, with the idea that different Member States will then come together
and share the research and not duplicate research in different parts of the European Union.
At the moment, different Member States are doing their own thing. The idea is that, if we
work together, we can get much greater coverage and better data.
The Chairman: Does this work fall within the framework of the EU’s current R&D
programme for research, or is this something quite separate?
Mandie Campbell: I would have to come back to you on that.
The Chairman: Could you perhaps let us have a little note on this area for the future, and
what you see as useful? That would be really helpful to us.
Mandie Campbell: I would be delighted to.
Q41 Lord Judd: When you get this valuable result of research, are there arrangements
across the European Union for sharing it with departments other than the Ministries of the
Interior and our own Home Office? It seems to me that the more we hear from you, the
more all this has immense implications for health, social provision and all kinds of issues in
the social realm. I wondered how much the research is shared with others who can play a
part in prevention.
Mandie Campbell: Each country around Europe has what is called a focal point, which is
the main contact into the EMCDDA. The UK focal point is the Department of Health, so we
work very closely with them from a Home Office, law enforcement perspective, but health
colleagues take responsibility for gathering all of the data together that goes to the
EMCDDA. That certainly is the case in a number of other European Member States. That
information is then brought together and published on the EMCDDA website, so it is
available and accessible to all Member States across different departments in different areas.
Certainly, health colleagues have full access to that data.
Q42 Lord Avebury: Briefly, what is the difficulty in harmonising definitions and methods
of data collection throughout the EU?
Mandie Campbell: Partly it is to do with the legislative frameworks in different countries.
Different countries have different ways of categorising offences of drug use. It is to do with
the fact that we collect data in different frequencies, so we are able to show a picture and a
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
pattern of, for example, treatment use that, when you only take snapshots every five years in
different countries, can be a very different picture in one year from that two or three years
later. Partly, it would be a cost issue, of surveying on a much more frequent basis in different
countries than we do here. It is also to do with definitions. For example, when we define
“problem drug use” in this country for treatment purposes—obviously we provide
treatment across the full range of addictive substances—we talk specifically about heroin and
crack cocaine because those are the products that largely drive acquisitive crime and,
therefore, the costs of illicit drug use in this country. In different countries, different
products are counted within their groups of different problem drugs. So methamphetamine
will be included in one country’s categorisation. Different countries’ terminology applies to
different things, so it is very difficult to measure the things across different Member States.
Lord Dear: This is not a question; it is to try to get my comment on the record at this
opportune moment. We are back again to terminology and the accurate collection of data. I
really think that, somewhere in our report, taking the remarks that have just been made—
they have been made several times in this evidence session—it would be useful if, yet again,
we as a Sub-Committee flagged up the need for commonality throughout the EU. We meet
this problem in other areas as well as drugs. It seems to be blindingly obvious that one needs
to count sheep as sheep, not sheep as goats.
The Chairman: It is easier said than done, of course, but nevertheless I agree. On the basis
of the evidence that we have heard this morning, this is one of the areas we will want to
look at. I think Lord Mackenzie has a second part to his question, although some of it was
covered by the evidence we had on West Africa.
Q43 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: We have talked about joint working and cooperation at policy level, sharing intelligence and so on. At a more practical level, between
police forces, can you explain how collaboration between law enforcement agencies across
Europe brings added value to policies that aim to reduce the supply of illegal drugs? Do you
think that the current action that we are taking goes far enough?
Mandie Campbell: I have talked a bit about, for example, the platform in West Africa and
working together to disrupt supply routes. Law enforcement colleagues work across Europe
in a variety of different fora, so as well as the liaison officer network there are obviously
Europol, Interpol, Eurojust and work on European arrest warrants. Across a broad range of
different law enforcement areas, there is collaboration. That effort is able to disrupt drug
supply in a number of different ways. I have lots of examples of particular operations that
have been carried out between colleagues from different Member States, also using the
Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, which is based in Lisbon. It directs maritime
activity, again looking at interception, and is manned by a number of different Member
States. There is lots of evidence of very big interceptions, not least in this country back in
July: an interception of 1.2 tonnes of 90% pure cocaine, which was destined for the
Netherlands, but was coming via the UK in a container ship. Working together with
colleagues from France and the maritime centre, UK Border Agency officials were able to
intercept that shipment, make six arrests and seize that product with a street value of
somewhere in the region of £300 million. That was a huge success in disrupting supplies of
drugs into Europe.
Q44 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: You have talked about success, and I accept
that. If you had the power, is there anything that you would do now, if you could implement
it, to improve the co-operation that is going on? That is what we are looking at.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Mandie Campbell: It has recently been agreed that there will be an EU policy cycle. There
will be eight areas that colleagues across Europe should focus on in relation to organised
crime. It sets the priorities across those eight areas. Four of those, in particular, are focused
on drugs. There is a policy area focusing on the western Balkans, and drug routes and supply
through there. There is one on West Africa, and the UK is leading that part of the policy
group. There is one on container traffic; our French colleagues lead that area. There is one
on new psychoactive substances; our Dutch colleagues are leading that. All of those are
done in collaboration with other Member States. It has set some really helpful clear
priorities, saying that this is where we really ought to be focusing our law enforcement effort
going forward.
The Chairman: Is there anything that you could share with the Committee, not now but in
writing, about some of these examples of ways in which this collaboration has really worked?
Obviously, if you share it with us, it will end up in our report, so we are not asking you to
do so with matters that would be sensitive if they became public. Of course, the more that
the public, through reports like the one that we are writing, get to know these things, the
better. Then they understand that this is not just a lot of people getting together in a
meeting room in Brussels. It is something rather more operational than that. Is there
anything you could let us have?
Mandie Campbell: I would be delighted to.
Lord Mawson: It would also be interesting to know what has not worked, with some
practical detail about why. Your positive story about some of these relationships rather sits
at odds with quite a lot of the experience of this Committee in other areas about what is
happening in Europe in practice.
Mandie Campbell: I will find those and add them to the note.
Q45 Lord Judd: We have seen written evidence that suggests that European Union-level
anti-trafficking policy can actually end up supporting corrupt local regimes and may be in
contravention of human rights issues; Nigeria might be an example. In your experience of
working with European Union-level trafficking policy, are these criticisms in fact well
founded?
Emma Haddad: We do not have evidence that EU-level action in this field directly or
indirectly ends up supporting corrupt regimes or may be in contravention of human rights
issues. It is something that we, as the UK but also with other Member States of the EU, take
extremely seriously. Obviously, the international collaboration and assistance in this area,
the examples that Mandie has been setting out, are extremely important in addressing our
key security concerns in this field of counter-narcotics. But in all our practice and
operational practice, we follow wider Foreign Office guidance on interaction with particular
countries and what we are and are not allowed to do. We take great care to ensure that
our action does not have unintended consequences, so we expect EU partners and the
Commission to do the same.
Lord Judd: Can I give you a specific example? We have heard the suggestion that in Nigeria
a major beneficiary of policy is the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency. However, the
investigatory skills of this agency, it has been suggested to us, are rudimentary. Most of the
agents have only the most basic training and investigations depend on information from the
public, luck and the use of violence, such as the routine shooting of cannabis farmers. Is this
a valid criticism and are there other examples of unintended harm?
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Emma Haddad: Again, we saw this example in the written evidence to the Committee. It is
not something that we are aware of. It is not something our SOCA liaison officers are aware
of. The examples that we talked about earlier in West Africa and working with the Nigerian
law enforcement agencies seem to be positive. But we are very aware—
Lord Judd: If you are not aware of them, and if there are reports that this is happening,
how does the European Union respond to those reports? They do not just leave it; they do
not wash their hands of it, presumably.
Emma Haddad: We can take these concerns back to our colleagues at EU level and ask if
anybody else has any evidence. It is something that we would take very seriously.
Lord Judd: But do you monitor how effective any follow-up action has been?
Emma Haddad: We will take it back to our colleagues, check if anybody else has any
evidence and check with our other law enforcement colleagues at national level. There is a
limit to how much more we can do if we are not actually seeing the evidence and, by all
accounts, we are not coming across it.
Q46 Lord Richard: This is more of a comment in the form of a question. When one is
dealing with international action of this sort, obviously you have to have in mind that there
are going to be unintended consequences. You cannot guarantee that there are not, but you
do your best to make sure that there are not. So far, you have no evidence that there are
any. Is that basically where we are?
Emma Haddad: Yes. Following wider government—Foreign Office—guidance, we would
not be doing anything where we thought that we were directly or indirectly having an
unintended consequence. But it is about things that we do not know are going on, and we
will do as much as we can to find out if they are going on.
Lord Richard: Yes, but the way in which the policy is actually effective is that it balances a
very difficult area. You have to make sure that you are effective in terms of drug
enforcement. You also have to try to ensure that you do not tread on human rights toes. As
far as I am concerned, that is an extremely difficult balance to create. On the whole, as I
understand it, you are saying that, so far, you have no evidence that you have gone on the
wrong side of that.
Emma Haddad: As far as we know, we have not. We are extremely careful. Obviously,
action in this area is in tricky regions of the world.
The Chairman: I think that you are aware of the allegations that Dr Axel Klein has made
to the Committee, which obviously make up part of the evidence that we are accumulating.
It would be helpful to us if you could let us have a short note as to why you do not think
that they are well founded, particularly if you could say something about what you and the
Foreign Office see as the Nigerian situation and the case for helping their agency even if it is
not very skilful at the moment. It would be helpful if you gave us some points on how you
and the Foreign Office take up issues of human rights abuses by that agency. Would that be
okay?
Emma Haddad: We will do that, absolutely.
Q47 Lord Judd: Another issue raised by written evidence that we have received is that
anti-drug trafficking initiatives, at either European or national level, can at best only hope to
displace the trafficking of drugs from one region to another, which ultimately can result in
further countries being affected by drug trafficking routes. Is this evidence of the
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
displacement of drug trafficking routes evident in the work that you have been involved with
at the European level? If it is, what are you doing about it?
Mandie Campbell: It is inevitable that if we are successful against certain criminal groups
there will be some displacement of activity, but we design our operational activity to take
account of that. We expect that to happen and therefore we are looking for that
displacement and how we can move on and take more action. For example, we have been
doing a lot of work with Spanish colleagues and Crimestoppers in the past few years to
target British criminals living in Spain. We have been focusing particularly on 65 individuals
for whom there were European arrest warrants outstanding. Of those 65, 47 have now been
arrested and brought back and action is being taken against them. That is very positive, but
we have heard—it is very early days and we do not know the extent of it—that there are
signs that some British criminals are now relocating themselves into Portugal in the hope
that they will be less visible to the big law enforcement effort that has been going on
between UK and Spanish colleagues. We are monitoring that; law enforcement colleagues
are aware that it is happening and are shifting their effort and activity to tackle it. We also
know that, through that displacement, organised crime groups become more vulnerable. So
when they are not operating on their home ground, as it were, they are more susceptible to
law enforcement intervention. By displacing them, we force them to change their operating
models, so we then have more opportunities to intervene and make more arrests. There is
displacement, but it is an inevitable consequence.
Lord Judd: Would it be over-egging it to say that, in some ways, displacement is actually
helpful because it enables you to be more effective?
Mandie Campbell: By the very nature of the displacement, it means that we are having an
effect. If we were not impacting on people’s ability to carry out their criminal activities, they
would not feel the need to be moving to other regions. I see that as a positive sign; it means
that we are having an impact. We need to make sure that we are constantly staying ahead of
the game, wherever they go and whatever changes they make. Sometimes it is a
displacement of activity rather than location.
Lord Judd: But presumably there are unfortunate consequences in the countries to which
they are displaced. People will be corrupted and drawn in who would not otherwise be
corrupted or drawn in.
Mandie Campbell: Across Europe, organised crime groups are operating to lesser or
greater extents. If we are aware that people are moving their activity, we are able to take
action to intercept and intervene to try to prevent them. Again, something I might be able to
write to the Committee about is that we have some really good evidence of a particular
individual, where we took concerted action against him as an individual and did everything
to, essentially, make every aspect of his life very difficult. He was a known importer of
heroin. That combination of activities managed to disrupt his entire supply chain from
Turkey all the way back to the streets of the UK. The group of people involved in that
displacement disruption got total sentences of about 180 years in prison. Targeting one
individual by continually taking action against him caused him to take more risk and
therefore made him more vulnerable. Therefore, we were able to take quite assertive
action.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: I suppose that a success of a European policy would
be if you forced them to move out of the European Union altogether.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Mandie Campbell: That would certainly be an option, although obviously, because we have
such good co-operation with our EU colleagues in law enforcement, we can get action taken
if people are operating within the confines of the European Union.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: But if the heat was as powerful in the other countries
of the European Union as it is here, presumably there would be no advantage in moving to
another European country.
Mandie Campbell: That is true.
Q48 Lord Avebury: How is the European Union monitoring the displacement activity
caused by the fungus which affects the opium crop in Afghanistan and which has brought
about a significant reduction in the volume of that production? I have a related question: has
the European Union conducted or does it intend to conduct any research on the biological
approach to crops such as the opium crop in Afghanistan?
Mandie Campbell: I am afraid that Afghanistan opium crops are not something about which
I have extensive knowledge. It would probably be more helpful if I wrote to the Committee
in response to that.
Q49 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: The next question follows on the same theme; it is
about the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. I just want to slip in a supplementary
which refers right back to some information that you gave us at the beginning. Simply, you
said that the price of cocaine had gone right up and that the purity of the product had been
reduced to 20%. My question is about the remaining 80%. It has been said that whatever is
used as a supplement to bulk out the drug itself can be harmful in its own right. I wanted to
know whether that was the case; if so, it is obviously a serious matter.
Mandie Campbell: It is indeed and you are absolutely right. A number of products are used
to cut drugs, to get them down to street-level availability. Those can range from caffeine,
which is a common product that is put in, to products that can be carcinogenic and can often
be extremely harmful to the individuals. That is something that we are very aware of and
communicate a lot through our various campaigns, including our FRANK website. But you
are right. We should be very alive to the fact that it is not only the drug itself that is harmful;
it is all the other things. That is a really important message, particularly for young people
who are taking products. It is really important, too, in relation to the new psychoactive
substances. People really have no idea what they are taking. They buy products on the
internet now, for example called “Ivory Wave”, and they have no idea what the components
of that product are. It is important that we keep giving those messages.
Q50 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Thank you very much. I will return now to
trafficking. We are told that the EU subcontracts its anti-trafficking work to UNODC. It
would be interesting to know what the interplay is between this organisation and the bodies
and institutions of the EU in this area. Is it of benefit to European policy to rely heavily on
UNODC? I see that in your evidence you say that the EU is very active and is one of
UNODC’s main donors, donating $15.6 million. This also includes funding for their
programme to convert illicit drug trafficking in West Africa, which has been talked about
previously.
Emma Haddad: You are right. UNODC is a very active bidder for EU-level funding for
counter-narcotics projects. Obviously, all projects go through an open bidding call-fortender process, as in any area of EU policy where there is funding available. They are often
successful because they have expertise in this area. They are a known and credible
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
organisation. They have geographic coverage, sometimes, where others do not, including
Member States but also other organisations. But they are also a known partner, and the
criteria for successful bidding include financial viability, legal personality and operational
capacity. Because they have worked at EU level with the Commission and Member States for
some time, that is all known, so and often they are successful. They are not the only
successful bidder, but they are one of them. As you say, the EU has been a large donor to
UNODC over past years, second only to the US in recent years.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: But the overall impression is that it is a beneficial
relationship, although probably quite an expensive one.
Emma Haddad: Indeed, and for those reasons—that they have the expertise, geographical
coverage and the experience.
Q51 Lord Mawson: Are transparent monitoring systems in place by which to asses and
review the impact of supply-side interventions?
Mandie Campbell: We have touched on this a little. We all recognise that, first, there is a
lot of data on supply-side interventions, but we know that we need to get better at
collecting evidence about the impact of those interventions. The simple answer is that we
need more. The EMCDDA has recognised this and initiated a piece of work on indicators
for drugs markets. They are looking, and different Member States are co-operating in this
work, at trying to identify the indicators for the drugs markets themselves, for the crime
relating to drugs and for the supply-side work, and at what indicators we all ought to be
using across Europe and measuring against subsequently. That work has only recently
started. It was kicked off back in October last year with a workshop with a number of
Member States attending. That work will now be taken forward over the course of the next
year. I hope that, perhaps, next time I am here before you I will be able to say something
about the product of that activity.
Q52 Lord Tomlinson: I have two very quick questions; I will put them together. To what
extent is EU anti-drug trafficking policy based on evidence? Equally, to what extent is antidrug trafficking policy cost-effective? If you regard it as less than optimally cost-effective, how
would you improve it?
Mandie Campbell: On the evidence side, I mentioned the ERA-NET, the European
research area network, and the work that is going to be done to improve the amount of
evidence. There is recognition that, while there is some evidence, it is not comprehensive
enough, and that by bringing together the activity and co-ordinating the research across
different Member States we will get more product. From the UK perspective, we have a
drugs strategy research group which brings together different government departments,
research data that the Department of Health and the Home Office would undertake, and
different research councils such as the Medical Research Council, so that, within the UK we
can try to co-ordinate our research efforts so that we are not always doing the same things.
The idea is that in Europe ERA-NET will help us to do the same thing, so that we can have
better co-ordination and, therefore, better value for money on the investment in research.
We will not all be duplicating.
On whether our policies are cost-effective, again, it is back to the evidence. We have lots of
evidence, for example, on how cost-effective our policies on drug treatment are. We know,
for example, that in this country for every £1 we invest in drug treatment, at least £2.50 is
saved in reductions in crime and other costs. That is quite consistent with evidence on the
treatment. Again, it is the supply-side intervention where we really do not have that data. In
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
the UK we are committed to doing that and we have a piece of work ongoing looking at
enforcement activity and how we try to show the return on investment on that activity. We
will be working with colleagues through the EMCDDA to try to do that more broadly
across Europe.
The Chairman: Would the result of that research be something that you would share with
other European countries?
Mandie Campbell: It certainly would. We have undertaken to do an evaluation of the UK
Drugs Strategy. That work is part of that evaluation process, in the framework that we are
creating to evaluate the different aspects of the strategy.
Q53 Lord Avebury: We have already spoken about the policy on harm reduction and
the relative effectiveness of our holistic policy. But am I correct in saying that the UK has
decided to move away from the principle of harm reduction in its new UK drugs strategy
2010, and that it is offering instead support for people who choose recovery as an achievable
way out of dependency? How does that chime with the EU’s recent promotion of harm
reduction principles?
Mandie Campbell: The short answer is that, no, we have not moved away from harm
reduction. We have said that we need to be more ambitious and that harm reduction is not
enough. There has been a lot of criticism of previous policies that were deemed to be harm
reduction—for example, substitute prescribing, with people being parked on methadone.
Certainly, for people who are prescribed substitutes, we see big reductions in their criminal
behaviour, blood-borne disease transfers and so on. So they are harm reduction. But the
Government have said quite clearly that we need to be more ambitious, so while we of
course need to reduce crime, and therefore the harms—of course we need to reduce
blood-borne diseases and transfers of disease—we need to go further. That is part of the
heart of the new strategy, which is saying that we need to help people to recover fully from
their drug addiction and so become free of dependency and addiction. It is only through
doing so that we help them to fully reintegrate back into society.
We also recognise that harm reduction is important. It is recognised in the drugs strategy in
the fact that it encompasses the broad range of treatment but also control as well as
recovery. The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse action plan also recognises
it. We would want to continue to encourage and support the principle of harm reduction
across EU Member States. A number of other countries are in a very different position from
the UK. We are right to be more ambitious, because we have made some very good
progress and we need now to push the boundaries and go even further. If you take, for
example, HIV infection through needle exchange, the rate among illicit intravenous drug
users in Spain in 30%, whereas in the UK it is only about 1.5%. There is a massive difference,
and it is quite right that the EU as a whole is focusing on harm reduction to try to really
drive down those very harmful figures, whereas, having already made some quite good
progress in the UK, we need to push further.
Lord Avebury: So the short answer is that we have neither abandoned nor watered down
any of the existing components of our harm reduction policies.
Mandie Campbell: We have not. We have simply added to them to be more ambitious.
Q54 Lord Mawson: Your written evidence expresses some concern about European
emphasis on the participation of citizens in the formulation of drug policy and increased
encouragement of localism in the formulation of drug policy. Can you further elucidate your
concerns in this area and what you see as the barriers to localism in drug policy?
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Mandie Campbell: I am sorry, but our written answer could have been clearer on this;
from your question, that is quite obvious to me. We actually welcome very much the
participation of citizens in our drugs policies. A lot of our strategies are very much about
more inclusion for people at a local level. We are certainly pushing through policies such as
the crime maps, so there is more transparency. Helping people at a local level to understand
what the problems are in their area is part of that. It is also about involving people at a local
level in the solution. For example, we have just launched a fund where we are providing
funds to different voluntary and community sector organisations to really focus on drug
misuse with young people in communities. Part of their remit is to stimulate lots of very
local-level community and voluntary sector organisations to get involved in helping to
support young people away from substance misuse. When we were formulating the UK
drugs strategy, we had a consultation. We had 1,800 responses. We took those responses
into account in the formulation of the strategy. We think that it is very important that
communities are involved. We were trying to convey in the answer that different countries,
including the UK, are at different stages of their move towards more local approaches to
drug harms, and therefore we want to move forward ourselves on a national basis to try to
make sure we get that right before the EU steps in to engage directly with members of our
community on drugs policies. That is what we thought the question was trying to ask.
Q55 The Chairman: I note that you have adjusted a bit what was put in the written
evidence to us. Do you not think that, for example, various cities across Europe, in dialogue
with each other—their city authorities, their local NGOs and so on—might have quite a lot
to learn from each other? Why does all this have to be passed through a national portal in
order to take place? Would it not make sense for Birmingham and Prague to exchange views
on their policies, if that is what their local governments think would be useful? Is there not
just a little too much of an attempt to control what could be rather a valuable exchange of
experience and peer-group review?
Mandie Campbell: I agree. There is absolutely no intention in the evidence that different
areas of Europe should not be able to communicate directly with each other, which of
course they should and do. We are trying to convey that, in terms of the practicalities of
exchanging information, if it goes via central points such as from the UK to the EMCDDA,
the information is then able to be disseminated out. If there was some valuable learning in
one city of a particular Member State, every Member State across the Union gets the
opportunity to see that learning rather than just that bilateral exchange.
Q56 Lord Mawson: A lot of the evidence you have given today is very positive. I wonder
which practitioners on the ground would agree with a lot of this. In my experience,
sometimes the world can look like one thing up at the top and on the ground it actually
looks quite different. In that subtle change between the top and the bottom, all sorts of
things begin to change. I wonder what time you spend in your working life with people
operating on the ground. How much are those connections occurring, and how much
understanding is there between this real grass-roots experience and some of the policy
committee work that is going on?
Mandie Campbell: I agree absolutely; it is really important. I try to get out and speak to
people in drug misuse centres, for example, and to colleagues working operationally on the
ground at least every other week if I can in my programme. Only last week, on Friday, I was
in a drug misuse residential rehabilitation centre in Wandsworth, talking to a group of ladies
there about their experiences of the drug system in this country. I find it hugely valuable. My
team in the office must sigh every time I go out, because I come back with a long list of
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
questions about all sorts of things and suggestions for things that we might want to consider.
It is really important that we have that connection. We do not want people like me sitting in
my office in Whitehall, thinking that I know what is happening out there on the ground
without going out and seeing it. I make a point of doing it. My team are out all the time.
Every day of the week, somebody from my team will be out somewhere, having a
conversation with either the practitioners who are administering the system on the ground
or the users experiencing it. It is very important.
Q57 Lord Avebury: Let me return to the subject of new psychoactive substances. You
said in your written evidence that EU legislation can be slow and cumbersome and that more
work is needed in this area. You told us earlier that we in this country already have
mechanisms for temporary banning processes on substances classified as being harmful on
the recommendation of the ACMD. How would we intend to transfer our knowledge and
experience into the European Union? Would there be an equivalent, for example, of the
ACMD at European level? How else do you think that the process of looking at these new
psychoactive substances at European level could be accelerated?
Mandie Campbell: That is the work that I mentioned earlier that we are trying to do
through the Horizontal Drugs Group and working with the EMCDDA. There is not a
European equivalent of the ACMD, but obviously different countries in Europe have their
own equivalents. We are working through the Horizontal Drugs Group to say how we can
bring together the information that we have. I mentioned standards earlier, and we are very
keen to promote that so that the work that we are doing to build up our forensic library in
the UK can be shared among other European Member States, so that each one is also
working towards that common capacity to share data.
We are also working through that group to change the Council decision on psychoactive
substances. I mentioned earlier that there was a recognition that the decision from 2005 is
not responsive enough now to the situation we find ourselves in. That is what is reflected in
our written evidence. We have found it necessary in the UK to forge ahead and take
decisions on new substances coming to our notice and to ban them, when Europe is catching
us up and a recommendation was made some months after we have had already done that.
There is recognition in the Commission that that is not a tenable situation, so it has now
initiated this work that will look to fundamentally improve the speed and responsiveness of
Member States and of EU institutions to these new products. Because we are in a very
fortunate position of having lots of evidence of how to do it and what works, we are able to
feed that in. But we are also very keen that we learn from other EU Member States,
particularly in terms of the intervention activity, and work with them to see how we can
take action and work with colleagues at the very end of the chain. For example, on
mephedrone, we have worked with Chinese colleagues and they actually banned
mephedrone in China back in September last year. That was the source of a lot of product
that was heading towards the UK, so that was a really important piece of activity that will
make a real difference. The more we can work with colleagues across Europe to help with
that type of activity, the better.
Lord Avebury: I recognise that there is no analogue of the ACMD at European level. Do
you think that there would be any merit in creating one?
Mandie Campbell: That is a very good question. The ACMD is obviously here to advise the
Government about products as they relate to the UK. Again, it is back to the whole issue of
subsidiarity, in the very first question. Different Member States face very different problems
and challenges. We are able, with the ACMD, to work on a work programme which is very
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
specific to our needs here in this country. The danger of having a European body is that they
may only work on one or two things that might be of interest to everybody, and we may
already be a long way down the line of having that work done. Personally, I think that having
a national function is likely to be far more responsive to our own needs than having a
European body.
Lord Avebury: The alternative might be to have a mechanism for rapidly transmitting the
recommendations of the ACMD to its equivalents at national level in other European Union
countries.
Mandie Campbell: That is absolutely right. All the information and product that we get
from the ACMD, we make available to colleagues elsewhere in Europe.
Q58 The Chairman: But does the Commission, which after all is going to be drawing up a
new strategy and so on, have adequate access to advisory bodies or experts before it makes
those proposals? I do not mean just through the horizontal group and the national policymakers such as you. Do they actually reach out and have the kind of technical advice that
you so value from the advisory committee? Surely, if they do not, they ought to have.
Mandie Campbell: I am not aware that they have that. Again we can make those inquiries
and write to you; I do not know if Emma is aware. I think that they rely on the evidence that
comes through from Member States. They would be bringing together the equivalent of the
product from ACMD from different Member States, and then using that to inform any
decisions that they want to take at an EU level.
The Chairman: I can see that that has to be one strand of input to the Commission.
Equally, I can see that, since the Commission does not actually take decisions on drugs law
and policy, but the 27 Member States do, there would not in any case be an exact replica of
the situation here between the advisory council and the Home Secretary. Nevertheless it
seems to me that the Commission, if it is to have a role in formulating drugs strategy, really
does need to look beyond just the 27 Member States and its own, perhaps not very
extensive, experience. Perhaps that is something that we will be looking into further when
we talk to the Commissioner about this. In the past there has often been criticism that the
Commission is pretty haphazard in the way that it takes advice before it makes legislative
proposals, policy strategies and so on, and that if it was a bit more systematic then the
quality of those proposals might be a good deal better. Do you have any views on that at all?
Mandie Campbell: I would be very interested to hear from the Commissioner following
their evidence session with you as to their ideas. It may well be that they are able to
reassure you that they have that access.
The Chairman: I am sure that they will try to. Whether they succeed is another matter,
but I am sure that they will say that everything is fine.
Q59 Lord Avebury: Finally, are you going to respond to the ACMD report that has just
been published on consideration of the novel psychoactive substances, and in particular to
the two top recommendations that the UK should be proactive in developing EU and
international networks to address the issue of NPS and that steps should be taken at EU
level to encourage source countries to halve the manufacture of such substances?
Mandie Campbell: Absolutely. The report was issued only yesterday, so we are considering
it. We will be responding formally to ACMD. As I said in my earlier evidence, those two
particular areas are ones that we are already very actively involved in pursuing.
Home Office – Oral evidence (QQ 25-59)
Lord Avebury: Could we have a copy of any response that you make to the ACMD?
Mandie Campbell: Of course
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. You have given us a great deal of your time.
Alas, I cannot suggest that your time with us has been quite the grass-roots activity that Lord
Mawson is anxious to encourage. Nevertheless, you have been very generous in giving us
this time and you have given us a lot of very valuable material. I think that you have promised
to supplement that with one or two bits of written material, which will be really valuable.
Thank you very much. We look forward to carrying on this dialogue with the Minister on 7
December.
Mandie Campbell: Thank you very much.
Emma Haddad: Thank you.
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
Inquiry into the EU Drugs Strategy
1. We very much enjoyed the evidence session on the EU Drugs Strategy on the 26
October and we were delighted to share with you the Home Office position ahead of
Lord Henley’s appearance before the Committee next month. We are now taking the
opportunity to follow up in a number of areas where we think it would be helpful for the
committee to have more clarity.
2. Firstly, with regards to the statement made on falling drug use. We can add some
further detail to this statement. England and Wales has around the lowest recorded
level of drug use in the adult population since measurement began in 1996. Individuals
reporting use of any drug in the last year fell significantly from 11.1% in 1996 to 8.8%
2010/11, as did use of any stimulant drug from 4.4% to 3.5%. Class A drug use remained
stable. There was also a substantial fall in the use of cannabis from 9.5% in 1996 to 6.8%
2010/11 and a significant reduction in the use of powder cocaine from 2.4% in 2009/10
to 2.1% in 2010/11. This scale of reduction is also mirrored in younger adults aged 16-24
where there have been significant reductions between 1996 and 2010/11 in the use of
any drug, any class A drug and any stimulant drug as well as in specific drug types. The
use of cannabis in the last year for example reduced from 26% to 17.1% over this time
period. 81
3. There were an estimated 306,000 opiate and/or crack cocaine drug users in England in
2009/10. 82 This is a significant reduction from 321,229 in 2008/09. There are also strong
signs that the young people are not starting to use heroin and crack cocaine to the same
degree as previous generations with significant drops in the number of heroin and/or
crack cocaine users under the age of 35 and the number of young people aged 18-24
presenting to treatment for opiate use more than halving from 11,309 in 2005/06 to
5,532 in 2010/11. 83
4. The prevalence of drug use among 11 to 15 year olds has declined since 2001. In 2010,
18% of pupils reported that they had ever taken drugs and 12% said they had taken drugs
in the last year, compared with 29% and 20% in 2001. 84
81 Smith, K. & Flatley, J. (Eds) (2011) Drug Misuse Declared: Findings from the 2010/11 British Crime Survey. Home Office
Statistical Bulletin 12/11. London: Home Office
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research statistics/crimeresearch/hosb1211/hosb1211?view=Binary
82 Hay, G., Gannon, M., Casey, J. and Millar, T. (2011) National and regional estimates of the prevalence of opiate and/or
crack cocaine use 2009–10: a summary of key findings. London: National Treatment Agency.
http://www.nta.nhs.uk/uploads/prevalencesummary0910.pdf
83 Hay, G., Gannon, M., Casey, J. and Millar, T. (2011) National and regional estimates of the prevalence of opiate and/or
crack cocaine use 200–10: a summary of key findings. London: National Treatment Agency.
http://www.nta.nhs.uk/uploads/prevalencestats2009-10fullreport.pdf
84 Fuller, E. (2011) Smoking, drinking and drug use among young people in England in 2010. London: NHS Information Centre
for Health and Social Care.
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/webfiles/publications/003_Health_Lifestyles/Smoking%20drinking%20drug%20use%202010/Smoking_dri
nking_and_drug_use_among_young_people_in_England_2010_Full_report.pdf
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
5. We need to clarify that these statistics and the statements that were made during the
evidence session refer to England and not the UK as a whole.
6. We also wish to clarify that there are some statistics available that show regional
variation; estimates of opiate and/or crack cocaine users, drug use in the general
population and numbers in drug treatment.
7. Opiate and/or Crack Cocaine Use estimates are broken down by region, age and gender.
In terms of regional differences, the North West Region has the largest prevalence of
opiate and/or crack use at just over 11 per thousand population aged 15 to 64 followed
closely by the North East and Yorkshire & the Humber at just under 11 per thousand.
The East of England has the lowest prevalence at around 6 per thousand. London has a
higher estimated prevalence of crack cocaine use at just under 8 per thousand
population, in comparison to prevalence of 7 per thousand in the North West and
between around 4 and 6 per thousand in all other Regions.
8. There is also regional variation in the age distribution of opiate and/or crack use. The
North West has the highest prevalence rate in the 35 to 64 age range which, at just over
than 10 per thousand, is much greater than the other Government Office Regions.
London has the highest prevalence rate in the 15 to 24 age range, but at around 9 per
thousand population is similar to the prevalence in the North East. Meanwhile the North
East has the highest prevalence rate in the 25 to 34 age range which, at just fewer than
31 per thousand, is much greater than the other Government Office Regions. Further
information on the breakdown of Opiate and/or Crack Cocaine Use is avaliable at
http://www.nta.nhs.uk/facts-prevalence.aspx.
9. We can also provide further information from the British Crime Survey (BCS) report
“Drug misuse declared in England and Wales” on the breakdowns of drug use by a range
of personal, household and area characteristics including; age, gender, marital and
employment status, region, deprivation indices, and output area classification.
10. As in previous years, estimates from the 2010/11 BCS showed that there appeared to be
clear relationships between specific characteristics and likelihood of drug use in the last
year.
11. The level of any drug use was highest among the 16 to 19 age group (23.0%), while Class
A drug use was higher for 20 to 24 year olds (8.2%) than all other age groups. Further
information can be found at: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/scienceresearch-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1211/
12. Data on drug users entering treatment by region are provided in Annex A.
13. We also undertook to write with further information regarding the prevalence of drug
use in European countries. As this amounts to rather a large amount of data, we have
collated this at Annex B.
14. During our discussions about the EU’s current Research and Development programme,
we agreed to write to the committee with some further information. We can confirm
that the European Commission leads on coordinating and funding new research through
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with the purpose of adding European value to
individual countries’ programmes of work.
15. The ERA-NET (European Research Area Network) scheme also sits under FP7. The
objective of ERA-NET is to develop and strengthen the coordination of national and
regional research programmes. Under an ERA-NET the European Commission provides
funding for the process of coordination, while Member States which choose to
participate fund the actual research. To date there has not been a drugs research
focussed ERA-NET but ERA-NET 2012 includes a call for a ‘Drug demand and supply
reduction ERA-NET’. This supports the EU Drug Strategy 2005-2012 statement that
information, research and evaluation are key elements in understanding the drug
problem better than at present.
16. A proposal for an ERA-NET on drugs, with the proposed name of ERA-NID is in
preparation for submission to the European Commission by February 2012. The aim of
the ERA-NID would be to enhance EU research capability and capacity in drug-related
research by improving coordination, cooperation and synergies between national and
regional funding programmes. The ERA-NID would establish a platform for identifying
priorities for research in the field of illicit drugs, and the development of a joint strategy,
with the ultimate goal of pooling of resources and the launch of joint research projects,
enhancing collaboration among researchers from different countries. The effective
dissemination of outputs from the ERA-NID would also be an integral part of the work.
The Netherlands are leading work on developing the bid, together with the UK, Belgium,
France Italy, and Portugal.
17. The EMCDDA is not a major funder of new research itself – it exists to provide the EU
and its Member States with a factual overview of European drug problems and a solid
evidence base to support the drugs debate through the collection of harmonised data
from individual countries. However through membership of the Horizontal Drugs Group
and joint working with the European Commission it also provides an advice and
challenge function to support and further the role of cross-country drug research.
EMCDDA also publishes monographs on selected issues. Where relevant these
monographs summarise key research findings. The ERA-NID proposal aims to make the
most of the information and expertise available through the EMCDDA.
18. We agreed to write in response to Lord Mawson’s question about cooperation that had
not worked. A clear example would be the EMCDDA itself in its early years. At that
time the EMCDDA was by no means as effective as it is today. An external evaluation of
the first five years of the agency noted in 2000 that the EMCDDA needed to define a
more focused work programme based on a limited number of priorities. It is a tribute to
the current Director Wolfgang Götz, Marcel Reimen who was until recently the Chair of
its Management Board, and the scientific staff of the agency, that the EMCDDA is so
highly respected today.
19. During our discussions about drug displacement, we agreed to write to the Committee
in more detail about a case where we took concerted action against an organised
criminal group.
20. In July 2010, Tariq Dad and three associates were sentenced for conspiracy to supply
cocaine. Mr Dad had a long history of organised crime including heroin trafficking, money
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
laundering, fraud and blackmail. A systematic programme of disruption by the Serious
Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), in conjunction with Avon and Somerset Police,
progressively damaged his reputation amongst criminals and undermined his capacity to
stay in business. As Mr Dad’s influence deteriorated and his debts mounted, he made an
attempt to dominate the regional crack cocaine market and had to take a more hands-on
role. Evidence was obtained to charge him with conspiracy to supply cocaine.
21. Every link in Mr Dad’s drug distribution chain was attacked and dismantled – from street
dealers to suppliers in London and Turkey. Sentences totalling over 180 years have been
handed out as a result of operations by SOCA and its partners linked to this
investigation. Whilst we accept that some displacement of trafficking routes following
intervention activity is inevitable, this case demonstrates how concerted action can force
an organised crime group to alter their method of working, change their physical
location and therefore make them more vulnerable to law enforcement intervention.
22. We also wanted to clarify the allegations that EU counter-narcotics policy contributed to
human rights abuses in countries such as Nigeria. As we said during the evidence session,
the Government is very conscious of the dangers in providing counter-narcotics
assistance to countries overseas and follows strict guidelines to judge and manage the
risk that we do not, directly or indirectly, contribute to human rights abuses.
23. In regards to the specific allegations in Nigeria, we have consulted with colleagues in the
region who work on counter-narcotics, including representatives of the EU and the
UNODC and found no credible evidence to support the assertions in the submission by
Mr Klein. The EU has agreed to study the content of the written evidence presented to
the Committee and will ensure that the implementation of the project addresses valid
concerns. As a key economic power in the region, Nigeria’s support in tackling drug
trafficking through West Africa is crucial. The UK has a SOCA Liaison Officer (SLO)
posted to Nigeria working in partnership with the Nigerian National Drug Law
Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to combat drug trafficking via West Africa into the UK.
Excellent cooperation is afforded to SOCA by the NDLEA which has assisted our ability
to undertake operational activity. The UK Border Agency also has a programme of
training, Operation Westbridge, to improve the drugs interception capability of host
countries which continues to deliver numerous upstream heroin and cocaine seizures.
24. We also agreed to write to the Sub-Committee about whether the EU monitors the
drug displacement activity caused by a fungus which affects the opium crop in
Afghanistan. We understand that the EU has not had any involvement in monitoring
recent blights of the opium crop. The UN Office of Drugs and Crime is the main source
of reporting on Afghan opium production and cultivation through its annual Afghanistan
Opium Poppy Survey. Similarly, although the EU employs a range of upstream measures
to tackle the flow of illicit drugs, we are not aware that there is any intention to conduct
research on a biological approach to crops such as the opium crop in Afghanistan.
25. We also wanted to take this opportunity to clarify that when we were discussing cocaine
flows to the UK through West Africa that this cocaine emanates from the region of Latin
America, rather than one particular country.
26. During the evidence session, we also spoke about testing new psychoactive substances
and mentioned in particular that we had tested products found at Glastonbury music
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
festival. We would like to clarify that this work is part of the forensic early warning
system.
27. With regards to the work of the Commission and whether they consult independent
experts, we are aware that the Commission regularly consults with a wide range of
stakeholders and partners and in particular the International Narcotics Control Board.
We understand that you are gathering evidence from the Commission and they will be
able to elaborate further.
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
Annex A: Drug Treatment by region
Table 1 shows a regional breakdown of the numbers of adults starting treatment over the
past six years that data is available.
Table 1: Regional breakdown of adults starting drug treatment
Adults starting drug treatment
20052006200720082009201006
07
08
09
10
11
East
6674
6636
6103
6382
5787
5342
Midlands
East of
5960
5221
6465
7115
6591
5932
England
London
14682
15824
16019
16358
15305
14094
North East
4488
4323
4990
5094
4984
4719
North West 14075
13558
14093
14656
13638
12730
South East
9486
8243
9685
9313
8882
8559
South West 6913
7536
7148
7252
6655
6122
West
8855
8674
8650
9034
8595
7963
Midlands
Yorkshire & 10881
9341
8310
8442
7887
7793
Humberside
Figure 1: numbers of people starting drug treatment
The general trends nationally and regionally over the past six years show that demand for
drug treatment has leveled off. Most adults are in drug treatment for heroin and crack
problems, and there has been an ongoing reduction in the number of heroin and crack users
coming into treatment, which first became apparent in 2008-09. In particular, the number of
heroin and crack users aged under-30 coming into treatment has dropped significantly in
recent years. As can be seen from Table 1 and figure 1, all regions have seen the numbers of
adults starting drug treatment tail off in the past three years.
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
Annex B - Prevalence of drug use in European countries
School age population
1. The European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs (ESPAD) shows the
following trends across Europe 85. The ESPAD project was started due to the lack of
comparable data on substance use among European teenagers. In order to collect such
data, a common methodological protocol was established in the early 1990s, including a
master questionnaire. For pragmatic reasons the survey is conducted among students in
class rooms.
2. The overall aim of the ESPAD Project is to collect comparable data on substance use
among 15–16 year old students in as many European countries as possible. The most
important objectives in the long run are to monitor trends, and to compare trends
between countries and between groups of countries. In order to do so, the surveys are
repeated every four years, with 1995 as the starting point. The following analysis of drug
use among young people is based on data provided to ESPAD by participating countries.
All Illicit drug use
3. In 2007 the proportion of students having tried illicit drugs varied to a significant extent
among countries, from 5% in Romania to almost half (46%) of the student population in
the Czech Republic. However, the recent trend – between 2003 and 2007 – for cannabis
use among young people included in the ESPAD showed an increase in 6 countries, a
decrease in 12 countries and a more or less stable situation in 13 countries. These
changes are illustrated in Figure 1.
85
The last sweep of the ESPAD survey was undertaken in 2007 in 35 countries.
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
4. Figure 1: Changes between 2003 and 2007 in the lifetime use of any illicit
drug. All Students (Dots above the line represents increases while dots below
the line represents decreases)
5. Note: Any illicit drug includes cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, LSD or other
hallucinogens, crack, cocaine and heroin
Cannabis use
6. For lifetime use of cannabis a total of 3 countries displayed a recent increase while 13
countries displayed a clear decrease.
7. The biggest drops for relatively recent cannabis use (around 8 percentage points) have
taken place in France, Ireland and the United Kingdom. In spite of the big decreases
these countries are still among the top ten nations for use recent use of cannabis among
young people. Comparison of the 2007 results with those from that first year shows an
even bigger drop (10 and 13 percentage points, respectively). If only the end points are
compared, the Czech and Slovak Republics exhibit the largest increases (up around 10
percentage points each). This data is illustrated in Figure 2.
8. Figure 2: Changes between 2003 and 2007 in the use of marijuana or hashish
during the last 30 days. All Students (Dots above the line represents increases
while dots below the line represents decreases)
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
Other illicit drug use
9. It is more difficult to observe trends in other types of illicit drug in the school age
population due to the small numbers involved. However, out of all illicit drugs asked
about in the ESPAD questionnaire, ecstasy shares the position as the second-most
common drug with cocaine and amphetamines. Lifetime use of each of these three drugs
is reported, on average, by 3% of the students in the 2007 data collection. During the
period of 1995–2007, no general trends or gender differences are visible for ecstasy use,
not least because only 2–3% report any use over the period of 1995–2007. However, in
individual countries some changes may be noted. Ireland, together with the United
Kingdom, displays a drop in lifetime ecstasy use during the period in question, from
roughly 8% in 1995 to 4% in 2007, with the significant change taking place as early as
between 1995 and 1999. Four countries, all in the east of Europe (the Czech Republic,
Estonia, Hungary and the Slovak Republic), show an upward trend between 1995 and
2007, with a total increase of roughly six percentage points.
10. Further information on drug use among young people in Europe can be found on the
ESPAD website: http://www.espad.org/
Adult population
11. Few countries in Europe collect annual data on the prevalence of drug use among the
general population (apart from England and Wales and Sweden which collects annual
data on cannabis use as part of a public health survey). The most frequent data collection
via surveys of drug prevalence is every other year (in countries such as Scotland, Spain
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
and Italy) whilst in some countries, for example Germany, data collection is not part of a
continuous series (i.e. a regular data collection routine). This makes comparing data
between countries problematic.
12. Adult survey data across countries is not directly comparable. Surveys are undertaken on
different topics (e.g. health, crime etc), via a different range of methods (e.g. face-to-face,
post) across different age ranges, using a range of different sampling methods and across
different time periods. All these factors will influence the responses that individuals give
to questions and may affect the prevalence estimates recorded.
13. However, based on data submitted to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) the following observations can be made;
Cannabis
14. The EMCDDA Annual Report 2010 reports that among 15-64 year olds cannabis
remains the most popular illicit drug in Europe. However, large differences in prevalence
of use are observable between countries, illustrated by the fact that the highest estimates
reported are more than 30 times greater than the lowest. Overall, trends in
consumption show stable or declining levels of use. Within this general long-term
picture, however, divergent patterns can be identified. Of particular note are some
countries in eastern Europe where consumption levels still appear to be increasing and,
in some cases, now rival or exceed prevalence levels found in western Europe.
15. For countries where it is able to discern a trend based on at least three data points five
countries have seen increases in the use of cannabis in the last twelve months prior to
the survey (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Italy, Finland and Sweden) and seven countries have
seen decreases (Denmark, Germany, Spain, Hungary, England and Wales and Norway),
France and the Netherlands have remained relatively stable.
16. Cocaine remains the second most commonly used illicit drug in Europe, although
prevalence levels and trends differ considerably between countries. High and still
increasing levels of cocaine use are observed only in a small number of mostly Eastern
European countries, while elsewhere the use of this drug remains limited. Recent
decreases have been seen in cocaine use in Spain, England and Wales, Denmark and
Norway.
17. Use of amphetamines remains overall lower than cocaine use in Europe, but in many
countries amphetamine or methamphetamine remains the most commonly used
stimulant drug. Problem amphetamine use is mainly reported by countries in the north of
Europe, while problem methamphetamine use remains largely restricted to the Czech
Republic and Slovakia.
18. Heroin use, particularly injecting the drug, still accounts for the greatest share of
morbidity and mortality related to drug use in the European Union. The number of
problem opioid users in Europe is cautiously estimated at 1.35 million, and most
treatment entrants still report opioids as their primary drug. Data from a range of
sources point to an overall stable to increasing opioid problem in the European Union
since 2003/04.
Home Office – Supplementary written evidence
19. Further analysis of trends in drug use across Europe will be published the annual
EMCDDA annual report on 15th November 2011.
14 November 2011
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
How are drug trafficking routes disrupted by collaborating law enforcement agencies across
Europe? Is current action enough?
I have been working as an independent consultant on drug control and criminal justice
reform projects for the European Commission since 1998 in over 20 countries. The
considerations are drawn from direct experience working on different projects and
programmes and cluster around three separate topics or problem areas.
EU support for trafficking flows along transit routes – tensions between development and
law enforcement objectives
Human rights, governance and corruption
Displacement and infiltration
Tensions between development and anti trafficking
The EU uses various instruments, including funding from the European Development Fund to
support law enforcement agencies in countries identified as transit countries. It hopes to
achieve two very different sets of objectives with this. On the one hand the importance of
the rule of law is recognized as a precondition for social and economic development. Aid is
therefore provided to law enforcement agencies as part of a development strategy based on
the foundation of good governance. It is reasoned that social, economic and political
development will ensue within a framework of functioning criminal justice.
The other objective is to curtail the flow of drugs into the EU, and it is clear that EU benefits
are prioritized. It is argued by EC staff as well as by staff from international drug control
agencies that the two objectives are compatible and reinforce each other. There are a
number of academic reservations to this proposition, but more pertinent are the arising
practical tensions.
In the pursuit of development objectives drug control is often most effective when working
from the bottom up, by supporting community activities that work with and address the
needs of drug sellers and drug users in different localities. Activities around community
policing that de-escalate conflict in communities and provide alternative methods for
resolving drug related problems. Measures that provide alternatives to imprisonment for
poor young men that have become involved with drugs, drug treatment provisions, drug
information, and campaigns against stigma. But none of these activities have any discernable
impact on drug trafficking. Moreover, while the activities designed to improve relations
between the community and law enforcement, to make the police more accountable and the
criminal justice process more transparent all go to enhance good governance, they do not
contribute to anti trafficking measures. Indeed, anti trafficking units are often created as elite
units with special powers and even further removed from scrutiny.
Some of the most effective methods in terms of yielding seizures and arrests therefore come
at the risk of undermining the goal of good governance. Law enforcement agents working on
anti trafficking often have a very vague understanding of how drugs work and what the
ultimate objectives of drug control are, but understand very quickly that large amounts of
money and important international cooperation partners are involved. Working in proximity
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
to such money, often in cash, or a substance that is compact and highly valuable, creates
multiple temptations to which numerous officers in poor countries, on low salaries do
succumb. EC support for drug control programmes in transit route countries does not
provide for any kind of oversight with regard to corrupt practices among beneficiary
organisations.
Another problem lies with the sense of loyalty of drug law enforcement officers in a
recipient country when working closely with LEAs from a donor country. Police units in
South America and the Caribbean that are working with the US Drug Enforcement
Administration are often accused of prioritizing the interests of the US over the interests of
their own country. They are certainly incentivized by their US partners with cash payments,
and assistance with obtaining visas and green cards.
The pressure to deliver results, and often conventions of policing as they prevail in some
transit countries allow for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, of informers and
the paramilitary activities against drug cultivators and gangs. This will lead to arrests and
seizures in the short term, but undermine the pursuit of good governance for which trust, a
cooperative society – state, community – police relationship is a precondition.
Ownership and expertise at the European Commission
In the absence of its own law enforcement capacity, the EC recruits consultants to design
and implement drug control projects. Often implementation is subcontracted to
international agencies, primarily the UNODC, which lobbies aggressively for such contracts.
In the case of consultants working on short term contracts there is a problem with
ownership and an asymmetry of power between the consultant and regional or national
agencies that are the prospective recipients of EC programme support. Such agencies tend
to control the information flow and the negotiation process, and can obstruct assessment or
planning processes that do not coincide with organizational interests.
There is little back up for consultants from the Brussels. While the different departments,
such as EuropeAid or the Directorate General for Justice, will brief consultants at the outset
of missions, they rarely have any deeper involvement with the projects after the field mission
has commenced. Finalizing project design into the working instruments – Project
Identification Fiche, Action Fiche, Technical and Administrative Provisions supported by a
Log frame – is therefore largely left to the EC
Delegations that are working in the beneficiary countries. The officers in charge are
generalists with no expertise in criminal justice or drug control issues. Their main concern is
usually to ensure that a project meets the technical requirements, can be managed by the
identified implementing agency with as little need for backstopping by the ECD as possible,
and for allocated funds to be spent. The non-disbursement of funds allocated to different
recipients remains one of the main challenges, given the complexity of bureaucratic protocol.
The delegations are therefore concerned with getting the money spent, even at the risk of
not meeting development objectives.
With so little guidance from the EC, the consultant is therefore left to negotiate with
national agencies that are often both the main source of information, the facilitators for an
ostensibly ‘independent’ assessment and the prospective beneficiaries of funding. It is clear
from the outset that a programme or project should result from the activities, even when
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
there is little objective justification. Freelance professionals may also be tempted to suggest
designs that contain future work for themselves. Too often it is also clear that the main
agencies identified in the beneficiary country will be the main beneficiaries regardless of the
assessment of the experts. There is a real possibility for collusion between so called
independent experts and national/regional recipients of support, not a risk confined to drug
control, but often not recognized.
A further problem lies in the relationship with national/regional agencies and the imposition
of national/regional agendas. These may have strong ideas about how they want EC
development funds to be invested. This is often a positive thing in development terms, but
when the issue of law enforcement and the objective drug control, it does not necessarily
guarantee effectiveness. In such situations it is very difficult for independent consultants to
stand up to a regional or national organization, especially one that is already in receipt of
large development contributions, and where the organization has a sense that the funds will
be disbursed anyhow at the end of the financial year as does happen on occasion.
(iii)
Project design
An example from a recent project in the Caribbean region, where the EC works closely with
a competent counterpart, the Caribbean Community and Market, a region in which the EC
has been providing assistance since the Barbados Plan of Action in 1995. Caricom emerged
out of the failed attempt of the former British colonies to form a single state at
independence. It has since worked along lines parallel to those of the EC, facilitating the
movement of goods and people across countries with a shared historical heritage and similar
countries. The accession of Suriname and Haiti has added a new dimension in recent years.
For the purpose of development cooperation the EC has formed a different entity,
Cariforum, which includes all of Caricom plus Dominican Republic and Cuba.
It is an important transit region for cocaine shipments bound for the EU and North America.
There are concerns over first of all, the impact of that cocaine in Europe, and secondly on
how the operation of organized crime groups with access to cash and weapons can
undermine national governments.
Under the 9th EDF funds were provided for a range of activities across demand and supply
reduction (even though the former does not impact on drug flows to Europe), and these are
to be continued under the 10th EDF. Drug control is combined with anti crime and security
measures and rolled into a regional programme. This has a compelling logic, as drug
trafficking is a transnational activity, and regional cooperation is needed.
But working at regional level means developing regional institutions that are yet to prove
that they are fit for purpose. The countries of the Caricom region decided in 2006 to set up
the Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS). They want to use the funds
from the 10th EDF, approximately € 6 million to support the agency. But according to the
EC’s own criteria, the so called 4 pillar test, IMPACS does not have the capacity to manage
funds of such magnitude.
Moreover, the suspension of IMPACS Director Captain Lynn Anne Williams demonstrates
the weakness of the institution to remain aloof from the fray of national partisan politics. It
as been alleged by a number of stakeholders, that IMPACS was used by the previous
government of Patrick Manning to conduct surveillance on the political opposition, meaning
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
that the resources of a regional agency were used illegally for political advantage of an
incumbent government. When at the last elections the opposition party won control of the
government one of its first acts was to investigate “financial mismanagement” at IMPACS and
send Captain Williams on leave while the investigation was (is) taking place. That national
influence can be brought to bear on a regional agency is cause for grave concern even with
the proviso that none of these charges have even been formally made. This crisis of
confidence in the senior leadership has immobilised and deeply demoralised the agency. It is
therefore strongly recommended that 10th EDF funds are used for designated activities with
clear outcomes and managed independently by an international agency with high integrity.
Yet, the selection of an international agency (be this DfID or UNODC) to implement the
programme is strongly resisted by Cariforum. On a strategic level it sees that argument for
building up regional institutions as outweighing the need for short term efficacy in reducing
the flow of drugs. There is the added dimension of wanting to keep control of development
funds that Cariforum regards as its own, even though these funds are provided by the EDF.
In its pursuit of regional ownership of programme delivery Cariforum also fails to address
another issue that goes to the heart of law enforcement cooperation. Suriname is a member
state of Cariforum and of Caricom, has benefited from EC support including drug control
under the 9th EDF and stands to benefit from activities under the 10th EDF. Yet the recently
elected head of government of Suriname is Desi Bouterse, who was convicted of drug
trafficking by an Amsterdam court.
Because of this the inclusion of Suriname in CARIFORUM in activities designed to curtail,
capture and bring to trial drug traffickers has some inherent difficulties; it is not only
offensive to the ideal of due process but sends out a mixed message regarding individuals
equal standing before the law that is contrary to the principle of justice.
Such abnormalities are tolerated because the way that programmes are designed and
implemented precludes strong ownership by any one officer or section within the EC, the
reliance on Delegations with other priorities and no technical expertise, and the very
approach to development cooperation with emphasis on shared ownership that allows a
small bureaucratic elite to capture development funds.
Clarity of purpose
Project design can also be affected by the confusion of purpose. Tensions between
development and drug control objectives have been mentioned already. In addition projects
can be continued for purposes well beyond erstwhile objectives. In the Southern Caucasus a
multi component programme was initiated in the early 2000s with activities in Armenia,
Azerbaijan and Georgia (Southern Caucasus Anti Drugs SCAD). A mid term evaluation
found that few of the objectives had been realised, that some the threats identified in the
project design had provide illusory, and that the unintended consequences of the project,
particularly with regard to LEA corruption, had not been addressed, nor even recognised.
Yet the programme received strong support from different quarters within the EC because
the programme meetings provided a rare opportunity of contact for high ranking officials
from Azerbaijan and Armenia, two countries in conflict over the disputed province of
Nagorno-Karabach. It appears that drug control can provide a cover for a range of activities
and is therefore divorced from control mechanisms relating to quality or impact.
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
2 Human Rights
The risk of working along transit routes is to give legitimacy and encouragement to the poor
practice of law enforcement agencies in countries with repressive regimes, poor records on
human rights and high incidence of corruption. There is a genuine risk for the EC to be
come embroiled with agencies that are on the one hand ineffective in curtailing the outflow
of drugs into the EU, while at the same time providing them with resources and legitimacy.
The considerations are of course complicated, as the very engagement with agencies may in
itself contribute to changes in culture and the injection of principles of good governance. On
the other hand it may simply provide poorly performing and undeserving services with extra
resources and powers.
At the moment a project is being finalised to support drug control in Nigeria; and the major
beneficiaries are the UNODC as implementing agency and the Nigerian Drug Law
Enforcement Agency. With some 3,500 agents this is the leading drug control agency in
West Africa and widely regarded as an elite unit. Yet, the levels of investigatory skills are
rudimentary, most of the agents have only the most basic training, and investigations depend
on information from the public, luck and the use of violence.
The agency is riven with corruption built into the process by a combination of low salaries
and excessive powers in a country where the use of office for private gain is endemic. While
the EC is well advised to engage and raise the capacity of the agency, it also has to take note
of practices that are unacceptable, as for instance the routine shooting of cannabis farmers
and the standard arrest of drug offenders deported after completing their prison sentences
in other countries. These measures have not so much proved a deterrent to Nigerian
trafficking groups, but enhanced their technique and encouraged the exploration of new
routes.
What is required, in any case, is a clear position on drug control and human rights. The
assumption that is widely shared in countries with a less than stringent attitude towards
human rights is that the application of force is sufficient if not as a deterrent to drug
traffickers, than at least as a symbolic statement to the international community about a
governments commitment to drug control. It should be made very clear that random
brutality is not an acceptable substitute for competent police work, particularly when as so
often, it is used to screen corrupt practices.
Displacement and infiltration
It has become a commonplace in drug control circles that the closure of a drug transit route
will lead to the opening of another. The much rumoured, though poorly evidenced opening
of the West African route is a case in point. Other routes may be in operation as we write
but unknown to law enforcement and academics. Yet the consequence of tactical success is
spelling a strategic disaster for countries hitherto uninvolved in drug trafficking. This is
particularly egregious as poor countries are not likely to attract the interest of traffickers
because of the modest promise of domestic markets. Once they are woven into
international trafficking networks, however, local consumption often takes off as part of the
spill-over effect- where traffickers pay local operators for their services with drugs. In effect
then, anti trafficking measures contribute to the widening of drug markets and related
problems. This has never been analysed properly and remains subsumed under the idea of
‘shared responsibility’. Yet, there is a real argument that transit countries suffer from the
Axel Klein – Written Evidence
dual failure of importing countries to firstly reduce the demand for illicit substances and
secondly control the importation.
The EC is now involved in a number of inter regional projects trying to create linkages
between for instance LEAs in Latin America and West Africa. It is also supporting regional
programmes in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa. One real risk is that
organised crime group are better poised to infiltrate LEAs in countries with high levels of
corruption and then access information shared at international level. The second is that
corrupt officers can create their own international networks. There is little to safeguard
against these possibilities, it does not even seem on the horizon. Once again the problem
faced by the EC is that it does not have operational capacity and relies on experts and
consultants.
Way forward
It is suggested that greater transparency is introduced into programming by the EC. At the
moment there is no accessible record of programmes in drug control which makes any kind
of independent assessment or evaluation difficult. There should be a data base of projects,
with information on funding and evaluation reports.
An independent panel of experts should regularly review the design, implementation and
impact of EU drug control interventions and their findings be made public.
The unintended consequences of anti trafficking measures, from displacement, to corruption
of agencies, to impact on human rights, has never been assessed. An independent
investigation of the global process with several field studies is long overdue.
20 July 2011
Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Alex Stevens – Oral
evidence (QQ1-24)
Professor Susanne MacGregor, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor
Alex Stevens – Oral evidence (QQ1-24)
Please see under Professor Cindy Fazey
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral
evidence (QQ 178-207)
Evidence Session No. 6.
Heard in Public.
Questions 178 - 207
WEDNESDAY 23 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Lord Dear
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Judd
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate
Lord Richard
Lord Tomlinson
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Lord Mancroft, Chairman, All-Party Group on Drug Misuse (APGDM), Baroness
Meacher, Chairman, All-Party Group on Drug Policy Reform (APGDPR) and member of
APGDM, and Lord Ramsbotham, member of APGDPR.
Q178 The Chairman: Welcome to our three witnesses this morning, who are all, I think,
very expert in the matter we are considering, which is the EU’s future drugs strategy—
obviously also looking at the outcome of the existing eight-year period, which expires in
2012, but much more seeking to influence the thinking in Brussels on the future drugs
strategy, which will run for the eight years after that. We have been taking a lot of evidence
up to now from various sources—from the Home Office, the NGO sector and academic
experts. It is very usefulfor us to have an opportunity now to hear three witnesses who are
very closely involved with these matters, last week having been filled with drug-related
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
events, if one can call them that. Therefore, it is very topical to see you immediately after
that.
I will just go through the rigmarole one has to at the beginning, if you do not mind. The
session is open to the public. A webcast of the session goes out live as an audio transmission
and is subsequently accessible via the parliamentary website. A verbatim transcript of your
evidence will be taken and this will be put on the parliamentary website. A few days after
this evidence session, you will be sent a copy of the transcript to check it for accuracy, and
we would be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as quickly as possible. If after
this session you wish to clarify or amplify any points made during your evidence or have any
additional points to make, you are welcome to submit supplementary evidence to us.
I have slightly assumed, although by all means contradict me if I am wrong, that you would
like to make a brief opening statement before we go into questions and answers, but if you
prefer not to, that is absolutely a choice for you.
Baroness Meacher: Speaking for myself, I had not planned a statement, but I would like to
say how very much we, as the All-Party Group on Drug Policy Reform, welcome the fact
that you are having this inquiry and will be publishing a document; I think that that is
enormously helpful. We have a lot of concerns about how things are going in Europe. There
are some very good bits and some very concerning bits. To have an opportunity to consider
the European experience in its totality is enormously helpful, so thank you very much. My
research officer, Frank Warburton, is here, and he might slip me a piece of paper at some
point if I am struggling.
Q179 The Chairman: Lord Ramsbotham, I think that you are a member of Baroness
Meacher’s all-party group.
Lord Ramsbotham: I am a member of her group and I chair something called the crossparty group, which is actually a collection of practitioners who are at work, particularly in
the criminal justice system. Our interest is, as with Baroness Meacher, that this is a united
nations—a world scene—in which we believe that Europe has a role to play. The European
role within the world scene is where we think we ought to focus.
Lord Mancroft: The all-party group that I chair and have been a member of since 1988 is
focused mainly on the healthcare side of the drug problem. It is, I hope, the bridge between
members of the Government—Governments of all types over the last 25 years have come
to see it—and the non-parliamentary members, most of whom are providers of drug
treatment throughout the UK. It is focused on that. I would add to that that my own role in
this, if I have one, is certainly not as an expert, although I may have become a minor
authority over 25 years on the healthcare side. I have moved my own views. I have been
drawn, as we all are in this building, into other areas of policy beyond the healthcare issues.
During that time, over those 25 years, I have increasingly formed the view, and my view has
got firmer, that most of the very expensive work that we in this country, in Europe and in
the rest of the world do on the criminal justice side of trying to resolve the drug problem
has actually made things worse and is a block to the solution, which is providing the
healthcare. That is what gets people off drugs, keeps them off drugs and prevents people
from getting on them in the first place. The criminal justice side of it is actually damaging the
side which I believe will probably be the solution in the end.
Q180 The Chairman: Thank you. We certainly have heard a lot of evidence so far on
the healthcare side and it is clear that that will be covered in our report, although I do not
want to comment on your suggestion that the one is inimical to the other. What is quite
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
clear from the evidence that we have taken is that the health side is a very important part of
this and needs to be given a lot of emphasis.
As we go through these questions, do not feel, please, that all three of you have to answer
every single question. It is a very flexible process that we have here. If you wish to come in,
you will be very welcome to come in on any question, but it is not a school examination
paper in which all questions have to be answered by everyone.
The first question that I would like to put to you is that the EU’s current drugs strategy
accepts that different member states are free to apply different drugs policies. In fact, that is,
in the jargon, an area where subsidiarity applies. Do you think that it is right that that
approach should continue or do you think that one should be seeking greater harmonisation
of national drugs policies at an EU level than we have at present?
Lord Mancroft: I think that it is probably about right at the moment. There is an enormous
amount of co-ordination on the supply side—the policing of drug trafficking, that side of it. I
do not see how you could get more. Indeed, I think that Europe itself co-operates with the
United States and other countries in the East. It can always be improved on, but I think that
that is pretty harmonised at the moment.
It appears to me that most countries in Europe, in particular the UK at the moment, think
that healthcare should be localised as much as possible. I would like to see greater
harmonisation. From where I am looking, I find that continental Europe in terms of drug
treatment is a long way behind the UK, and the UK is too far behind the line anyway. I
would like to see them catch up with us and us progress a lot further. Some European
countries are using treatments that we would not even allow in this country, so there is a
long way to go before they catch up.
Baroness Meacher: My response to that question is that the crucial thing about drugs
policy is that it should be evidence-based. Fifty years ago, when the 1961 convention was
written, there was really very little evidence about what might conceivably work. In Europe,
we now have a certain amount of reliable evidence about policies that work. For example,
there is the very professional, carefully designed Swiss system for the treatment, if you like,
of heroin, which is not just the heroin-assisted treatment clinics but the totality of the
treatment programme, starting with the walk-in, drop-in centres where people come in with
their street heroin and are injected, and where they find—unexpectedly, probably—a doctor
and a social worker who begin to talk about their physical health problems and address
those and talk about how things are, whether they have anywhere to live, and so on, and
start addressing those issues. These people are then encouraged into the system, whether
methadone maintenance, initially, or the heroin-assisted treatment clinic and then moving
between these facilities as required, always with the ultimate aim of abstinence.
That has been very well evaluated and it seems to work. In terms of money, they are very
clear that you save money by spending money. It is not cheap. I am just using that as an
example now, but it seems to me that where you have good evidence of a strategy to deal
with a particular problem in the drugs world, it would be wonderful if the EU would take a
leadership role in promoting and harmonising strategy across Europe around evidence-based
policy. That is my first point.
My second point is that there are other bits of the system where we do not have very good
evidence yet. Although the UN conventions permit different developments for scientific
purposes, I think that countries have been very reluctant to develop alternative strategies
and evaluate them because they feel that somehow it is contrary to the spirit of the UN
conventions. There is also a role for the EU, in my view, to encourage countries to
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
experiment with different ways of doing things and to encourage and promote the evaluation
of those approaches. I think that there are two roles: harmonisation but also encouraging
different ways of doing things and clear, well-organised evaluations. If the EU went down
those routes, as Lord Ramsbotham said—I think that the EU is ahead of the game on drugs,
albeit we are an awful long way behind where we would like to be—the EU could lead the
world. I really do think that.
The Chairman: We have had quite a lot of evidence that the statistical basis, which has to
provide a good deal of the evidence, is not adequate at the moment. Often, one member
state’s statistics are not consistent with another’s. Therefore, the excellent work that the
EMCDDA does in Lisbon is not as full as it could be. Their latest report rather demonstrates
that, so the point you are making certainly applies in that area of statistics, but you are
making a wider point.
Q181 Lord Avebury: Do you think a step towards harmonisation could be for the
European Union to adopt a proactive dissemination policy on what works? You mentioned
one particular example, but could more be done in informing member states of this kind of
evidence?
Baroness Meacher: I would very strongly support such an initiative. The EMCDDA to some
degree do that and I think that their report is good, but I imagine that they are
underresourced. If they could be built up into an organisation that really could foster
evaluations, disseminate the results and have a serious role within Europe on scientific
evidence and dissemination, that would be splendid. If your Committee were willing to
recommend that, I think that that would be excellent.
Lord Ramsbotham: I entirely endorse that, because I think that that would exploit the fact
that there are various ways in which Europe is ahead, and that is something that we want to
trumpet, as it were, because I think that people will listen if it comes from Europe rather
than from the individual countries. That is my feeling, that in this scene Europe as a whole, if
it was more coherent, would represent something greater than just the individual
participants.
Lord Mancroft: It is a great idea, but it is quite difficult to do even within individual states.
There is a huge amount of disagreement about what works. Most of the best practice in this
country in the area of healthcare for addicts has been studiously ignored by the Department
of Health for 25 years. There is very good practice going on in the private and voluntary
sector which the state sector says does not exist, which is not helpful. There are currently a
lot of empty beds in the UK because commissioners will not refer to what they regard as
not scientifically based care. That is true across Europe now. More and more facilities have
copied what we have in the UK and yet the various state health systems choose to ignore it.
It is a great idea, but it is incredibly difficult in practice.
Baroness Meacher: It seems to me that that is where the linking of evaluation to any work
is absolutely fundamental. Certainly in this day and age, the NHS will not commission
anything unless it has been shown to be effective and cost-effective. It seems to me that that
is the way forward.
The Chairman: We will come on to some of those issues in the further questions, but that
point is very clear.
Q182 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: Some of the answers that have been given
touch on this question, but perhaps you can build on it. Can a united and coherent European
perspective on drug policy be presented at the international level, given the current lack of
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
consensus in so many areas, in particular the treatment of drug use and drug users, and what
should our aims be in this area?
Lord Ramsbotham: Perhaps I could start with a practical example. I have been very
concerned that within the prison system there should be a coherent drugs policy, which
should be related to the national policy, because it is not a separate policy at all. As Lord
Mancroft says, there are some very well proved good-practice treatments available, which
ought, to my mind, to be included in good practice in our prisons, because you have people
in there for a period of time when you really can work with them. There is a disconnect
here. I feel that what has to happen is the pulling together of this good practice and the
gathering of the evidence together, to make certain that they match and that there is
practical application of what is going on to improve the quality of evidence that we can
produce on that sort of thing.
Lord Mancroft: One point worth making in this area is that there is a lot of agreement in
Europe that we need to reform the United Nations conventions, because whatever Europe
decides to do as individual states or collectively, we all have to stick to United Nations
conventions. In individual states in Europe, there is a consensus that the conventions need to
be changed, yet there is no movement in the United Nations to do that. The EU, speaking
with a louder voice than individual states, could undoubtedly lead the way in saying to the
United Nations, “As a major collection of states, we want to see these conventions
changed”. They are, as Lady Meacher said, completely inappropriate.
The Chairman: I think that there is probably some dispute within the European Union as
to whether the best way to proceed is to, as it were, increase the flexibility with which the
UN conventions are applied, or whether to go for actual reform of the conventions, which is
a cumbersome process involving a large number of countries, not all European. I think that
there is some disagreement about that.
Q183 Lord Tomlinson: Just to follow up Lord Ramsbotham’s point, if you do not have a
coherent policy between, say, the Prison Service and the national policies, do you think that
trying to get a harmonised policy across 27 countries is realistic, or is it just a pipe dream
with no chance of becoming reality?
Lord Ramsbotham: No. I think that the harmonisation of evidence gathering has been
rather fragmented. Individuals have been gathering it here and there, but there has not been
a sharing. I absolutely agree with Lord Mancroft that, on the healthcare side, there is quite a
long way to go because good practice and what works have not been shared. On the other
side, the sharing on trafficking and all that, there is much more harmonisation, and that
should set the tone; it is already happening. If healthcare could be encouraged to have as
close co-operation as there is on the traffickers, it is perfectly possible to spread this
practice, but because it is not there, there is no stimulus to get on with it.
Baroness Meacher: Various people have said things; I just wanted to say a couple of
sentences. I hope that we will come back to the UN conventions on a later question, so I
was not going to say anything about the conventions here. In terms of the united
perspective, I have already indicated that I think that there are little bits of policy where we
could have united perspective now; there are lots of other bits where we still have work to
do and evaluations to undertake.
Q184 Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: You mentioned, Baroness Meacher, that our
response should be evidence-based and I think that everybody would agree with that. We
have had some interesting evidence recently from the Home Office that suggests that drug
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
misuse in England and Wales has been falling quite dramatically over the last couple of years.
Does that suggest that we have got the balance about right between enforcement and
treatment? Could Europe do worse than follow us?
Baroness Meacher: My answer to that would be that this country does relatively well on
the treatment front. As Lord Mancroft said, we have a lot of voluntary organisations and a
lot of organisations doing treatment. That has built up quite strongly in recent years and I
think that we are seeing the results of that, but we have an awful long way to go. As the use
of one drug, cannabis, has reduced, the use of other drugs has increased. Often it is the
more damaging drugs that have increased in use.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: The evidence suggests that it is falling across the
board.
Baroness Meacher: Well, it is variable. The other thing is that this country is a world leader
on legal highs. My worry is that in this country most particularly, where legal highs are very
big, people are using less cannabis, which is relatively harmless—we know that a few people
may suffer dreadfully with psychosis, although we are not absolutely certain about the causal
relationship—whereas with some of these legal highs, which are copies of drugs like cocaine,
heroin and cannabis, more and more youngsters are turning to those, which is why my allparty parliamentary group is going to do an inquiry into legal highs. We literally do not know
how massive the use of those drugs is in this country. I would be particularly worried about
that.
Lord Mancroft: I have a little history in this, as my father was the Home Office Minister
responsible for not banning heroin in 1952. One thing that I have learnt in my 25 years on
this subject is to take Home Office statistics and information with a large grain of salt. I have
heard this thing about drug use going up and down about five times in the last 25 years. In
the end, it always seems to come up again.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: The British Crime Survey has shown this.
Lord Mancroft: There is some evidence. Part of the evidence, if you look behind it, is that
one of the changes in my time is the claim that now about 50% of the cannabis that is
smoked in this country is grown in this country. I would not absolutely describe that as a
policy of success. One feature is that if you grow it hydroponically, which is how it is grown
in Britain, it makes it rather less attractive to smoke—you do not get so high and you go to
sleep. Kids work this out really quite quickly, which is why there is now a massive increase in
young people drinking alcohol—they are swapping one drug for another. There is nothing
new about that. They have done that frequently over the years, as one drug comes in and
out of fashion. I think that we are seeing that now. I question the idea that the current
policies are at about the right level, when we spend between £15 billion and £18 billion a
year on the criminal justice system, which allows addicts to go round and round and round. I
am not sure that that is a success; it is certainly not a good balance.
Lord Mackenzie of Framwellgate: But misuse is falling—that is the point that I am
making—so we must be doing something right, or perhaps it is the recession.
Lord Mancroft: Maybe, but the prisons seem to be just as full, the waiting lists for
treatment are just as high and drug-related crime does not seem to be falling very much, so
it depends on which way you look at it.
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
The Chairman: I can assure you that we are subjecting Home Office statistics that are put
to us to careful scrutiny. Our specialist adviser made exactly the same point as you did at an
earlier stage—the statistics are not entirely what they seem to be.
Q185 Lord Tope: Two of the major objectives of the current EU drugs strategy have
been to significantly reduce the demand for and the supply of drugs. Do you think that these
aims are being met?
Lord Ramsbotham: The straight answer is no.
Lord Tope: I thought that it would be a short answer.
Baroness Meacher: Certainly there has been no significant fall across Europe. One of the
difficulties is that in Europe there is such tremendously diverse experience and practice
across these 27 countries. Some countries are doing pretty dreadful things, whereas some—
and Switzerland is a wonderful example—are doing very good things. When you average all
this lot out, you get a very odd picture, I suggest. One really has to focus on individual
country experiences, in my view—certainly at the moment.
The Chairman: The EMCDDA report is of course very valuable in that respect, as it
provides a lot of pretty up-to-date material.
Lord Ramsbotham: Again emphasising that there are some shiningly good examples, I am
very glad that you mentioned Switzerland, which may not necessarily be in the EU, but what
it has done has been very interesting and certainly has lessons that could be applied
elsewhere.
Q186 Lord Dear: A report has recently been published by the Global Commission on
Drug Policy and I wondered whether you had any views on it, in so far as it might affect the
EU drugs strategy as it currently exists and particularly the one that we may well
recommend for the future.
Baroness Meacher: I think that the Global Commission on Drug Policy is very interesting,
in the sense that it has rather extraordinary people on it, such as George Shultz, the former
Secretary of State in the US, and Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the US Federal
Reserve, who came to our event last week. These are hard-nosed economists, who will be
looking at what is cost-effective, frankly. If those people are saying that policy is not
working—and they are saying it extremely powerfully and forcefully—I think that we make a
great mistake if we do not pay attention. Obviously there are other people like the exPresidents, but I would pay particular attention to the economists on the commission,
because of what that means in terms of the interpretation of their recommendations. They
call for fundamental reform. They are saying that the criminalising policy has not worked,
does not work and, frankly, will not work. That is extremely powerful, in my view. We have
already said this, but I think that the EU is perhaps the only structure, if one could call it that,
that could respond to the Global Commission with sufficient weight to make some sort of
impact on world policy in this area.
Q187 Lord Dear: Are you saying that the driver for that would be economic rather than
health or welfare?
Baroness Meacher: I am saying that these people are saying that even if you look at the
economics it does not make sense to put whatever it is—$300 billion-plus—into the hands
of traffickers and criminal gangs and for every country in Europe to be spending billions on
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
criminal justice and certainly a lot of money on treatment as well, but it is a bit vague and
often not particularly well evaluated. We are just dumping billions into this problem area.
Even just in terms of the taxpayers of these countries, this is just not a good thing to be
doing. You may not want to go down the soft stuff—“We are damaging people’s lives and
we are preventing people from ever getting back into employment because we are giving
them criminal records”; there are arguments upon arguments upon arguments—but even if
you do not buy any of that, most people would, I think, buy the idea of good value for
money for the taxpayer. In this field, we have extraordinarily bad value for money for the
taxpayer.
Lord Ramsbotham: To go on from that, I think that their value is who they are. They are
not the usual suspects. They are looking at it from a much broader perspective and applying
its implications to other things on which they are expert and on which they are listened to.
That is why I think that their contribution is so important.
Q188 The Chairman: I just wanted to take up one point on decriminalisation, which has
struck me, as a rank amateur, in listening to all the evidence. Those who press for
decriminalisation have got into a bit of a trap. A lot of people outside this debate would
think that what you are saying is that every aspect of drug policy should be decriminalised—
that the traffickers should be decriminalised and so on. I know that that is not true, but I
suggest to you that you need to think about this. If I understand you rightly, what you are
talking about is the decriminalisation of the use and possession of small quantities; you are
not talking about the decriminalisation of criminal networks, et cetera. I just put that thought
to you because it has struck me, on listening to all the evidence, that quite a lot of the time
those who are pushing for reform, like you, are conveying a mistaken impression. I know
that in detail you are not, but the trouble is that that single, catch-all word
“decriminalisation” seems to raise that issue.
Lord Mancroft: I think that that is very true. It is a very good point to make. It is very
difficult to get over complex arguments in the age of soundbite politics. We are not
Governments with large voices to do that. You are right that it is difficult and it needs to be
clarified. One of the most important things about the Global Commission’s report—it is not
the only one—is that there have been an increasing number of reports by people who are
not, to use Lord Ramsbotham’s phrase, the usual suspects. They are by people who do not
necessarily even come historically from this area of policy but have looked at it from a health
or social point of view, or now an economic point of view, and realised that the current
strategy simply does not work. That is what is new. There are very few reports coming out
suggesting that it does work. The argument has shifted very significantly in the last few years.
I do not agree with everything that they have said by any means—one would not, as this is a
complex and big area—but what is very difficult and frustrating is that it appears that one of
the disadvantages of modern democracies is that the people involved, the elected
representatives, do not wish to debate this subject. It is not just a matter of which way the
debate goes. It is at the moment almost impossible to get a debate going in a western
democracy on this subject. The American Government, despite a change in language with
the new Administration, has now sunk back into the previous Administration’s language,
without having any debate. In this country, it is almost impossible to get a debate going. We
have been trying for quite a long time. The Whips in both Houses are not keen on this.
There are no party votes to be had on drugs. Therefore, this huge area of social policy does
not get the airtime that it really deserves—hence the misunderstanding that you quite rightly
draw our attention to.
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Lord Ramsbotham: I think that what you suggest is absolutely right. This is where the
Portuguese experience has been very interesting, because in their campaign to spread the
validity of the decriminalisation, legalisation or whatever you like to call it, plus the
prohibition word, which is crucial in all this, they have thought through how they are going
to spread that, not just in Portugal alone but in Spain, for example, where there was
considerable influence. We have a lot to learn from that. I think you are right, because the
words are thrown around and they need to be explained very clearly. If the whole concept
of prohibition not working is going to be put across, that, too, has to be explained very
carefully and clearly with the “so whats”, as well as just saying that it does not work.
Q189 Lord Avebury: There has been quite a lot of discussion in the media about the
proposal by President Santos of Colombia for a global review of drugs strategy. I asked him
yesterday in the meeting in the IPU room who would be responsible for conducting this. He
said that it could only be the United Nations. The question I want to ask you is whether you
think that the European Union should take the initiative in promoting a discussion at some
level in the UN, and does it require the creation of a separate institution in which that
discussion could proceed?
Baroness Meacher: The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform wrote to
Ban Ki-moon on I think 5 March 2009, urging him to undertake a review of international
drug policy. He wrote back to us saying, “This is on the agenda of the UNODC. They are
going to do this.” I wrote back saying, “I am not sure; this is not the impression I have.” So
we have been pressing for that, but clearly it needs a stronger voice than the all-party
parliamentary group, and I would urge your report and the EU to press for this. We are
dealing with all sorts of questions all at once, but when I went to see Mr Costa at the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2010, he made it quite clear that the initiative of Ban
Ki-moon had put pressure on them and they produced the document, which I have a copy of
here, From Coercion to Cohesion, which you will have seen—you want to ask us a question
about that. They have gone quite a long way in urging a health-oriented approach. We will
come back to that, so I will not go into detail about it. As everybody says, to change the
conventions is nigh on impossible. We are now working with a coalition of Governments—it
just started last week—towards the idea that a whole lot of countries might withdraw from
the conventions, once we have strong evidence on a whole range of policies, and re-accede
with reservations that would be absolutely evidence-based. That is a way forward; there is,
therefore a way forward. You can do it but, in my view, we have to build the evidence on a
certain number of policies and then go down that route. I think that my answer to you is:
absolutely the UN needs to lead something and, in my view the EU can be the front runner
on it. There are certain ways that one can move and certain ways are very difficult.
Q190 Lord Richard: I have two questions, one of which I think you answered and the
second of which I think you veered into. The first question I was going to ask you was: does
the work of both all-party groups suggest that a strongly control-oriented drug policy still
remains the best way forward? I think that you have answered that pretty well. The second
thing that I was going to ask you was: what scope is there for drug policy reform under the
UN conventions and the treaties on illicit drugs? You have partially answered that, but I
wonder whether you can expand a little on what you said.
Baroness Meacher: We had a very interesting paper at our meeting last week from
Professor Robin Room; we have a copy here and we can leave it if you want to have it
within your papers. He set out very precisely how one would achieve these reservations to
the conventions in relation to the limited number of policies where we have evidence. One
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is decriminalisation of possession and use of small quantities of drugs—we always make that
very clear—along the lines of the Portuguese and Czech Republic models, although each of
those is slightly different. Another is the heroin one. The coca leaf one is probably not of
interest in Europe. The other one has to do with enabling countries within their own
jurisdiction to regulate cannabis, and we will come on to that. So there are ways forward.
We have, I think, an interesting paper that we could make available through your
Committee. That could be a way to go forward.
Q191 The Chairman: I think that it would be very useful if you gave us that paper, so
thank you very much. Could you enlighten me a little on this? The Portuguese, if I
understand it rightly, and indeed the Czechs, are signatories of the United Nations
conventions, which contain no enforcement provisions, of course, because the United
Nations does not normally have enforcement provisions, other than peer-group review.
Nobody has thrown any stones at them or done them any harm. Why is it that you are so
clear that you need a structured and, I would suspect, politically quite difficult process of
withdrawal followed by rejoining with reservations? Why is that better than using the
flexibility that seems to exist already?
Baroness Meacher: The International Narcotics Control Board does not quite throw
stones—that is not its method—but it pays visits to those countries and criticises those
Governments for pushing up against the UN conventions. I believe that countries that are
implementing evidence-based policies should not be criticised by an international control
board under the UN for pursuing those policies. For me it is a matter of principle really.
These are the countries that should be respected for leading the way. Very unusually, the
Czech Republic repenalised drugs and then evaluated that and found that everything went
the wrong way; their hypotheses were not proved. They have really done their homework,
these countries, but it is not fair to say that they do not have unpleasant words thrown at
them, because they do. I think that should stop.
Lord Mancroft: It is an area of policy where politicians in a variety of countries seem to say
one thing and do another—there are other areas, too. Successive Home Secretaries talk
about being tough on drugs. Actually, no one has gone to prison for possession of drugs in
this country for 14 years. You have to work jolly hard to get sent to prison for drugs in this
country because, whatever Home Secretaries say, the courts simply could not send all those
people to prison—there are too many of them, so they get shoved sideways. If you are a
well known pop star and you are on your sixth or seventh conviction for class A drugs, you
might get a couple of hours in Wandsworth, but that is about as far as it goes.
Most of the people who are in prison for drug-related offences—which is about half of
them—are there for acquisitive crime. Occasionally it is for bashing people up, but mostly it
is acquisitive crime, getting the money to buy the drugs, which are only expensive because
they are illegal. It is a ludicrous position to be in. We are not doing what we say anyway.
That applies in this country and it certainly applies in most countries in respect of the
conventions. It is not that prohibition is a good or bad thing; it simply does not work. But
they pretend it does and go on. That is why, despite the difficulties of getting the
conventions changed, one should because they are wrong and they do not work.
Q192 Lord Richard: Is there any move in the UN system at the moment to do
something about the conventions? Are groups of countries trying to do this?
Baroness Meacher: They are rather looking to us to help them. The Transnational Institute
tries to bring countries together to talk about these things and do something about United
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Nations, but they have found it very difficult to get top government people around the table.
The Soros Foundation, which funded our work last week, wants to bring the APPG on Drug
Policy Reform together with the Transnational Institute to try to make sure that we get toplevel government people around the table to take this work forward. Everyone thinks in
terms of some countries going down the route that I referred to of withdrawal and reaccession with reservations. Of course, Bolivia has been the exception; they have stuck their
necks out and are going through that route. They have withdrawn; they hope to re-accede
with a reservation over the coca leaf, but they are isolated and on their own. Southern
American countries support them, but they have not been willing to stick their heads above
the parapet. It is very difficult for countries to do this other than in quite a substantial group.
I keep saying this, but on the basis of evidence I think that then countries could move
forward and do something very useful.
Q193 Lord Tomlinson: I would like to go back to the question that we touched on
earlier about controlling and limiting the supply of illegal drugs. Bearing in mind that EU drug
strategy is an area where subsidiarity applies, is it not the case that that is the main area
where the EU can successfully come to an agreement, and that European drug strategy is on
the supply side, much more than anywhere else? Lord Mancroft, you said earlier that you
think everything has been done on the supply side; when we had the director of EUROPOL
here a couple weeks ago, he suggested very clearly that his work was severely handicapped
by inadequate resources on the supply side. He has a budget of only about €20 million and
he believes that he is looking at less than half of all the trans-border incidents of which they
have intelligence. Bearing that in mind, do you think that more can be done on the supply
side and that it is possibly the only area where we are going to get substantial EU
agreement?
Lord Mancroft: Of course you could always do more. You could spend more money and
devote more resources, but I think that there is a huge degree of co-operation at the
moment—I am sure that there are exceptions to that—both in Europe and beyond. I think
that the degree of co-operation is as good as you could expect it to be, but the reality is that
it does not seem to make any difference. However much money or resources we devote to
prevent traffickers trafficking drugs, we never apparently catch more than 10%, and the
traffickers change their routes. Cocaine used to come mostly through Spain; it now comes
through African countries and works its way up that way.
I will give you one example, although it is not a European example. We and some of our
friends have spent quite a lot of time and money in the past 10 years in Afghanistan reducing
the supply of poppy, but the United Nations has announced that this year’s crop will be 62%
higher than last year’s, and 90% of the heroin use in Britain comes from Afghanistan. If that
was the second of the two objectives of our going into Afghanistan in the first place, the
answer is that that one did not work either. If you cannot stop that, there is no reason to
think that spending another €20 million on police forces, customs and goodness knows what
in Europe is going to make a lot of difference. We have spent more and more and more
over the past 30 years, and it has made less and less difference. I do not think that that is
cost-effective.
Lord Ramsbotham: The interesting thing, though, is that, as you hinted earlier, the
machinery is there. Therefore, it could be expanded on. I do not think that the co-operation
involved in the machinery could be improved. As you say, the circumstances and the money
that you may throw at it may change, but the way it has been set up—the way that everyone
knows how to work together—is pretty good, I think.
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Baroness Meacher: Supply is driven by demand. There would be no traffickers if there was
no demand for drugs. It seems to me that the only way to deal with the problem, therefore,
is to go through the demand side. That is why we argue so strongly that if, just as an
example, you took the Swiss heroin system and replicated it throughout the world, for the
sake of argument, heroin would be provided legally, it would be clean, it would be safe and
people would be in treatment and brought off it. In Switzerland, within 18 months, 30% of
these chaotic, multi-drug people are in full-time employment and another 30% are leading a
completely legal life. What have you done to the traffickers? You have wrecked their trade.
The point is that it is only little bits here and there; we need worldwide controlled,
regulated, legally available heroin to kill off the traffickers’ market. You have to take each
drug individually. You cannot just talk about drugs; each one has to be looked at individually.
That has to be the way forward. We will never kill the supply while the demand is just
rolling along.
Lord Ramsbotham: It is interesting in that connection that, for a time, the American
strategy was based on the phrase, “Prevent tomorrow’s market”.
Q194 Lord Judd: Is it quite as simple as that? Is there not a problem of the industry now
being so large that a great deal of ingenuity would go into stimulating demand, not just letting
the trade wither? I just wonder whether it is quite as clear-cut as you have suggested.
Baroness Meacher: Let me just say that it is not simple. I may have wrongly indicated that it
is simple; it is not simple. Lord Judd is absolutely right. There is the weapons trade, there are
all sorts of trades and industrial complexes that are making millions—maybe billions—out of
this drugs war. We know that the arms industry loves wars and this is a war. It involves
aeroplanes, submarines and weapons. These are all being manufactured by people who are
making very large sums of money. If we try to ditch this illegal market and this war, we will
have all sorts of problems. No, it is not simple, but it is not right that people’s lives are being
wrecked and taxpayers are paying billions in order to feed the coffers of submarine, plane
and weapons manufacturers.
Q195 Lord Avebury: Do you think that European anti-trafficking policy operates within
the framework of international human rights law? Although there have been allegations of a
conflict between the two, do you know of any instance where matters have been brought to
the attention of the Human Rights Council that would have implications for the European
policy?
Baroness Meacher: I think that all of us are floundering on this one. I have only a small
contribution, if any, to make. I think that there are disproportionate responses under the
Human Rights Act to people involved in the drugs field. For example, women who carry
drugs on behalf of these big operators are put in prison. These people are victims. They are
poor, they are desperate, they have children who they cannot feed and they agree to do
these things—foolishly, you could say. They should have the drugs removed from them and
they should probably have controls on their travel abroad so that they cannot do it any
more. You need good controls at the airport, but you should not be punishing those mules. I
am sure that there is quite a major human rights angle to all this, but I have to say that I am
not an expert on this, and there is somebody around the table who undoubtedly is.
Lord Ramsbotham: I will just add, if I may, on the business of the drug traffickers, that I
think that there is a move, which I fully support, to get them back to their country of origin
as quickly as possible rather than keep them in prison for a long time somewhere else. That
is not helping their rehabilitation or in any way stopping the traffic. It is expensive for the
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
countries that have to keep them and I think that it is absolutely under the human rights
agenda to do something about it. Willpower is needed to get the two countries concerned
to arrange that they will send people back if they come in, but I realise that that is a minor
issue in the whole subject.
Lord Avebury: As I recall it, the evidence that we had was concerned with European
Union aid money going to countries and operations which were intended to limit the supply
of drugs but which in fact have the reverse effect in the countries of origin.
Lord Mancroft: I think that that is true, particularly on anti-trafficking: when they put
pressure on trafficking routes in one direction, they change to another direction. For
example, as I was talking about a minute ago, most cocaine used to come more directly from
South America, to middle America and the Caribbean into Europe. It now goes via Africa. I
think that that puts pressure on African Governments, who may not always stick as closely
to international human rights laws as European countries do, so the effect is breaches of
human rights law not within the European Union but in countries that we put pressure on
inadvertently by the things that we do. I think that probably does happen. There is certainly
some evidence of that from west Africa.
Q196 Lord Dear: Could I bring you back to the topic you touched on before, of legal
highs and psychoactive substances? The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy
Reform has suggested that we should look at alternatives for dealing with legal highs. Would
you like to expand a bit more on what you mean by alternatives? Do you see any
alternatives, or are we on a quest for something unknown?
Baroness Meacher: I think we are talking about, for example, trading standards or
medicines controls. There are regulatory systems that might be suitable for this sort of thing.
We know that the regulators are not terribly keen to take on drugs, but they may be quite
appropriate bodies to do that. However, the whole point of our inquiry is to ask these
bodies to come and talk to us about how this might be done and to explore the best way
forward. Again, with legal highs, every legal high will be different from the next one, so you
will probably need all sorts of different regulatory bodies to deal with different materials.
Q197 The Chairman: I am a bit puzzled by the distinction. What you are suggesting
seems to be a very mainstream view, that there are large numbers of these new substances
that are being invented all the time—I think the EMCDDA report says 41 in the last year—
and that they need to be regulated. Surely when a Government or a group of Governments
regulates something like that, presumably in a restrictive or prohibitive way, it has to be
backed by legal sanctions, otherwise the regulation does not have any meaning. I wonder
whether you really are suggesting alternatives or not.
Baroness Meacher: Is that not also true if you try to control these substances under the
Misuse of Drugs Act 1971? It is also true that if people supply these drugs, and indeed use
them, they will be breaching the law and you have to have sanctions and follow it up. I think
that these things are going to be very difficult to track. The attraction to me of these other
regulatory systems, different from the Misuse of Drugs Act, is that they tend not to
criminalise the users but to go for the suppliers.
The Chairman: So we are coming back again to the distinction between not criminalising
the use or possession but continuing—or perhaps, in this case, starting—to criminalise any
trade or imports in these substances. Is that the distinction that you are making?
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Baroness Meacher: I think that it probably is. I have to say that we have not undertaken
our inquiry yet and I am not an expert on legal highs. However, the worry here is that no
Government anywhere is going to be able to control these things at all. Our worries about
cannabis and cocaine and what have you will seem as nothing compared with the
tremendous concerns there will be about potentially killer drugs, or very damaging drugs, in
this new legal highs area, sold from China through the web. We just want to begin an
exploration of whether there are any ways at all of denting this situation.
Q198 Lord Dear: What you have not said but I think is implicit in your answer is that, as
much as anything, this is a problem of definition. The moment something comes on to the
market, assuming you can seek to regulate it, immediately, by a subtle change in the chemical
composition of the drug, you are faced with something that is hitherto unregulated. Given
the pace of the development of the market, I wonder whether seeking to regulate is worth
the effort at all and whether there is not another route through. Of course, you might then
come back and say the answer is to stop trying to make it illegal and to go for the treatment.
Was that the original thesis?
Lord Mancroft: There are two issues that have to be addressed and they are both tricky.
First, if you just decriminalise and do not go the whole hog, you end up with it not being a
criminal offence for an individual to use a particular substance but the only place they can get
this substance is from the criminal market. That on the whole is not a very good idea. So I
am unhappy with that approach, although I see all the difficulties. On the pure regulation
side, the classic example is the row about the drug ecstasy a few years ago. At that stage in
proceedings they reckoned about 2 million people a week were taking ecstasy, a dance drug,
in this country. They only cost about 50p each, these things, and they are manufactured all
over the place. People make them on housing estates; they are a very simple drug to make.
There is no example of anybody ever being addicted to it or of anybody ever dying of it.
There are examples of people dying from being allergic to it and through drinking too much
water because it has this effect of making you very thirsty. So it is not a safe drug at all but in
the scheme of things it is not like heroin or amphetamines.
After a political and newspaper row of the usual type, the Government decided that they
needed to restrict it further so they moved it up the level of restricted drugs under the
Misuse of Drugs Act. The effect of that was very simply that the dealers immediately,
overnight, stopped selling ecstasy in nightclubs around England and started selling a drug
called mephedrone—not to be confused with methadone—which I had never heard of, not
being a very good scientist. My girl groom, on the other hand, said, “Of course you know
what it is. We’ve got packets of it in the stables. We’ve had it for years. It is an absolutely
perfect painkiller for horses.” I said that I did not know that and she said, “Oh yes, of course,
I’ve known all about it.” It just goes to show that this completely missed drug which every
vet in the country has been prescribing for years suddenly becomes a fashionable drug.
Actually, apparently it only has one chemical difference from ecstasy but that one chemical
difference led to an enormous amount of overdoses among kids in a very short time. It is a
much more dangerous drug, but until the Home Office got round to it, about six months
later, it remained legal. That is what is going to happen if you overregulate: these people are
always going to be ahead of legislation and restriction. That is the problem that Lord Dear is
alluding to and it is a very real problem. Can Government ever move fast enough to
overtake that one, to deal with it? I do not know, but I have my doubts.
Q199 The Chairman: I think the drug you are referring to is now banned by the EU.
Lord Mancroft: It is, yes.
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Baroness Meacher: But there will be another one that will probably be even more
dangerous.
The Chairman: That is a problem, but I am not sure that simply saying that it is impossible
to manage this is necessarily the right reaction. But we will keep our minds open as we hear
evidence on these issues.
Lord Ramsbotham: The health side in particular has got to keep up with what is needed in
order to cope with these things.
Baroness Meacher: This is why we want to do our inquiry, because we do not feel either
that we should just give up on the thing.
Q200 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: These two questions refer to a theme that has run
through your answers quite consistently, and they apply to certain areas of EU drugs policy.
First, does it offer measurable results that are of clear value? Secondly, can EU drugs policy
claim to be evidence-based and cost-effective? Quite a lot has been said on both subjects
already—I do not know if there is anything you want to add.
Baroness Meacher: I think that we have dealt with those. I would not wish to add anything
to what we have already said on either subject.
Q201 Lord Judd: I rather gathered from your interesting evidence that you do not feel
that drugs strategy places enough emphasis on harm reduction measures and that this is
particularly true in the European Union context. You mentioned From Coercion to Cohesion,
published by the United Nations recently, which obviously gives an extremely clear lead in
saying that the agenda ought to change from an emphasis on crime to an emphasis on health.
How do you feel that this can be made significantly more important in the European debate?
What observations do you have in that context? Perhaps I may say, if you will allow me,
Lord Chairman, that I found your conference last week very impressive and invaluable, and I
personally would find it very helpful if your report on the conference was available before
we come to the conclusions of our report.
Baroness Meacher: There are quite a lot of points there. I am not sure that I can really
explain this correctly. One of the difficulties in Europe is the terrific difference from one
country to another; for example, substitution treatment for heroin is widely available in this
country. However, the 12 countries that joined the EU since 2004 only account for 2% of
substitution treatment in Europe as a whole. So what you have is 12 countries with virtually
nothing at all. Clearly, in terms of harm reduction, there is a tremendous need for the EU to
take up this call to spread harm reduction and substitution treatment across to these mainly
eastern European countries to which these things are really rather unknown. They are just
not familiar with them and they do not realise what the efficacy of these substitution
treatments are. That is one point.
In terms of the document from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, again, I think
that there is an enormous role for the EU in propagating this thing. I would ask how many
people in Europe—even in Governments in Europe, in internal affairs and health
departments—are aware at all that this document exists. I am not supposed to be asking
questions but I would urge the EU and certainly this Committee to pitch for a major sell on
this document, which points to scientific evidence that strongly supports a health-oriented
approach to drugs. That is phenomenal from the United Nations, given that the 1988
convention says in no uncertain terms that anyone using any drug of any kind shall be
punished. It is very powerful. However, this just says, “No, you can read the conventions
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completely differently,” and come out with the answer that it has. That has to be a very
important document, in my view.
Q202 Lord Judd: Your whole argument to us this morning has been, in effect, that we are
operating in an atmosphere of prejudice, wilful ignorance and the absence of evidence-based
policies. That is what you have been talking about. We all know that the political community,
of which we are all part, is constrained by the media and what is being sold by the media to
the public as a whole. I find in all these discussions a rather disturbing absence of honest
debate about the irresponsibility of the media. I do not see how you will get a change in
Europe unless we can stimulate a debate in the media to say that we cannot tolerate any
longer this expensive, wasteful policy which we are all pursuing. Can you comment on that?
Should you not be putting more of your efforts into winning the media to an understanding
of exactly what is happening?
Baroness Meacher: Last week we had superb media coverage from the BBC, the radio and
television, the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, almost any paper you can think of—the
Observer was phenomenal—but there was one paper, the Daily Mail, of course, which did the
most damaging job you can think of. That is all it needs. We went to see senior people on
the Daily Mail, did we not? I should leave this to you, Lord Mancroft.
Lord Mancroft: I have spent a lot of time over the past few years increasingly addressing
the subject. Journalists in this context, rather like Members of another place, if you meet
them individually, agree with you. As soon as they speak in public, they disagree with you.
Lady Meacher is absolutely right to draw attention to the Daily Mail. I know that I have now
ruined my public and private life for ever, but it has in my view behaved so grossly
irresponsibly on this subject. We cannot get a decent, sensible, civilised hearing without
being accused of the most terrible things. I have always been accused of being a woolly
liberal, but I am an old hard-line Tory. I cannot be a woolly liberal; it is not in my DNA.
You touch on a vital subject. It is not just the press. I know an enormous number of
people—I am sure that you do, too—who have one view when they are walking on the
green carpet but when, mysteriously, they find their way some years later on to the red
carpet, a short journey up the corridor, they change their views completely. I remember
being in this Committee Room about 15 years ago, under the last Conservative
Government, when Home Office officials were trying to convince us that if you legalise the
drug market, the price will go up. We got into an interesting debate about whether the black
market was more expensive than the white market. We had a bit of fun with them. When
the meeting finished, the Home Office Minister—you can probably look it up and work it
out—came past me, leant forward and said, “You know that I really agree with you,” and
went out. He had just spent an hour peddling the government line.
This has been going on for 20 or 30 years. Things like the Global Commission on Drug
Policy report and a Select Committee as distinguished as this one taking evidence for a
report would not have happened five or 10 years ago, so the mood is changing and
distinguished reports such as the one that you are writing may slowly convince people in the
media that they are now behind where public opinion is moving. It is very difficult to lead
public opinion when certain powerful people in parts of the media are determined not to let
it move. Of course it will happen in the end.
Q203 Lord Judd: My second question relates to your emphasis on the importance of
decriminalisation. There have been several references in what you have been saying to
countries where this has been successful. I think it would be extremely helpful—perhaps not
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now, but in a paper you send us—if you could succinctly list the specific countries in which
there has been demonstrable improvement in the situation as a result of decriminalisation
and what the economic benefits have been for the countries concerned.
Baroness Meacher: What I can do right now is to give you the document that we prepared
for our meeting last week, which sets out very succinctly the Czech and Portuguese
decriminalising models, which are different from each other. I will leave that for the
Committee. Release, an organisation basically run by lawyers, with whom that event was
mounted, has done a study looking at all the different countries that have decriminalised
drugs and the level of drug use in those countries. That is not quite doing what Lord Judd is
asking, but as soon as that is available—and I do not know whether Release would be willing
to release an early draft to the Committee before you produce your report; I do not know
what your timeframe is—that would at least be another bit of evidence. Other than that, we
are into asking an academic to do a piece of work, finding the funding for it, and so on, which
is certainly going to be way beyond your timeframe.
The Chairman: Yes. Just to give you a clearer picture on the timeframe, we are getting
quite close now to the end of our evidence taking. We are going to Brussels next week,
then we have the Home Office Minister, Lord Henley, the following week and that is the end
of our evidence taking. To be useable in our report we would need to have material by
about the beginning of January at the latest. If that were possible, it would be very helpful; if
it is not, the world will undoubtedly go on and, we hope, this debate will go on, because that
will certainly be one of the areas that we will have to look at: the paucity of the debate and
how it can be enriched and made more varied and not as confrontational as it is now. I am
sure that that is an issue that the Committee will have to look at in the European context.
Thank you very much for giving us the material that you already have. That is the timetable. I
hope that we will have our report by February or March. Anyway, we are up against the
guillotine of the end of the Session, so we will certainly not miss that.
Q204 Lord Avebury: We have heard a lot of favourable evidence about the work of the
EMCDDA, but your report criticises it in one respect, that it fails to fully engage with the all
the available evidence, and you give the example of heroin-assisted maintenance. What
implications does this failure have for European drugs policy and what could be done to
rectify it? Is it the only example you can give, or are there other areas in which the
EMCDDA has failed?
Baroness Meacher: On that particular example, its final report did include it—maybe
because we complained that it had not included it—so it is in there. My point on the
EMCDDA is that I doubt that it is adequately resourced and I would suggest that more
resource would be justified so that it can do more, as I said earlier, in sponsoring research
into different policies. So I would say, “Boost the EMCDDA”; I would not want to criticise it,
really. I am sure that it does the best it can with its resources. The chairman, João Goulão
from Portugal, is a wonderful chap, a very good man.
Q205 The Chairman: We are going to visit the EMCDDA next week, on Tuesday. It
would astonish me if the issue of resources did not come up at some stage, although one
gets a little hardened to people telling you that they have not got enough resources. We
have already heard that from EUROPOL. We will have to listen carefully to that. The sums
concerned are not very large. There are two aspects to it: first, whether the EMCDDA itself
has enough resources to do the work that it is asked to do; secondly, whether the European
Union is using enough of the Seventh R and D Framework Programme to commission
research in this area. I think that we will have to look at both things. They are slightly
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
different and undoubtedly different in scale because the second involves larger sums than the
first. Of course, in this area, most of the spending in Europe is still at the national level. We
are not talking about EU budget spending, except in the case of the cost of the EMCDDA
and in the input that comes through the Seventh Framework Programme. We will be
following that up.
Lord Mancroft: It may be helpful to know that there is quite a lot of other research,
particularly in Britain, on this area of treatment. Last year, the National Addiction Centre at
the Maudsley Hospital completed a very big trial in five different areas of the UK comparing
people who were substituted on methadone, which is what has been used mostly in Britain
for the last 20-odd years, with control groups who were being maintained on heroin. I think
the report has been published and it is a very good piece of research. The academic world
keeps in contact quite a lot across Europe and a number of reports have come out, and
there is a lot of academic research from co-operative bodies in different countries, and not
necessarily through the EMCDDA. So there is quite a lot of research out there to be seen
and it is widely discussed.
I would make one point. Heroin and methadone maintenance is only applicable for addicts
who are using heroin. It has nothing to do with cocaine or dance drugs or legal highs or
anything else. It must be remembered that the main objective of treatment is not to maintain
people; it is to get them off drugs. One of the biggest problems is that far too many people,
particularly in Britain but also across Europe, are put on maintenance prescriptions and
there they remain. That is a sort of half-life. Treatment providers across Europe, whether
state, private or voluntary, must not be allowed to let their patients just wallow for 20 years
on prescription drugs. That is not the solution. That is one small route—an important route,
but it is only one route.
Baroness Meacher: One perhaps also needs to say that there are people who are so
damaged, whose personalities are so damaged and whose whole environment has been so
damaged that they may not be able to become completely abstinent.
Lord Mancroft: Very few
Baroness Meacher: Well, Switzerland tried very hard in its clinics. But always the aim is
abstinence, always, and that is important.
The Chairman: Perhaps I should say that if any of you have any thoughts as to areas of
research which you think could usefully be done at a European level—there are references
in the EMCDDA report to some areas where it believes more research would be helpful—
could you let us know? These are specifics, not just, “There should be more research”. It
would be very useful if there were to be some research commissioned and some specific
examples. That would be helpful.
Q206 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: I have a very quick question for Lord Mancroft.
Were you saying that, when they were put on either methadone or heroin as a rehabilitation
or maintenance drug, the heroin experiment was more successful?
Lord Mancroft: It appears from this one piece of research by the Maudsley that those who
were maintained on heroin did better. You want to talk about what “better” means: it might
means in terms of employment, crime, personal health, et cetera. That is identified. They
appeared to do better—and it is cheaper.
Baroness Meacher: It is more expensive but it is more cost-effective to go down the
heroin-assisted treatment route.
Lord Mancroft, Baroness Meacher and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Q207 Lord Dear: My question was really a sweep-up and to ask for recommendations
for the future. I think we have already covered that. You made pretty clear where you
would like to see policy go: skewing very much away from enforcement and towards
rehabilitation and treatment. I am not trying to put words in your mouth but would that be a
fair summation?
Baroness Meacher: I do not think that it is quite as simple as that. For example, if you take
cannabis, which is very widely used, the best form of control may be regulation rather than
the Misuse of Drugs Act. If you had regulation of cannabis, you could regulate the amount of
THC within it, which is the active ingredient; you could make sure that the CBD was a much
higher proportion than it is in cannabis generally available on the street at the moment. For
example, you could make skunk thoroughly illegal but you could have much more readily
available something that would be almost entirely safe—actually, infinitely safer than
cigarettes. So you would control the composition. You would separate the cannabis supply
from the hard drugs supply, so youngsters would be less likely to tip into or be encouraged
to use hard drugs. You might see—and this is where you need your research—a drop in the
use of hard drugs and thereby this tremendous drug-related crime. There is a potential for a
tough regulatory system that might be—might be—infinitely better than the criminalising
system that we have at the moment.
Lord Mancroft: Politicians talk an awful lot but they sometimes do not choose their words
as carefully as they might, and that is true in this debate as well. We do not actually have
prohibition in this country and we do not actually want legalisation. What we have under the
Misuse of Drugs Act is controlled drugs. What we are really saying is that the controls are
not working. What we want to do is alter the controls. That is a lot less frightening than
going from black to white. It is an area of grey, and if we can move the debate into a rather
more sensible area, that would help. The second point is that legalisation of drugs will not
solve the drugs problem. It might go some way to solving the crime problem, and then we
would get back to where we started, before 1971, with the health problem—a great deal
bigger health problem than we had in 1971, but it is a health problem, and the way you solve
health problems is with healthcare. If you look at it from that point of view, it becomes
slightly simpler.
The Chairman: One thing that I am beginning to learn in the course of this inquiry is that
applying the word “solved” to the drugs problem is unwise and unlikely to lead you to total
victory. That is very much what you are saying about shades of grey rather than black and
white. It is utterly misleading to suggest that any policy prescription is actually going to solve
the drugs problem. What we are talking about is whether it can be more effective than the
present policies or whether the present policies are the best mix, and where the value is
added, what the costs are, and so on. We are not dealing with one of those areas where
there is going to be a “solution”. Anyway, thank you very much for coming to spend some
time with us. It has been very useful to us to hear all these views so cogently and clearly
expressed. Your evidence will be part of our inquiry and some of the thoughts that you have
given us will be debated hotly within the Committee when we come to draft our report.
Thank you very much.
Baroness Meacher, Lord Mancroft and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Baroness Meacher, Lord Mancroft and Lord Ramsbotham – Oral
evidence (QQ 178-207)
Please see under Lord Mancroft
Baroness Meacher – Supplementary written evidence
Baroness Meacher – Supplementary written evidence
Please see under All Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform
Lord Ramsbotham, Lord Mancroft and Baroness Meacher – Oral evidence (QQ 178-207)
Lord Ramsbotham, Lord Mancroft and Baroness Meacher – Oral
evidence (QQ 178-207)
Please see under Lord Mancroft
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Evidence Session No. 7.
Heard in Public.
Questions 208 - 238
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
Vice-President Viviane Reding, Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and
Citizenship
Q208 The Chairman: So now we are all here.
Vice-President Reding: Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you. You have put drugs on the
agenda. That is part of my dossier and I am ready to answer your questions at once so that
we do not need long preparation. The only thing that it might be important for you to know
is that we are in a completely new situation since the treaty of Lisbon became the
fundamental law of Europe. Added to this is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is
being put into action when Europe is preparing legislation and when member states are
implementing it into national rules. That is taken into consideration. This is also the first time
that Europe has had a fully-fledged Commissioner for Justice. Before Lisbon, justice was
solely the competence of state sovereignty, but in cross-border questions it has now
become a competence of the European Union. That gives us the latitude to go for rules that
are effective at European level. Many of the rules that had been made before, in a loose
situation, involved Ministers deciding at the lowest possible denominator and then not
applying those rules in practice. By the way, there was no European Parliament or Court of
Justice to control that. With all these things that have not worked, it is now time to make
them work. That is my responsibility.
Q209 The Chairman: Thank you very much Vice-President, and thank you for finding
the time to see us. This is an important inquiry and we are quite well advanced in it now.
We hope to produce a report around February or March. Of course, we are looking
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
forwards, not backwards. We are looking to the future drugs strategy, which I think you
intend to come forward with at some time next year. We hope that the work that we are
doing will be one of the small pieces that will assist in the building of the strategy. If you will
forgive me, I have to make two or three formal remarks at the beginning, about the nature
of this meeting. It is a formal meeting of the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the House of
Lords European Union Committee. A verbatim transcript will be taken of this evidence,
which will be put on our Parliament’s website. A few days after the session, we will send you
and your staff a copy of the transcript to check it for accuracy. We would be grateful if you
could advise us of any corrections as quickly as possible. If, after the session, you want to
clarify or amplify any points made during your evidence, or if you have any additional points
to make, you are very welcome to submit supplementary evidence.
Thank you for your introductory remarks, which cover one of the aspects that we wish to
take up with you—the effect of the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon. I think we do
not now need to cover that in the rest of the questions. Going into the questions, which I
hope cover pretty well everything that we wish to talk about, the first point that I would like
to put to you is that the current EU drugs strategy and the EU drugs approach before that
basically accept that different member states are free to apply different domestic drugs
policies. Therefore, in a way, you can say that this is an area where subsidiarity is alive and
well and being applied. Do you think it is right that that should continue or do you think that
there should be greater harmonisation of national drug policies at EU level? If so, in what
respect of which particular aspects of the strategy?
Vice-President Reding: The strategy is a thing of the past. It is a nice piece of literature. It
has served to bring national policies to converge. There have been several finished and
ongoing evaluations of the strategy. The Commission always takes a strategy and puts it into
action. That is what I have proposed—a communication for action, not for having a lot of
discussion. Subsidiarity is a fact on several of the drugs policies, and it is going to continue.
Q210 The Chairman: Just to understand this, does that mean you are not going to
produce another strategy for the next five years, as well as legislative proposals, or will you
produce both a strategy and action proposals next year?
Vice-President Reding: I will certainly present actions. All those who know me know that I
am more an action person than a strategy person. If necessary, I can also propose a strategy,
but that will not prevent me from taking action, because actions are what is needed.
The Chairman: That is understood. For the purposes of our inquiry, that is quite clear.
Vice-President Reding: Member states might elaborate on a strategy.
Q211 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Vice-President, I would like to ask you about the
major objectives of the strategy and the extent to which the aims have been met. They
were, or are, to reduce the demand for and supply of drugs; to promote international cooperation; and to promote research, information and evaluation. What sort of progress has
been made?
Vice-President Reding: This strategy was a fine set of proposals on the demand and supply
question. You know that we are doing ongoing evaluation as well as policy responses. I
would like to point to a report on the global drug markets, covering 1998-2007, published by
the Commission in 2007. It concluded, “Intervention against drug production may have an
influence where drugs are being produced” but it identified “a lack of evidence that controls
can reduce total global production”. The same applies to trafficking. By the way, Europe is
the largest donor to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and is among the largest
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
donors to the World Health Organisation and UNAIDS. We also count a lot on our agency
to collect data. Even if the data is not perfect, it is probably the most elaborate and specific
data in the world. The action plan for 2005-08 showed that data can be improved. We are
working with the agency to get this done. I might come out in 2012-13 with more stringent
rules on data collection, but on that subject we strongly depend on member states.
Q212 The Chairman: Yes, we are going to see the agency tomorrow and take evidence
from them. We have heard very high opinions from many of our witnesses on the work of
the agency. The point that you have just mentioned about the inadequacy of the statistics
because of the different statistical bases in all the member states has been raised quite a lot
in our evidence.
Vice-President Reding: I did not say inadequacy. It could be better, but it is the best in the
world.
The Chairman: No, I am not talking about the inadequacy of the agency, but the
inadequacy of the national statistics that are given to the agency.
Vice-President Reding: Yes, that is a problem, and I must say that many member states do
not take that as a priority. We do not see it only here; we see it also on other occasions in
data collection. For instance, I was building up a policy for equality between men and
women, but the data that I have is simply not always comparable. I can only extrapolate.
Q213 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: I just wanted to ask you about the funding. You said
that Europe was the most generous funder to the UN and on health issues. Is any
monitoring done on how effective that funding is, and the sort of work that it is being put
towards?
Vice-President Reding: We cannot monitor the functioning of the United Nations.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Ah. You mentioned another organisation as well as the
United Nations.
Vice-President Reding: World Health Organisation.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Yes, can you monitor that?
Vice-President Reding: No. Those are international organisations. We can help them to
fulfil their tasks. We think it is important that they can, because not all nations are taking
their responsibilities as seriously as the European Union does.
Q214 Lord Avebury: I want to ask a supplementary on that. Although you cannot
monitor in the sense that you do not have inspectors who can crawl over the books of the
UNODC, you can surely assess whether the European Union contributions to UNODC are
giving us value for money.
Vice-President Reding: We are doing that with private organisations that we are giving
money to, with the NGOs that are on our list, but we cannot send inspectors to the United
Nations.
Q215 Lord Avebury: With the work of these NGOs, are you in a position to evaluate
whether the money that is being given by the European Union to UNODC is being well
spent?
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Vice-President Reding: This we are doing systematically. We are doing it not only on the
question of drugs, because that is a very small element. We do it horizontally for all the
money that we spend. That is when you hear from these organisations that we are very
heavy on their back, because we really look at how the money is spent and whether it is
spent on what it was meant for. This control is done regularly with all subsidised bodies. Just
for the United Nations, we try to ring-fence our contributions with conditions; we do not
just give money. That is all that one can do in international organisations.
Q216 Lord Avebury: Thank you. Looking at it through the other end of this telescope,
how does the European Union bring added value to drug policy at national level?
Vice-President Reding: We co-ordinate with member states so that they are not just
islands without contact with each other. They have an exchange. This co-ordinating role also
has a converging effect for many of their policies. We provide technical support, mostly for
those member states that need this help, and funding opportunities for NGOs. The new
report on 2005-12 is expected in early 2012.
Q217 The Chairman: The Commission plays an important role in the drug strategy and
in the actions that you propose. What framework do you have to ensure that you get expert
advice from Governments and from private sector NGOs, and so on?
Vice-President Reding: Expert advice? You know how we function in the European
Commission. We have a very strong system of impact assessments. We cannot bring out any
legislation or any proposal without doing a very sound impact assessment. During the impact
assessment procedure, we get an exact evaluation of what we intend to put on the table. It
can sometimes be lengthy. It takes time—you cannot do an impact assessment in three
weeks—but it helps us to take the right decisions before we put it on the table. Then, of
course, we have our research capacities, mainly linked to the body, and the monitoring of
the information once we have taken action. So those three things together—the research,
the impact assessment and the monitoring—make us pretty sure of what works and what
does not work.
Q218 The Chairman: But before, for example, moving into the next drugs strategy
phase and the actions you put forward, you and your senior staff will presumably have quite
a lot of consultation with experts and with people in the private sector working in this field
in the member states. Is that in any way systematised?
Vice-President Reding: That is always systematised in all our actions, not only in this field.
For instance, I am going to legislate on criminal law. It is very clear that before I do that, I
first need to have a legal base. I have a legal base in the new treaty. Secondly, having put the
ideas on the table, I need a sound and solid impact assessment on the legal questions and the
societal questions that are linked to those. If it is in the field of criminal justice, I also have
the input of Europol, Eurojust and similar offices, to tell me whether I am going the right
way.
Q219 Lord Avebury: That brings us nicely on to the next question. Drug policy-making
at Commission level is now the joint responsibility of the Directors of Justice and Home
Affairs. How is the responsibility divided between the two directorates and does the fact
that you have the two directorates looking at the issue cause any difficulties in decisionmaking or in policy implementation?
Vice-President Reding: No it does not. You know we have a separation between justice
and home affairs, built on the new treaty. The responsibility for the horizontal co-ordination
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
of the whole drugs policy is with Justice, as is the development of future policies. Home
Affairs has the agency, but nothing else. Criminal law is done by Justice, for instance. There
are other DGs that have some responsibility, such as DG Enterprise and TAXUD for direct
precursor legislation. On synthetic drugs, I have announced more stringent rules to ban
them more quickly. I am working on the precursor question closely with DG Enterprise and
with Foreign Affairs, because I have to make a new agreement with Russia on the
precursors. DG SANCO is responsible for drug treatment and harm reduction, and there
are other DGs that have to do with foreign affairs, which have to cover the drugs question
in all relations and agreements with third countries.
Q220 Lord Tope: Thank you, Vice-President. European drug policy must operate within
the confines of the UN treaties and conventions on illegal drugs. Does this present any
particular difficulties for European drug policy-makers and is there any scope for a review of
the international treaties and conventions on illegal drugs?
Vice-President Reding: The EU is party only to the 1988 UN convention, but not to the
1961 and 1971 conventions. Having said that, we are, of course, always in the remit of the
United Nation’s papers because they are general, and we are going through much more
specifics because we have the power to legislate on something else. I am just speaking
largely.
We supported the debate by data collection and information exchange. This is mainly left to
the agency because it is at the level of civil servants. It is not at the level of Ministers or
Commissioners. We leave policies on how to handle drug consumers in member states
completely to subsidiarity.
Q221 Lord Tope: What is your reaction to the recent report of the Global Commission
on Drug Policy?
Vice-President Reding: I gave you the answer already. I leave that completely to member
states. I refuse to enter this debate.
Q222 The Chairman: Let us try to understand a bit better why this should be so. The
member states are the ones who are parties to the 1961 and subsequent conventions, and
they are, of course, bound by them to the extent that they are binding, because the
conventions are, as you rightly say, fairly general and there is quite a lot of scope for
flexibility. I want to understand why you feel that you should not participate in the debate on
the future of these conventions and the way that they can be used. We hear some evidence
that suggests that people would like to see them changed and made more open to the
legalisation of possession and use, and we hear some people who say that that is a foolish
direction to go in because these are international conventions and it would be too
cumbersome to change them. I am surprised that you do not feel that the Commission has a
voice to raise in the debate on this issue.
Vice-President Reding: They are certainly very interesting debates. I think I should leave
them to someone else.
The Chairman: Right. Lady Eccles.
Q223 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Let us turn to the measurement of the efficiency
and effectiveness of law enforcement measures. Are there are any Europe-wide performance
indicators in place to carry out those measurements and, if so, are the member state
indicators compatible?
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Vice-President Reding: The action plan 2005-08 concluded that there is a need for the
development of key indicators in the fields of supply, scope, quality and comparability. In
2010, we published a working paper on this subject, and it was very clear that the data have
to be improved. That is the reason why we work on key indicators in this area. That is also
what I said in the communication for action, and I will present a proposal on this matter
before the end of next year.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Clearly you are dependent on the competence of the
measurements and what they are indicating with regard to the effectiveness of the law
enforcement measures that are at present in place.
Vice-President Reding: It seems that this is always the case for the European Union and one
of the problems if you have member states that do not really comply with what they should
do. That is why stricter, clear indicators, where there can also be a control if the member
states give those in, will be necessary.
The Chairman: We have heard a good deal of evidence on that, and I am sure we will
cover it in our report.
Q224 Lord Avebury: Your recent Commission communication Towards a Stronger
European Response to Drugs seems to indicate that we need to implement stronger controls
in the areas of drug trafficking, new psychoactive drugs, which you have already mentioned,
drug precursors, criminal assets and money laundering. In contrast to that, the recent UN
document From Coercion to Cohesion sees the global drug problem as less of a crime issue and
more of a health issue. Can you say how these two different conceptualisations of the illicit
drug problem relate to one another from your point of view? Are these fundamental aims in
conflict with one another?
Vice-President Reding: I think they are not because illicit drugs are both a crime question
and a health question. We are more responsible for the first one than for the second one.
The health question is certainly one that falls under subsidiarity. Drug trafficking is clearly a
crime with a cross-border dimension. On European legislation, we already have a framework
decision of 2004 on drug trafficking that excluded use and possession for personal use and
related offences from its remit, so we do not need to change anything. The only new
element which is now on the table is that we do not need any more framework decisions,
which are the smallest common denominator and are mostly not put into practice at the
level of national states. Now we can go for directives on the basis of criminal law for the
fight against drug trafficking as a crime with cross-border dimensions. You have underlined
drug trafficking, psychoactive drugs, drug precursors, criminal assets and money laundering,
and they are the elements I am going to concentrate on.
Q225 Lord Avebury: Those are the elements that are mentioned in this document, are
they not? On drug precursors, which have been the subject of comment in the media
recently, can you say roughly how you are going to tackle drug precursors, many of which
have legitimate uses in other fields?
Vice-President Reding: I am going to work together on this subject with the DG for
Enterprise. You are absolutely right that many drug precursors are completely licit
substances and we must not take measures that could hamper the development of industry.
We have to wait on the free movement of products for making industrial development
possible and surveying groups of precursors. What we have seen for the new psychoactive
drugs is that there is a very quick change from one precursor to another or from a group of
precursors into new substances. One new substance or drug is developed per week, so we
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
have to look not at individual drugs but at the basket of precursors that go to make different
drugs. I would like to be much more efficient here because we will run into a major
problem, if we are not already there.
Lord Avebury: So there may be some difficulty in formulating legislation that will inhibit
the use of these precursors for the manufacturers of drugs while at the same time not
interfering unduly with legitimate uses of the same substances in normal chemical
production.
Vice-President Reding: That is exactly what our impact assessment is going to look at.
The Chairman: I imagine that the costs that industry would be put under if a control
regime were introduced could be quite serious.
Vice-President Reding: Well at least industry should be made aware of what can be done
with those precursors, so we need certain collaboration with the industrial bodies in order
to help the free flow of these precursors to go in the right direction.
Q226 Lord Avebury: Can you tell us what specific measures you have got in mind for
dealing with the increasing number of newly discovered psychoactive substances that you
mentioned are coming forward at the rate of one a week?
Vice-President Reding: We have an instrument, a Council decision—again, one of the things
that do not work—that has three very clear shortcomings. We have analysed it. It is unable
to tackle the large increase because it does it one by one, and it is a very lengthy procedure.
I have utilised it once, and I needed one and half years to ban mephedrone. One and a half
years to ban one of the products, and each week one is coming to the market, so it is not
what we need. It is reactive. The substances subjected to control measures are quickly
replaced by new ones. That is why I said we need to work on precursors and not only on
the different substances that come out of precursors. Like all pre-Lisbon rules, it lacks
options for regulatory and control measures, but fortunately we now have the Lisbon treaty
and we can act. All this is under impact assessment in order to see in which direction I will
go, but I will go.
Q227 Lord Tope: Does the timing of the communication allow the Commission
adequate time to take account of the evaluation of the current strategy before formulating
the new legislative proposals?
Vice-President Reding: You know strategy is wishful thinking whereas an action plan or a
communication for action is an action. We are continuously evaluating the strategies, which
are more general papers. We have done that with the strategy until 2000, and we are doing
it now. The new strategy is going to come out at the beginning of 2012. In the old strategies,
a lot of elements were enumerated that could not be done because there was no power to
do it. I can only do what the treaties foresee me doing, so if the treaties do not foresee me
having the power of action, I cannot do anything. That is why the first Commissioner for
Justice has the tools in order to do things. It is rather recent. Now we can do real actions
which will have an impact and which will need to be implemented at national level. That is
also the reason why I have excluded health, because is intergovernmental and subject to
subsidiarity. We can only be a helping hand on what Governments decide. Work on crossborder crime, psychoactive drugs and freezing criminal assets, which hurts crime, can be
done at European level.
Q228 The Chairman: I take that point, which you put extremely clearly. Most people we
have talked to feel that there is a need to debate, consider and weigh up carefully the
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
balance between measures of control dealing with the issues you have described—assets,
money laundering, trafficking and all that—which everyone agrees are necessary, and an
approach that puts more weight on harm reduction and the health aspects than before. Do
you not think that if you separate out those two aspects so clearly, one set that the
Commission and the European Union deal with, and the other set that the member states
deal with, it is going to be quite difficult to get a serious debate about the balance that is
desirable between these two aspects of policy?
Q229 Vice-President Reding: We have debates all the time. I think they are intellectually
very interesting and we should certainly continue with them. We have the platform with a
lot of debates, but then we have treaties which very clearly define who is doing what. Health
questions are national responsibilities under the treaties, so I can participate in a nice debate
on what should be done—and I started my political career in 1979 caring for these kinds of
things at the health level, so I know a little bit—but I cannot do anything as a European
Commissioner. I cannot bring forward a directive or a regulation. It is not in my
competence, but I can very well intervene on the cross-border crime question, and there we
are in also contact with, for instance, our American friends, with whom we do a lot of
collaboration. We are also working on the drug routes in west Africa. We are helping
countries in Central and South America change crops. You know about all these questions,
but when it comes to the territory of the European Union, we have very well spotted the
difficulties we have got and the way that criminals utilise the fact that the cross-border fight
against crime does not function so that they have safe havens all around the place where
they sit and do their business and they bring their business out to other member states. That
is not the way we want to go ahead on this question. Next year, you are going to have on
the table the very concrete elements. I am working in a very narrow way together with
several Ministers of Justice and Ministers of the Interior because responsibility in European
Governments is divided between them. My main drugs action is going to be with Ministers of
the Interior, but some of the elements, such as confiscation, are with Ministers of Justice.
We are putting on the table thorough measures that will make it more difficult for criminals
to take advantage of the internal market.
Q230 The Chairman: This is a question which arises quite frequently when we take
evidence. Given the subsidiarity that we have been talking about at some length—both the
member state responsibility for health and the member state responsibility for deciding what
the policies are within each member state for dealing with drug users and possessors—to
what extent do you think that those differences, and there is common ground that they will
continue, hamper the European Union in speaking with a single voice at international
discussions of drug policy?
Vice-President Reding: As I said already in the introduction, the fact that we all speak
together, and have this forum where the Ministers speak together, might not change
profoundly the national rules, but they have a tendency to become more coherent in the
end. For instance, the actions and plans are all endorsed by the Council, so they get the
signature of the different member sates. Having said that, these documents are not legally
binding. A law will be legally binding, no? If we have a European law on confiscation of assets,
for instance, that will be legally binding and then every member will have to speak with the
same voice on that. But all the strategies and action plans are thoughts, not blocks. They do
not bind us to speak with one voice. The consequence is that, on certain occasions, the EU
will abstain from making statements for the benefit of the Union internationally, at least on
questions of health and how to handle drug users.
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Q231 Lord Avebury: Can we turn to the question of what measures the Commission is
putting in place to encourage local initiatives and input in formulating drug policy? When I
talk about local initiatives, I mean initiatives by individual NGOs in the member states and by
subsidiary units of government such as large cities, which have beautiful views on drug policy
which, at present, may not always get the hearing that they deserve.
Vice-President Reding: Yes, we do have the civil society forum on drugs, where there are
35 civil society organisations from across the EU sitting together. They will present in early
2012 a number of opinion papers on the future of drug policy. We encourage them to do
that and, through our drug prevention and information programme, we fund many activities
and organisations that contribute at the local or national level to drug policy discussions. So
we have many of those, capable of having a real discussion and we have the results of those
discussions are in the pipeline.
Q232 The Chairman: Would you be able to share with us a broad order of magnitude
of the amount of funding you do? If you were able to give us a note, it would be helpful
because we would like to take that into account. We have heard a lot of evidence that
suggests that this kind of co-operation between a city in one member state and a city in
another member state which have similar problems or shared experience is valuable. If you
were able to let us have a note about what you are doing already, the scale of it and one or
two examples of what the Commission does in using the EU budget for that purpose, that
would be helpful.
Vice-President Reding: We are doing a lot on this but you must be aware that the budget
has been much reduced and that nobody is going to increase the budget.
The Chairman: No, it is a question of making better use of what resources there are. It
would be helpful to us in our inquiry if we saw examples of what the Commission has been
able to do in recent years.
Vice-President Reding: You will see in that respect that what we do with very little money
has a big effect
Q233 Lord Avebury: We have also heard that some small organisations receive funding
which is sufficient only for the bare purposes specified in their terms of reference, which
does not enable them to take part in meetings, for example, of your civic forum. Is there a
danger that you will be missing some very worthwhile input from these organisations at the
grass-roots level, which might have some important things to say about European Union
policy?
Vice-President Reding: I am sure that we will. If I see all those who are interested to get
funding, the little money we have and those few which we can actually fund, I am sure that
we are missing out a lot. If I see what the national Governments are doing at this moment to
cut this funding dramatically, which is actually their responsibility, the fear that you have
voiced is a real one.
Q234 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Vice-President, we have had some quite disturbing
evidence from one or two witnesses about law enforcement strategies against the supply of
drugs that are too harshly implemented, and which can sometimes compromise human
rights. I am sure that this must have come to your attention as well. Presumably this is very
much a matter for the member states, but is the Commission taking a view on this? Can
anything be done to prevent this possible compromise taking place?
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
Vice-President Reding: There, again, we have a very clear division of responsibilities. Law
enforcement is a national task which is normally controlled by the Council of Europe and the
court of human rights. If I am not mistaken, Great Britain has signed the convention on
human rights, so that means that national courts and the Court of Strasbourg look at these
questions. When we are doing European legislation, also in questions of law enforcement—
let us speak about confiscation of assets—after the treaty of Lisbon and the charter of
fundamental rights which is an intrinsic part of the treaty of Lisbon, we have to take
consideration of the fundamental rights into our law-making. When this law is implemented
at national level, then the member states have to take into consideration the charter of
fundamental rights. That is complicated. It has not yet entered into everybody’s
understanding. But I have established, for instance, for our law-making, just as we have an
impact assessment for economic and societal question, we have an impact assessment for
values and the rights enshrined in the charter.
The Chairman: So, in the legislation and the actions that you are talking about bringing
forward in 2012, we can expect that there will always be a kind of fiche, which will refer to
the impact on people’s human rights.
Vice-President Reding: Absolutely, not only on those but horizontally on all legal proposals
which come out of the Commission, there is coherence with the charter of fundamental
rights. And because we do not have a third pillar any more, and it has been integrated into
normal EU law-making, it is clear that all EU law-making is subject to the necessity to apply
the charter of fundamental rights. That comes interestingly at a moment when the discussion
in your country is going very high on the convention of human rights, is it not?
The Chairman: One does hear from time to time a certain amount of comment on that,
yes. Although the Government have not actually put forward any proposals in this sphere as
yet, the debate is a very active one; and on the EU charter too.
Q235 Lord Avebury: We have heard a lot of favourable comment on the work of the
EMCDDA, but a difficulty has come to light surrounding the limitations imposed on the
quality and comparability of the data collected by it due to a lack of common definitions; for
example, drug-related crime, drug-related deaths and what is meant by “large amounts” of
drugs. That is referred to in the EMCDDA report itself on page 35: “National information
systems differ across Europe, especially in relation to recording and reporting practices. For
these reasons, it is difficult to make robust comparisons between countries”. Do you think
that anything could be done to rectify this in developing common definitions that would
apply across all member states?
Vice-President Reding: I think I have already said several times, so I am going to repeat it,
that the data that are collected by the agency are, by all comparisons, the best in the world.
Having said that, it is not good enough. The improvements in data depend to a great extent
on the investment of member states in improving and updating data collection instruments at
national level. In order to help them to do it, and to push them a little bit, we will produce
by the end of 2012 a proposal for the development of key indicators in the drug supply area.
Lord Avebury: But in those key indicators, will you be able to specify what definitions the
member states should adopt for these elements of policy that I have mentioned? What are
“drug-related crimes”? What are “drug-related deaths”? That way you do not have
differences between all 27 countries in how these matters are defined.
Vice-President Reding: That is exactly what the impact assessment is going to do.
Lord Avebury: Good.
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
The Chairman: That is very interesting.
Q236 Lord Tope: Can you tell us what measures are in place to assess whether the drug
policies of the EU and its member states are cost effective, and what those measures are
actually reporting about cost effectiveness?
Vice-President Reding: I think that I have already answered that question.
Lord Tope: What particular difficulties will the current economic circumstances bring to
formulating policy at national and European level?
Vice-President Reding: I think that I have also already responded to this. Europe is not
going to get more money. The EU and national budget are certainly, as we are seeing, going
to have a lack of public expansion.
Lord Tope: What is the effect of that likely to be?
Vice-President Reding: Every national Parliament has to analyse what is happening in its
country. National Parliaments are responsible for national budgets.
Lord Tope: And at the EU level?
Vice-President Reding: At the EU level I have managed to stabilise the budget concerning
these questions, but I am certainly not going to manage to augment the budget.
Q237 The Chairman: That is, stabilise it in real terms or in nominal terms?
Vice-President Reding: In real terms. There is an inflationary increase, yes.
The Chairman: So you should be able to continue with programmes along the basis that
you have already got, but not to expand them.
Vice-President Reding: Absolutely. Those programmes are a supplement to what should be
done in the national states.
The Chairman: Indeed. Presumably the Commission will express some views on the need
for member states not to reduce their funding too dramatically in these areas. Otherwise
they will be cutting away part of the policy.
Vice-President Reding: I am not responsible for the British budget.
The Chairman: No, I am just asking whether the Commission will express views on this
subject or not.
Vice-President Reding: Well, I can make a nice sentence.
Q238 The Chairman: One last question, to which you already referred briefly. How do
you assess the way in which the European Union’s development policy, which disposes of
pretty large sums, is handling drug-related problems facing the producer countries like
Colombia, and, indeed, the transit countries? Do you think that enough emphasis has been
given to this, or that more emphasis ought to be given to it? Do you think that the parts of
the Commission that deal with development programmes with these countries are giving
enough weight to the drug problem? Are they getting it right?
Vice-President Reding: I think that we are doing a good job. You know that Europe is the
first donor world wide for development aid. Aid to help farmers and societies to switch
from drugs to other crops is taken very seriously. To what extent is it efficient? We see
Vice President Viviane Reding – Oral evidence (QQ 208-238)
projects which are very efficient. We see others which were efficient and then dropped back
because there was a change in national policy in those countries. Then there are traffic
routes, on which we are working closely with our American friends, sharing responsibilities
and infrastructure—in western Africa, for instance. I was in the United States one week ago
to discuss our collaboration on drug routes with my counterparts. I think that we are doing
quite an interesting job there, but it is always not enough. Even if you do a lot, it is always
not enough. That does not prevent us from continuing to do this. My colleagues in
development and foreign affairs always have the question of drugs on their agendas.
The Chairman: Because, of course, there are also quite big member state programmes in
the development field. It is really quite important that the EU and member state programmes
act in a coherent and effective way.
Vice-President Reding: We try to do that world wide.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, Vice-President. You have been very
generous with your time at a moment which I know is one of considerable pressure on
members of the Commission. It is valuable to us to have had this hour with you and to have
your views, which will helps us to put together our report. I hope that, in due course, you
will find it a useful and valuable one.
Vice-President Reding: Thank you very much. On the questions which have not got the
evidence, my collaborators will send them over.
The Chairman: That is very kind. Perhaps we could spend a few more minutes with them
so that my colleagues can pick up any points.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
Evidence Session No. 8.
Heard in Public.
Questions 239 - 257
MONDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2011
Members present
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (Chairman)
Lord Avebury
Baroness Eccles of Moulton
Lord Tope
________________
Examination of Witness
José Sócrates, former Prime Minister of Portugal
Q239 The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming along. I expect that you have
heard a bit about the background; this is a sub-committee of the House of Lords EU Select
Committee. We deal with home affairs, so the EU drug strategy comes within our
framework. We are gathering evidence now to write a report in about January or February
on the next European drugs strategy after 2012. The present one runs from 2005-12, and
we expect the member states and the Commission to produce another drugs strategy for
the period ahead. We are trying to produce a report that is therefore forward looking and is
not so much about the drugs strategy of the past or the present but of the future, but
obviously it is based on the evidence that we have of the past and the present. In that
context, we are going to Lisbon tomorrow to see the EU monitoring agency there and to
see the Portuguese official who chairs the committee but is also in charge of drugs policy in
Portugal. We have obviously been very interested in the experiment that you made when
you decriminalised the use and possession of drugs, so it is very welcome to us that you
have been prepared to come along and talk to us about that, because this is one of the key
elements in the European equation that we are looking at. If you do not mind, I have to start
with a sort of formality. This is a formal meeting of the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the
House of Lords European Union Committee, and a verbatim transcript will be taken of your
evidence, which will be put on our parliamentary website. A few days after this evidence
session, we will send you a copy of the transcript for you to check for accuracy. We would
be grateful if you could advise us of any corrections as quickly as possible. If after the session
you wish to clarify or amplify any points during the evidence or have any additional points to
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
make, you would be very welcome to submit supplementary evidence to us. Would you like
to make an introductory statement, or shall we go straight into the questions?
José Sócrates: I want to tell you how pleased I am to be with you discussing this matter. As
a matter of fact, I did something on this subject some years ago. I almost cannot remember
those years, but I am very proud what we did in Portugal in 2000 or 2001. It was a
movement in our legislation in, I think, the right direction. In Portugal we have put a
pragmatic approach to drug issues into our law and put aside the ideological approach to get
rid of all drugs and have a society free of drugs. My family and I had a personal experience of
drugs, with a member of our family, and I know what it is to suffer a case like that in one
family. For 10 years, I called for a tougher approach to drugs from the state. I asked myself
why the state did not act in a tougher way to eliminate these dangers to our society. After
years, I realised that it is not the right approach. Unfortunately, we cannot achieve victory if
we take only the approach of repression. That is why, when I had responsibility for this
subject, I did my best to change the angle. Let us do something to make the consequences to
society of this problem less dangerous. Let us do something to reduce the potential impact
on health and safety to society. Let us do something to get a better approach. To be honest,
the pragmatic approach was one that we had followed already in the 1990s in some areas.
For instance, all the countries in Europe had a programme for clean needles, which was
clearly a way to combat the effects of the drugs on our society. We do not want Aids; we
do not want disease—and if you want to use drugs, please do so without danger. It is a
pragmatic approach. We cannot do anything in any other way. I had the responsibility to do
something on the legal aspect, because we saw so many consequences for drug users and for
the state due to some cases of consumers. First, we had almost no jail sentences for
consumers. We have two or three institutions already adopting the idea that it is better not
to put these people in jail, because it will be worse. Secondly, we had problems in our
judicial system, with so many cases of consumption. The state spends a lot of money and
resources on dealing with all this—judges, lawyers, prosecutors, all the scenario. Can we
lower the level? That was the question that I put to myself, and that is why we decided to
make the change in our legislation that you mentioned. We did it that way because we
looked for a solution that would do two things, the first of which was to make a law that
was compatible with the international conventions. It is very important, because the fear of
creating a paradise for drug consumption is real. On the other hand, we want to put it out.
So I think it is a perfect solution. It is illegal, but it is not criminal. It is a contravention. To be
honest, if you asked me what changed in Portugal, the real change was in our courts; they
did not take care of these cases. In society nothing really changed because the courts had
already decided not to jail those who consumed. Changes in the legislation were decided
because there are a lot of prejudgments, phantoms and preconceived ideas about this
subject. From my point of view it is necessary to find an alternative—to follow a real
pragmatic approach and do whatever we can to make life better for people who use drugs
and to avoid the danger of using drugs in society.
Q240 The Chairman: Thank you very much. You have set out a wonderfully clear
narrative of how you arrived at the point you did. That is very valuable to us, partly because
you have not sought to exaggerate the difference made by the changes. Sometimes the
protagonists on one side or the other seek to exaggerate these and say that this is a huge
revolutionary change, and so on. You have set the framework quite admirably, and if you are
happy we will now proceed through some questions about the EU’s approach to drugs. Of
course, Portugal is very much part of that, but only one part of it, and it would be helpful to
hear whether you have some thoughts on the EU as a whole when it comes to draw up its
next drugs strategy.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
The current EU drug strategy basically accepts that different member states are free to apply
different drugs policies within their domestic policy. That is an area in which that famous
concept of subsidiarity actually applies. Is it right that that should continue, or should there
be pressure for greater harmonisation drugs policies in the EU?
José Sócrates: First, I think it will be good for Europe to have a common strategy. We do
not have a common strategy, but we have strategies about everything, even if the strategy is
that each part does whatever it wants. The approach on drugs is very similar in Europe. I do
not know exactly what the situation is with new members, but when we had 15, the
approach was almost the same and we had the same problems and the same strategy to deal
with those problems. I think it would be very good to have a common strategy. Why? In my
view, for only one reason: if we have a common strategy it gives Europe the power to
change the world strategy. Nowadays, we have no possibility of changing anything. If the
United Kingdom wants to change anything, it is very difficult to do so. It is the same with
Portugal, Belgium and other countries. If we have the same strategy, we can change
something in the world’s approach.
At this moment, the only country that can do something to change the perspective on this is
the United States. If it decides to change, everything will change in a minute. With all the
problems that we and Mr Barack Obama have, I do not see a window of opportunity for the
White House to look at these matters. What is the problem with having a common
strategy? None. I see only good things from having a common strategy. There are some
points that recommend the same approach, but I will underline this point: if we have a
common strategy in Europe in the context of combating drugs in the world, we will be
stronger. For consumption to be put out of the courts, of course you need to speak to
judges and people from the prisons. No one recommends that we should put into prison
someone who uses drugs but does not traffic drugs. It is only one aspect. There are all the
addict programmes based on harm reduction. We also have some technical expressions to
reduce the harmful effect of drugs on society. I think that we should base our policy on the
results. If a programme makes things better, why not use it? To be honest, I do not know
whether the question about a common legal basis and a common approach in Europe is the
main question. To be honest, I am not very familiar nowadays with the approach the new
member states.
Q241 The Chairman: The new members do a lot less on harm reduction than the old
members partly because they do not have the resources but also because that is not how
they have approached it. Among the older members, countries such as Sweden take a very
tough line. They are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Portugal.
José Sócrates: Sweden?
The Chairman: Yes, Sweden criminalised everything. You might think that surprising, but it
is the case. The Swedes appear to have no intention of shifting away from that. In a sense,
the aim to have a common approach is probably a long way away, but that does not mean
that you cannot have a more common approach than we have now. I do not think that all
the measures we have taken lead us to suppose that we will get there in the next five-year
or seven-year period. Sorry, I am not meant to be expatiating on these issues.
José Sócrates: This is changing very quickly. In the beginning of the responsibilities on drugs
I had as a Minister, as an adjunct to the Prime Minister, I remember an interview on
television by the Secretary of State with responsibility for drugs from the Dutch
Government. I was very curious to understand how the Dutch signed a convention against
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
all the consumption and had all the coffee shops. It was a fantastic interview. It was saying,
“We have prohibition. It is forbidden”, but our Attorney-General has the possibility of taking
the approach of opportunity. The Dutch decided seven years ago not to prosecute. That
decision is the origin of all the coffee shops. The journalists were saying, “It is illegal. Is this a
little hypocritical?” I do not know but it works. I never forget that it works. Is it the only
solution? The problem is that the coffee shops attract certain tourists. I think that the
Government now want to illegalise the coffee shops. I agree that we were looking at Holland
as a country of tolerance, but the politics of Sweden are so different.
The Chairman: That is one of the reasons why we are doubtful whether it is wise to try
to prescribe in a centralised way what countries should do. Your answers have been very
helpful in seeing the advantages of converging more closely.
Q242 Lord Avebury: You said that we should base our policy on results. Let us look at
the objectives of the European drug strategy of 2005-12 to see whether they have been
achieved. They were: to significantly reduce the demand for and supply of drugs; to promote
international co-operation; and to promote research, information and evaluation. To what
extent have those objectives been achieved in the past seven years?
José Sócrates: I am not very familiar with the accuracy of the latest figures of the drug
policies. My intuition is that it is flat, but I am not very familiar with it. All the strategies
should be ambitious. They should be like an engine to make ambitious targets. I do not know
whether the targets were achieved but my impression is that in all countries we have the
same phenomenon. I am not sure about this, but I think there is a decline in the use of
heroin by some groups, which is very important. I do not believe in a policy that treats all
drugs with the same intensity and preoccupation. Believe me, drugs are very different, and
the danger is heroin, taken by young people. It is a general inclination, a general standard, but
I am not able to answer your question.
Q243 Lord Tope: You have talked about drug policy at the national level. How can the
European Union add value to that?
José Sócrates: I think we have added value on international issues and some instruments to
measure the impact of drugs and the development of international policies, and a
comparison between countries. It is very helpful. I speak based on my own experience. I
remember the Lisbon strategy in the beginning. There were so many objectives. In recent
years, we made great progress when we decided to fix some targets and had the possibility
to evaluate the performance in each country. That possibility to compare policies put
countries in a race to achieve, which is very good. For instance, we compete nowadays on
innovation because we have a scoreboard. We compete on science. We compete on online
governmental service. Why? Because we have a scoreboard. By the way, do you know which
country has the number one online governmental service? It is Portugal. That is why we can
push national policies. Our experience in the past three years of the Lisbon strategy shows
that something has been done after the capacity of the Commission to measure and classify
countries and make it public.
Q244 The Chairman: What you have said is very much in tune with what various other
witnesses have said. They have also said that the European agency in Lisbon has done a good
job in assembling the statistics. The difficulty that the agency admits to, and which lots of our
witnesses have talked about, is that the statistics—the information—provide by national
Governments is not compatible. You are dealing with apples and oranges all the time and
you therefore cannot produce firm evidential data, which is one of the real weaknesses. I do
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
not know whether that is your view, but it is certainly the view of the agency and of quite a
lot of our witnesses. The British witnesses believe that the agency’s work is valuable, but
they think that it could be a lot more so if there was a greater degree of compatibility of the
statistical base.
José Sócrates: No doubt you are completely right. Making the data compatible for
comparison is essential in measuring the development of national policies. That is why there
is some possibility of a common strategy. It is not about more power to fix the right
approach on a statistical basis but about the capacity to measure it and make it public.
The Chairman: Absolutely, I am going to skip the next question because you kindly
answered it, which was the story of Portugal and why it came to the policies that it has
done. You helpfully gave us that in your opening statement.
Q245 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Thank you. There is just one question that I want
to ask before my main question. You told us in your introduction how the Portuguese policy
had originally been one of repression and how gradually you thought that a pragmatic
approach would be much better. Already the thinking was moving in that direction. Nobody
was sent to jail; some of the institutions were already on board; the public expenditure was
excessive, et cetera. The thing that interested me when you were telling us this was how
Portugal finally agreed to take this rather exciting step of decriminalising the use of drugs.
José Sócrates: There is a small story behind it. I do not know whether I can tell you the
story, but it is very interesting.
The Committee continued in private.
On resuming in public—
Q246 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Portugal operates a policy that is based on harm
reduction, but presumably there is still a problem with supply and demand for drugs. How
do you control that, or is it self-controlled because people just do not want it?
José Sócrates: I do not know whether I can answer your question because I have not dealt
with that problem for years. In Portugal, I think general public opinion is on the side of a
pragmatic approach. In all the polls we have done, people understand that the traditional
position against—the repression—was not working, and I think they support these
programmes. We have harm-reduction programmes in Portugal.
I am going a little away from your question, but I want you to understand that it is not only a
question of political language. It was after decades of failure, because in Portugal after the
1970s we had to face the new challenge on drugs, after our revolution, with everyone who
came from the old colonies. It was a sudden shock for our society. During the 1980s, the
majority of our public opinion wanted repression. The question on policy was, “Why don't
the Government just do this?”
After two decades, we understood that this is not about political will or the incompetence
of our policy; things are not working because it will never work that way. We have also
done a very good job in the field of treatment. Now the figures are better. The people in
treatment and recovery—
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Did not reoffend?
José Sócrates: Yes, did not consume drugs again. You understand that I am not familiar with
the last data.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
The Chairman: We will be in Lisbon tomorrow to hear evidence from the Portuguese
Government.
José Sócrates: My general idea is that the main point is that heroin consumption among
young people has declined. That is the optimistic side of the situation. Heroin shocked our
population in the 1980s and 1990s because families did not know how to deal with that
strange thing, because heroin is disease, heroin is death, heroin is criminal behaviour.
Q247 The Chairman: Our question, going on from that, is whether, at the time that you
introduced these new policies, you had any problems about the fact that you are were a
signatory of the UN convention in 1961? Did people criticise you or throw stones at you?
José Sócrates: In the beginning yes, but they shut up because we strongly defended our case.
After six months, they did not criticise any more. They accepted that we were in the
framework of the convention. In the beginning, it was the traditional argument: you will have
a revolution, you are the first—
The Chairman: And the floodgates will open.
José Sócrates: No, we are in the framework of the convention. We have the right not to
put these cases into the courts but to deal with them at an administrative level because it is
quicker; it is not so bad for the consumer. The consumer will not be criminalised or have to
go in front of a jury. If you speak to the Portuguese authorities—the prosecutor, the judge,
all the judicial organisations—they understand that it was very good to deal with those cases
out of the courts. We have so many problems with justice that it is very difficult to insist
that the judge should deal with consumer cases.
Q248 Lord Avebury: You talked a few minutes ago about the rise of the number of drug
users in treatment. I believe that studies have shown the reduction in morbidity and
mortality of drug-takers. On the other hand, some studies have criticised the Portuguese
policy because of the rise in the overall number of drug users. Has there been any attempt in
Portugal to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the effects of the change in drug policy
that you introduced in 2000-01, and what has been the cost-effectiveness of that strategy,
compared with the previous alternative?
José Sócrates: I do not think that the change we made has had any impact on whether there
are more or fewer drug users. I am sure that the consequences of the change in our
legislation are two major impacts, and they are both positive. First, our courts got rid of
trials that they did not want to deal with because they never condemned the person.
Secondly, it was also very good for the consumers because they were not ostracised and
marked as someone who has been in court. Also, the state does not spend as much money,
so there are three positive things. Did it impact on consumption? No.
Q249 Lord Avebury: Was there any national attempt to bring all these individual studies
of the reduction in expenditure on the courts, of the increase in the number of people in
treatment, of the reduction of disease and of deaths among drug users—all the
improvements as a result of the new policy—together in a comprehensive analysis?
José Sócrates: Yes, but I was speaking about the change in the law. The Portuguese policy is
comprehensive. It has more pillars, and not only of the law. The change in the law was very
important to make it clear that we also have a humanitarian approach because, to be clear, it
is very stupid to put a consumer in front of a judge with a prosecutor, and it would be more
stupid to put him in prison. That is why we think that it is better to deal with these cases at
an administrative level.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
The Portuguese drug policy has also developed on the pillar of humanitarianism. The demand
reduction was very developed and all the figures that we have are very good. Once again, I
am not familiar with the last figures, but I would not take at the same level of importance a
consumer of hashish or cannabis and a consumer of heroin.
The Chairman: I want to ask Lord Tope to ask the next question because it is based on
evidence from 2001-07 that we have received from the European agency. Please do not
think that this is a criticism of what you said.
Q250 Lord Tope: You said just now that you thought that it had no impact on drug use.
The evidence we have from the agency is that their data show that from 2001 to 2007 the
proportion of Portuguese people who used heroin in the previous month had doubled and
the proportion who used cocaine had tripled. That is quite an impact; there is no reason to
think that it is not correct.
José Sócrates: I am not familiar with that.
The Chairman: You said you are not familiar with this. We will pursue this tomorrow
with the person in charge.
José Sócrates: Can you repeat it?
Lord Tope: Yes. This is from the EMCDDA. From 2001 to 2007, the proportion of
Portuguese people who had used heroin in the previous month had doubled and the
proportion who used cocaine in the previous month had tripled.
José Sócrates: I am very surprised by that. I never was told about that. Are you sure?
The Chairman: The specialist adviser to the Committee, Caroline Chatwin, tells me that
this was written evidence submitted by Keith Humphreys from the Stanford University
School of Medicine. We will pursue that in Lisbon.
José Sócrates: You said that within the past five years the consumption of heroin in the last
month had doubled?
The Chairman: That is between 2001 and 2007.
Lord Tope: It is clearly a great surprise to you, if it is true.
José Sócrates: If it were true, something would happen in our society. Double the
consumers of heroin?
The Chairman: The figures on cocaine are not particularly surprising, because all the
European figures have gone through the roof in recent years. The figures on cocaine do not
mean that Portugal is different from anywhere else. The Portuguese figures on heroin are a
bit counterintuitive, because thegeneral EU figures have tended to go down, I think.
José Sócrates: But my conviction, as I told you, was the opposite. In young people, the
consumption of heroin was declining. That was the case when I had responsibility for that in
2001.
Q251 Lord Tope: Do you think that people are more willing to say that they used heroin
now than they would have been 10 years ago? May it be that it is not the use that has
increased but the reporting of that use?
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
José Sócrates: I do not know, but it is very strange, because we feel that the consequences
of the use of heroin in our society are declining. We have less violence from drugs; we have
less disease.
The Chairman: We will test that with your colleagues tomorrow in Lisbon and will
certainly not publish figures like this in our report unless we have tested them thoroughly,
because we have no desire to cast a shadow on the policy unless that is totally justified.
These are figures that run up only to 2007, which is, after all, four years ago.
Q252 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: Do you think that the present policy on drugs is
immune to being changed by future Governments?
José Sócrates: No. I hope that Governments in the future will change the policy. From my
point of view, as I told you, the approach of repression is not the solution.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So there is no possibility that in Portugal the policy could be
reversed?
José Sócrates: Oh, you are speaking about Portugal.
The Chairman: Yes we are speaking in this case about Portugal; whether there is any
potential for reversing the policy.
José Sócrates: No, I never heard that someone intended to change it, but I do not know.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: No rumours?
José Sócrates: No, no rumours. I do not know whether the Prime Minister thinks the same
as Barroso, but, as I told you, I have not heard anything.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So the position of the Government within the political
spectrum makes no difference—whether it is right-wing, left-wing or centre, everybody
agrees that it is a good policy?
José Sócrates: Well, we had a Government of the right from 2001 to 2003 led by Mr
Barroso and he did not change the law. I think we have a very good common approach,
political support and compromise.
The Chairman: The next question is one that you have already answered, which is about
the attitude of other European Governments.
Q253 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: This is a question about the fact that Portugal's
national policy is not entirely in line with that of the other European member states, which
is—to use your terminology—a bit more repressive. There is a hope that the European
countries will speak with one voice and have a common policy. Do you think that Portugal’s
position, which stands rather outside the policy of the other EU member states, is unhelpful?
José Sócrates: I am a socialist from the centre-left, but all my political education was based
on the philosophy of freedom in societies. That is why I want a Europe that defends
minorities. The fact that Portugal’s approach is different from that of the other states does
not mean that we are doing things the wrong way. I think the others are doing things wrong.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: So you are setting a good example.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
José Sócrates: Yes, a good example. To put it another way, the question of numbers is not a
good argument for me. There are reasons that lead other states to do things, and we should
listen to them. But more important are the arguments about the substance of the policy. If
you can give me a good argument—a good reason—for putting in jail a person who has
consumed drugs, please tell me because I do not see it. When I was 30 years old, I thought
that all of them should go to prison. It took me 10 years to understand that I should think
otherwise. So many times I banged my head against a brick wall when I should have gone
around it. I do not see any reason to put someone in prison just for consuming drugs. It is
worse for society and worse for the person. You do not solve any problem.
Q254 Baroness Eccles of Moulton: If they commit a crime by stealing property in
order to pay for the drugs, is that different?
José Sócrates: That is another thing. In Portugal, if you steal something you go to prison. I
am not speaking about that, only about consumption. We are talking about small cases. As I
told you, the consequences of these changes are very limited. The changes are political and
humanitarian. We see a person who consumes drugs as someone who is ill and needs
treatment. They do not need to go to prison. We would spend more money and the
consequence for him and for society would be worse.
Baroness Eccles of Moulton: And you can spend that money on re-education.
José Sócrates: We have so many areas where we can spend the money. It is very interesting
to talk about these questions at a moment like this in Europe.
Q255 The Chairman: The trouble in a way is that the harm reduction policies that your
Government introduced and are pursuing are also under great pressure from the austerity
programmes that are being pursued across Europe. The risk is that the necessary
complement to being more pragmatic in legal terms is that you spend more and have more
resources for harm reduction. Unfortunately, the little evidence that is beginning to come in
shows that harm reduction policies are under great pressure because of the austerity
programmes. That would be a great pity. It does not necessarily mean that the policy is
wrong, just that it is not being fully applied.
José Sócrates: The pragmatic approach to drugs and the policies of harm reduction are
cheap. We have a hundred policies that are much more expensive. We can pay the price
without putting money on the table. We can have the disease and the violence. The cheaper
way that I know is harm reduction, but once again I think that all programmes should be
under evaluation. Of course we should compare the money spent with the results. I will give
you an example. If we have budget problems, we should protect the most important
programmes. For instance, we have no doubt that methadone really works. It works for the
person and it is good because it reduces the crime rate. It allows the person to work and
lead a normal life—and it is cheap. We should protect this programme. I am not familiar
with the costs of the different programmes on harm reduction, but are they expensive? No.
We spend so much money on health. When I speak about a pragmatic approach, I speak
about money, too. As I told you, we have different possibilities for paying the price. One of
them is to put the money on the table, but there are others. I know that from myself and my
family. We paid the price, too, and I really want other families to deal with their problems in
a different way and with a health system that helps them more than my family was helped,
because we were at the beginning of all of this.
The Chairman: That is very strong testimony.
José Sócrates – Oral evidence (QQ 239-257)
Q256 Lord Avebury: Tomorrow we will see the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs
and Drug Addiction in Lisbon. What is your opinion on the role that it plays in adding value
to decision-making on drugs policy within Europe?
José Sócrates: In my six years as Prime Minister the matter of drugs has taken up only a few
minutes, but I remember that at the moments when I had responsibility for drugs, the
institute helped me a lot—and it can do more to develop a European drugs policy. There are
very good people there. But in my last two years as Prime Minister, the matter of drugs has
not been my main concern.
Q257 The Chairman: All the evidence we have heard so far supports the view that you
have just expressed: namely, that the agency is doing good work, that it could do more and
that the work of the people there is genuinely valuable. One reason we are going there
tomorrow is to hear their side of the story. We spend our lives examining different
European policies and I have to say that it is not invariable that everyone we listen to says
that an agency is really good. In this case they all have said that about the EMCDDA—both
the practitioners and the Governments—so unless they are all telling us a funny story, I
think the evidence is accumulating that this is a valuable agency that ought to be given some
modest additional resources to do a bit more research. It should certainly be given better
statistics so that the reports that it produces every year get better and better.
José Sócrates: The key point is better statistics and the possibility to compare and make
public figures that will allow countries to achieve better results. But it is not a question of
money. It is not necessary normally. It is only necessary to define a strategy that will allow
the agency to make public some indicators.
The Chairman: Your point about a scorecard with the Lisbon process is a valuable one. I
noticed when reading the agency’s reports that it was a bit too kind to Governments and a
bit too cautious about identifying the people who are lagging behind. I am a great believer in
the scorecard approach. I was delighted to hear you say that the scorecard was useful for
the Lisbon process. I belong to an organisation called the Centre for European Reform in
London. As you probably know, it started the idea of a scorecard on the single market long
before the Commission adopted it. It took seven or eight years to persuade the Commission
to start having a scorecard that showed people what was really happening rather than what
they said was happening. That is a helpful idea.
José Sócrates: No doubt. My experience over all these years of action is that the institutions
of Europe need to develop work by focusing not on public relations but on results. This will
help. The agency needs the power to help all countries to define the right statistics. It should
compare results and create indicators and encourage everyone to try to have a better
position in the rankings. Ranking is very good. We have a ranking on electronic government
and it works. We have a ranking on innovation and it works. All the Administrations know
that one day the rankings will come out, so they want to be in the right position.
The Chairman: I think with that, Prime Minister, you have given us a very valuable idea.
José Sócrates: Please, it was an honour to be with you. I wish you good luck in your work.
It was a pleasure to speak on drugs again. For so many years, I have put subjects like that out
of my mind. I know how important your work is, so it was an honour to speak with you
about all these things. All the best to you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Professor Alex Stevens, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne MacGregor – Oral
evidence (QQ 1-24)
Professor Alex Stevens, Professor Cindy Fazey, Professor Susanne
MacGregor – Oral evidence (QQ 1-24)
Please see under Professor Cindy Fazey
Mike Trace and Rev Eric Blakebrough – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Mike Trace and Rev Eric Blakebrough – Oral evidence (QQ 60-117)
Please see under Rev Eric Blakebrough