1. Home
2. Articles
3. APPG

All Party Parliamentary Group Meeting

by CanSS, posted 20 10 2014

Charles Walker opened the meeting and asked Mary Brett to give a brief update of CanSS.

Mary explained that a London businessman had very kindly paid for a new, professional website that will be launched in early December.  She also talked about the excellent paper written by Professor Wayne Hall, an Australian and released by the World Health Organisation which was flagged up on the front page of the daily Mail a couple of weeks ago.  It was a summary about cannabis and how dangerous it is and it has been wonderful for making people realise that there really is something in this.

Charles Walker then introduced David Burrowes, the speaker for the evening.  David Burrowes is a solicitor and a Member of Parliament for Enfield Southgate and was elected at the same time as me in 2005.  He has worked with Oliver Letwin around the subject of drugs and the justice system.

David Burrowes:

It is great to be here and to have a chance to talk to you.  I know from being involved and popping in to previous meetings that you have had here that you are experts in many ways.  Many of you have experienced first-hand the issues around cannabis and other drugs around young people so I know that many of you will know much more than me in many ways.  Let me just give you a reflection on my insight into cannabis use gathered over twenty or so years.  Being here is a lesson in the risk of having a conversation with Kathy Gyngell and just talking about my latest insight from being a duty solicitor at Stevenage Magistrates Court.  She then said “Oh you really must come and talk about that” so now I will be much wiser when I talk to Kathy and tell her about my latest insights into cannabis and other drug use, but it is good to be here.

So to focus particularly on cannabis but also to the wider relationship between drugs and young people I was just thinking about what to say and with the issue of cannabis it is interesting how disproportionate the interest is in relation to cannabis.  Disproportionate in the sense of the interest taken, certainly from those who wish to liberalise and legalise with the issue of cannabis.  Particularly I think back to the time, and I think you have found the same Charles when you ask your particularly punchy questions in the House in relation to the issues of cannabis is the impact on that.  So when I have been involved in raising the issue or just responding in very moderate terms to the issue of the relationship between cannabis and mental illness when someone had a question about the medicinal influence of cannabis, the response that you get on social media particularly is immense.   You are castigated, they blog about you so if you google about David Burrowes and cannabis you will find that there is a whole stream of abuse and in fact how disproportionate the interest, certainly from those of the liberal end of the wing and it is immense and certainly tells its own story actually as to when one looks to have a debate about cannabis how it reveals a lot of other issues about how people deal with the issue of drugs and alcohol and its abuse and how it is affected by these people. Also, there is the disproportionate disinterest in relation to cannabis and its impacts in relation to young people, both nationally and on the ground.  You are all obviously an exception to this, but how we have this two ends of the spectrum.

So, twenty years or so I have been a solicitor, a criminal defence solicitor, and that has kind of affected me in relation to my interests in relation to drugs and alcohol and how it has such a huge impact on people’s lives.  In many ways I have to declare an interest whenever I talk about this subject because it was in my firms financial interest in many ways to allow the trade to continue and for the filing cabinets to be filled up and repeatedly filled with people who are supplied drugs and alcohol. In some ways it makes me a poacher not a gamekeeper in trying to do something about it in trying to stop my colleagues and others files being filled up with the catalogue of abuse.  But of course it goes much wider than this doesn’t it than the criminal justice system and  I suppose that what I was able to see during my years of practice and what I still see – I am still a duty solicitor and I still go into courts and I am still able to see first-hand what we see just in a small part with the criminal justice system the affect but what this is really is we are just seeing is just a window into the lives of these young people particularly who have been so damaged.  I just wanted to draw out my own interesting experience both with my time as a professional with the criminal justice system but also linked into my time as a policy maker which involved since being elected trying to do something about what I saw as the tragedy of the cycle of drugs and how we just haven’t got a grip of it over so many years.  And then being involved with eleven others in trying to see what we could do to model a drugs strategy and see if we could do a whole lot better.  You will have to come back to me with your thoughts on that. 

As a solicitor over the years I was particularly given the task of representing those who were young or mentally ill, which was a lot of the intake.   I suppose my reflections on those years was often of the most prolific, and I dealt with criminals that I saw just their graduation, not in terms of employment or in aspiration, but in terms of graduation  in drugs and criminality.  There was one that I often try and think about when I talk about drugs and alcohol named Royston who himself was just an example of what the tens and hundreds of these type of clients who, and you will be aware as well here, had high aspirations and he wanted weight lift for his country.  He was doing really well as a youngster and he really did have such high aspirations and he was going to boarding school at the time and he then got into cannabis particularly and alcohol as well.  I saw just gradually over the years that I represented him, sadly by the end of my time representing him that I was sadly on his friends and family list.  I was the one who was mostly on his friends and family phone list.  It was a desperate situation.  He had lost friends and he had lost family and he was left with a criminal defence solicitor as his main point of call and he would call about issues.  That was how desperate he became.  But over the time I saw what had been a bright light in him with hope gradually die and light in him gradually went out as the years went by as he went under the siege of drugs and alcohol.  Cannabis played a really big part in dulling him, in dulling his senses and in leading him down that road.  Sometimes the lights went up - when he had a child, suddenly he realised it was not just about him and it was about others around him and it wasn’t just about his dependences and feeding those dependences and feelings but about how he dealt with that and that there were others around.  But this was only briefly and then the lights went out again as he continued on his path with cannabis and alcohol.  I think about him a lot in terms of how we deal with the issues of drugs and alcohol.   Then not just the most prolific, there was more often than not the issue of cannabis at a very young age, but the most serious as well.  The most serious killers, the most serious arsonists, very much nearly always there was when we looked through and when the reports came through on sentencing there was the key area and influence the issue of cannabis.  So from that experience I became all too aware of the serious negative impact of cannabis at a young age particularly.  I think that is an area that is particularly important to focus on and we so often miss that when we go through.

Now, to bring you up to date, what has happened over those twenty odd years?  When I returned ten months or so ago to work as a duty solicitor at Stevenage Magistrates Court, the dust just flew away with my understanding of being a solicitor. It doesn’t change too much thankfully when you are there.  But sadly it doesn’t.  Certainly the processes are pretty similar and the law has changed a little bit.  We have quite a lot of criminal legislation coming through here but it is pretty much similar.  So what has changed?  Well, the names of the clients might have changed but the individuals, in terms of what is going on behind them, haven’t changed.   There were three young people in the youth court, 13 and 14 year olds, and they came in to see me.  They were from different family backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds but very much there were the same issues.  In fact they presented to me very similarly.  They really were very sadly dulled.  They were unable to respond clearly, they were really unable to give any informed instructions.  They were living a half-life sadly- like half-lives, which is how I would describe them.  They were half awake. They were pretty much homebound, getting up at very odd hours and were very much in themselves.  They had lost any real contact with friends after they had abused them in relation to being involved in drugs and them using their credit cards or trying to get drugs etc.  They had been thrown away by their friends and left to just be inside their house.  Also, and this is what really, really concerned me, is that these are all young boys who were or who should have been in an education.   

There is a statutory responsibility for them and yet they had, and for some of them they had more than one year had been in and out of education without anyone really bothering about the fact that they were pretty much languishing at home doing very little.  That is just desperate that this is happening.  Now there were parents there as appropriate adults and they had just about given up with the situation.  They were desperate too and had completely given up on the situation.  They are exasperated and wanting something to happen and for some kind of action to happen.  This is just an ordinary day at the youth court in Stevenage when I just happened to be there.  That is just a reflection on three. All three of these said that cannabis was at the root of it all and that they were just taking cannabis routinely and had become dependent on it.  It was very sad to see, but what really got to me is that not only had there been those who were supposed to be responsible during those one or two years that they had been out of education, who had picked them up and who had tried to see why they weren’t in education and what had happened and looked behind the scenes to see what was going with themselves and in their relationships between others, but that they had also been in the criminal justice system as well.  They had been through the youth court or been cautioned.  They had ended up now in the court process, and yet all the way along that journey, no-one had tried to look into all that was going on to try to come up with a package of ways to support those people out of the mire that they are in.  Even then when we get into court, and we did get into court with three of them, is that the youth offending team were just fairly disinterested in the whole thing. They had seen it before.  Cannabis - it is just a bit of cannabis isn’t it? This person had put his own view of cannabis from when he was a youngster and was transposing it into the situation of these three desperately sad individuals.  Nothing much was going to be offered. I tried to encourage the magistrates to make some further enquiries to actually challenge them and there they were, they had actually gone in front of a court, to see what is going on with the local education authority in Hertfordshire, whether there is any intervention is going on in the way of treatment, what is happening in relation to their whole welfare.  All these are enquiries that really could and should be made, and there are in fact duties of care, but the court has seen it all before.  They had seen it lots of times before and no-one therefore was going to take it too seriously.  So they then carried on the boys all got referral orders for nine months to have contact with this disinterested social worker and this police officer who was also just on placement for a year.  

And this is going on all the time and it is a real shame.  So they moved on and no doubt these youngsters are probably still dependent on cannabis and will probably in time go the way of Royston who graduated to a life full of serious crime which will mean serious misery for them, their families and for all those around them.  So, it was depressing to be back there in court and to see that in so many ways things haven’t changed very much.

So therefore in terms of wanting to feel encouraged and understanding was is going on out there in the world, it was very encouraging to read this month about Professor Wayne Hall’s study that has been going on for twenty years.  Like you, for twenty years I have been raising concerns and have seen it on the ground and seen the huge impact that it has on people’s lives,  the issues of dependency and it was gratifying to see that here we have a long, long piece of research looking at all material from an expert adviser to the World Health Organisation, putting down very clearly that drugs are a trigger for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia as you have all been saying year in year out, that it traps users in a spiral of dependency, that it inhibits brain development in young people, just thinking of my three young people in Stevenage youth court where I could see that very much for myself.  It is this downward spiral that I could see in these three young people that leads to them wanting to drop out of school, and then we have failure to find employment, alienation from family and friends, and then becoming fully dependent on drugs and welfare.  That is what I see in Stevenage Youth Court and we have seen year in year out of these last twenty years. 

So what are we doing about that?  Well, if we reference, if we just want to go to the NDTMS and we could have a debate about the rigours and quality of the NDTMS and they have statistics for young people and the latest research on that.  What would they say?  Well they say yes, that the majority of young people accessing specialist services did so with problems with cannabis, 68% or 24% with alcohol as their primary substance.  Well, one can recognise that and may well think that it is an underestimate in many ways but certainly that is what is put forward. Then it says and agrees that those entering services, just over half were in main stream education and 19% were not in education or training or employment.   Then it talked about and reports that 74% of multiple probabilities. Now we are talking about across the whole piste of whole drug misuse.  Across the whole scale of those who were linked in to substance abuse, 79% of those that were linked in to the NDTMS system said that they no longer needed specialist intervention.  That is 8 out of 10 reported that they didn’t need any specialist intervention of all those young people that came into the service.  8 out of ten did not need, and less than 1% received a referral to adult drug or alcohol treatments. 

So everything is ok then. 8 out of 10 aren’t referred to specialist intervention so they must be alright then mustn’t they?  Well the reality is that we see on the ground and see in the youth courts and see elsewhere sadly that this just plainly isn’t the case.  But what we have also got now is Professor Hall saying very clearly that this isn’t the case in evidential terms.  That adverse effect of acute use, which is what Professor Hall concludes, driving whilst cannabis impaired for instance approximately doubles car crash risk, maternal cannabis use during pregnancy modestly reduces birth weight, and so what is the adverse effect of chronic use? One in ten regular cannabis users will develop dependence which rises to one in six in those people who start in adolescence. 

What else does it say about chronic use?  Regular cannabis use in adolescence approximately doubles, yes doubles the risk of early school leaving and cognitive impairment and psychosis in adult users.  What other risks does regular cannabis use produce? It is strongly associated with the use of other illicit drugs.  It may also increase the risk of cardiovascular events, angina, and heart attack in middle age and older adults with pre-existing cardio vascular disease.  And so the list goes on.  This study is over a twenty year period.  This really is an excellent study and along with my twenty year period of time observing cannabis use, it really does chime with us doesn’t it?  And then we see, quite properly so that Mark Winstanley from the Re- Think mental charity was commented as saying “The common view that smoking cannabis is nothing to get worked up about needs to be challenged more effectively.”  And so say all of us!  “Government time and money would be much better spent on educating young people about how smoking cannabis is essentially playing a very real game of Russian roulette with your mental health.” Now this is something that you have all been saying as well. 

Now, what is Government doing about it?  Well I was involved in the drug strategy in terms of shaping that and trying to ensure that it was an efficient as it could be about real recovery.  The latest review says this “The drug strategy raises the level of ambition to support people to recover fully, which we believe means being free from dependence on drugs and alcohol.  Our aim is for local areas to provide services that an individual may need in order to achieve that and to sustain recovery, which will encompass housing, employment and appropriate support to maintain a stable family life and a life free from crime. We need in a way to take recovery beyond the treatment system to make this sustainable.”

Now those are good words and words that I am sure that you would agree with.  The continued challenge though is particularly and sadly more to do with young people is that it doesn’t meet the reality of what young people are going through.  If you go and look at any public health strategy such as the one in my area, cannabis won’t be mentioned. It won’t get a mention at all and young people are very much down the list.  It is adult centric, it is focussed and no doubt if the Home Office minister was here they would tell you about, and they would be quite right to tell you about the serious concerns that there about the latest drugs that are on the market.  These are the drugs that are hard to keep a control over.  The increasing concern that they have is that there is evidence not so much of a tendency not so much to dependency but to violence so the Home Office machine and the commissioning machines focus their attention on this because this leads to crime with young people and this needs to be tackled.  We need to find ways to intervene and to deal with that.  So that is where the focus is, despite the fact that we have this clear evidence now, growing evidence about the impact of cannabis, how that it is a predominant problem for young people as they become more and more dependent and more and more ravaged by the impact of cannabis on their lives, not just dealing with crime but in their relationships and their opportunities for getting in to education and employment. 

So we have got to think of ways in which we can improve that and do more about it and try and bridge that gap.  We still need to bridge that gap but how? The existing government have increasingly localised relationships to spend on alcohol and drugs, but how, we can ensure that if one is to follow that localised level, that localised policy, we need to ensure that when we have someone who is identified as taking cannabis, how we don’t just simply have a brief intervention or ticks a box that you have dealt with cannabis and that they aren’t referring themselves for specialist treatment, whatever they determine that to be, but that they stay in and there is constant attention given to what is more likely not to happen, which is an increasing dependence and a need for people to involved in their care and support.  What I have seen all too often and still see as a solicitor, and which I am conscious of as a politician is that there is still that disinterest in these young people.   There is another area that we are looking at currently and that is with mental health issues such as autism and I know that is something of interest to Charles Walker as well. We are stepping up in terms of early identification for example of those with the spectrum of autism and we are recognising that there is a need to ensure that all types of services are engaged in a pathway as that continues over a large number of years and also looking at transition to adulthood when dealing with people with autism.  Now we don’t see that level of attention at all when it comes to cannabis and young people. We don’t see that it is important that we continue to have an attention to keep ensuring that we draw in lots of different services to provide support for these young people.  So, I am encouraged now, like we said at the beginning, that there is now a greater understanding that is developing.  Unfortunately, I don’t see it yet at the level of attraction, both at the level of national policy which has other agendas and particularly at our local levels as well so I look forward with yourselves to seeing what we can do to improve that and bridge that gap so that we can come back to meetings like this where there isn’t that interest from the legalising lobby and disinterest from people concerned about the health and welfare of these young people.

Charles Walker thanked David Burrowes.

Charles Walker:

I think Professor Wayne Hall’s report is the first or most significant report that has put the legalisers on the back foot.   It has taken a bit of wind out of their sales so it is against that background that I am sure that David will answer any questions that you wish to ask.

Dr Barry Twigg:

What are the proposals for better prevention in education?

David Burrowes:

At the moment there hasn’t been an agreed concern for the issue and so whilst there is certainly debate of the merits of the FRANK web site, the ministers will say in response to this, as they did in response to Charles’ questions he has raised on this over the years, “Yes we are trying to ensure that people know  and are more aware of the harms in relation to skunk and so forth” but the information out there at the moment is very poor and where I am concerned is that is not just us debating nationally what the information is but to try and ensure  that at a local level  where there is a greater responsibility now for spending on health and well -being that we try an ensure that local services and commissioners have that information.  We need to find a way to disseminate Professor Hall’s evidence.

Dr Barry Twigg:

How will you go about doing that?

David Burrowes:

Well it is not within my responsibilities to do that, but what we need to do and what I try to do is to encourage lots of meetings with commissioners and public health directors and to try an ensure that it is in their strategy documents and that it is in their minds in the terms of the way they look at things.  At the moment it doesn’t even get a mention.  So I need to play my part and we need to, as I will do as I have the freedom of not being attached to the actual government is to be on the case of ministers.

Dr Barry Twigg:

Well where it should be done is with the schools and the youth services. The trouble is, the schools don’t do it and the youth services have been cut to ribbons over the years.  The support in the courts for young people appearing there used to be done through attached youth workers and people like that.  They hardly exist now.  In some areas they have actually abolished the youth service, the local authority youth service, so what are you going to do about prevention education? This is hardly being done.

David Burrowes:

The youth service has increased in my part, but may be not in your parts. I don’t think the answer lies in the statutory youth service. The voluntary youth service makes up more than 50% of the youth service now.  It is not just about statutory youth services.  You are right, prevention education is absolutely key to being able to educate people in well- being, but the quality of that when it is being well funded has also been very limited.  I am not convinced that even on a statutory basis with extra funding for education through local authorities is going to do the trick.  We have, on a national level, a serious blind spot when it comes to the issue of cannabis.  On a national level what is pumped out, and we mentioned FRANK which is tax payer funded of course as well, you are not satisfied with that advice, and so would you want the whole plethora of FRANK education officers going round to local schools giving drug education advice?

Barry Twigg:

Yes:

David Burrowes:

Well that is interesting.  Some of the best educational advice in relation to drug education I have seen has been not done by statutory service or by a detached youth worker.  It has actually been done by the voluntary sector and by people who themselves know from ground level the impact of drugs and alcohol in young people.  So whatever way it happens we need to find a quality informed advice.   I think from my experience it is not just what happens in schools.  The fact is that there were parents that I have seen in my time as a solicitor who felt disempowered themselves and felt completely unable to deal with the situation that was facing their children with nowhere to go.  We have a situation where the education service like in the case of those three young people has a statutory responsibility to those young people, and even at that level when they were not attending school, there was no intervention or interest taken at that that scale.  Their parents felt let down.  So if you are not going to take an interest when these peoples welfare  is at stake, it is very hard to know how the same education service would take seriously going in to schools to tell them the rights and wrongs of taking drugs.

John Graham:

I am a therapeutic counsellor and currently associated with the CRI outreach project at Harlesden.  We work with people who have been through the criminal justice system and remain entrenched in it.  I was hoping to perhaps ask a dynamic question in regard to the economics principle that it is perhaps the availability of supply that creates demand rather than the other way round.  If there was any initiative to,  domestic supply of cannabis nowadays particularly of skunk weed  being basically generally being manufactured all over the country, if there was any initiative to do something about this supply, because although providing information about this sort of thing is important, it is the availability of it, there really is an issue here?  I wonder if there is an issue here to enhance doing something about the supply.

David Burrowes:

I think because it is done at such a commercial scale, the supply, there is a policy that this doesn’t cause police interest and so the police are not interested in that because you have the home spun supply.  The other side to that actually is the relationship also with those involved in that, and the links to trafficking as well of course. That also has links to organised criminality attached to it as well so that has generated more of an interest and yes that means that means the supply of cannabis becomes much more of a concern.  So you are right, so rather than the priorities of supply coming in from overseas it is not up there in the levels of concern but certainly on a lesser scale yes.  The thing that worries me though is that we still have a situation where are drug strategies are led by the Home Office, and that still is a problem and whilst I have challenges obviously in relation to the Department of Health, I think that the problem is, whilst it is led by the Home Office, plainly the Home Office’s concerns are mainly about tackling the rise of crime instead of looking at the latest drug, but how it is impacting directly on crime and that does cause problems, that does skew often the impact on communities and families and on health.  So yes, that does cause concern.

Kathy Gyngell:

When we studied some of this together, Holland which was interesting with regard to having a small level of drug policy which in a way has a sort of contained decriminalisation in the coffee shops and environment which the local area can decide if they will or will not allow, they are very pro-active in their criminal side on getting onto the cannabis farming within Holland.  They invest money into it and they really get results.  The Dutch levels of sentencing for that level of drugs offence are tough.  They produce an annual report on how effective their attack on home grown cannabis is, how much they have got, how many have been shut down, how many have been put in prison.  I mean we don’t seem to have that.  The Department of Health is never going to do it.  The only thing that is really credible is that the Department of Health will drive the Home Office in to being more pro-active on dealing with cannabis as a priority.

David Burrowes:

No I am not suggesting that. Yes, the wider issue is that the Home Office’s primary concerns are over catching these criminals but in the wider impacts of the harms of drugs and alcohol, for example at the ministerial group meetings that I attended regularly until recently, the big concerns were the issues of health, the initiatives of communities,  the problems of drugs and alcohol.  But they were nearly always by the Home Office.  It is down to the same thing, they always will tackle crime. Governments do that.  But they do take a lead on issues.  When you look at the drug strategy it is led by the Home Office and I just don’t think that makes whole sense because if you are just look wholly at the criminal justice aspects of the situation with drugs and alcohol I think we will go short.  We have to look at the criminal justice system too I agree but we need to look at the public health issues.  In both Holland and Sweden the common attitude is in how you deal with the health and welfare of young people and they are put straight into treatment and have intervention support.  We have a very adult centric way in dealing with drugs and alcohol and young people come way down the list of concerns.  They are really only of policy interest when they become adults, and they then commit some serious crime and then that triggers off an interest.  That is of course why the Home Office takes a lead in these things because then money will get invested because it is reducing crime that they are bothered about.  They want to suppress not get rid of that criminality.  They suppress it and then get involved in less serious crime and that is good enough for the Home Office in many ways.  So we need to think about Holland and Sweden.  Their early intervention was that when someone gets into a police station when they have been found to be carrying or using drugs, they don’t just simply test them and say ok we are going to make a reference for a referral to your youth worker and please turn up here and that’s it.  They are straight away through the door and in to receiving treatment and into receiving support in the same time that they are being dealt with by the police.  It is a revolving door rather into further crime is straight into treatment and support and it makes a huge difference.

Kathy Gyngell:

How could we do that?  How could we generate an interest into creating an intervention system like that instead of all these warnings and cautions where they can just go out and get the next fix and it doesn’t mean anything?

David Burrowes:

Well there needs of course to be resources for it. There physically it is the same building.  I think the way to do it is where you receive your conditional warning or caution it takes place there.  It doesn’t have to be administered in a police station.  It could be administered in a council building where there are drug treatment services.  Again this would need policy changes.

Mary Brett:

Did you read my thing about FRANK that Kathy very kindly put on the Conservative Woman?

David Burrowes:

Yes I did.

Mary Brett:

I mean that is just a complete disaster, FRANK and I just don’t know how to get them to listen.

David Burrowes:

Yes, other people have raised concerns about FRANK but it is a well-oiled machine.

Mary Brett:

The really worst thing in it is the strength.  They say it is about 2 or 4 times as strong as old herbal cannabis which was about 1 or 2%.  It was 16% in 2008.  That by my maths makes it much stronger than 2 or 4 times as strong.  There hasn’t been a potency study since 2008 and we need one.  We had a meeting with Sir Bernard Hogan Howe and Sir Robin Murray was there.  They had a conversation about doing a new potency study and Sir Bernard Hogan Howe said it was no problem and that he would ensure that Sir Robin Murray’s team received samples to test for a new study.  It was agreed quite publically that this was what they would do.  Two or three months ago I eventually wrote to Sir Robin Murray and asked what was happening about the potency study.  He said that we are absolutely ready to go but we need £15,000 and the Home Office won’t give it to us.

David Burrowes:

Charles, your distinguished Chair asked the question in 2011 about the relation to cannabis skunk and psychosis and schizophrenia.  The response was that in a  study published in 2008 reference was made to that.  It stated that they had found a probable but weak causal link between psychosis and cannabis use but whether this would become stronger with the wide use of higher potency cannabis remains uncertain.  Then subsequently in 2009 the minister of the time said we have updated the FRANK website with the new information on the harms of cannabis reflecting the scientific consensus.    Now you need to go back and draw their attention to Professor Hall’s report.  Are you going to update this because it is well out of date?

Charles Walker:

We had a pre meeting which David unfortunately could not attend, but I had a pre- meeting with Mary and her team and the upshot of that is that we are very much going to be pursuing ministers along the lines you just suggested in regards to “in the light of new evidence what is going to be done to review the guidance given in2008?”.

David Burrowes:

Well they were going to update the FRANK website in 2009 in the light of new evidence.

Mary Brett:

No, they re-launched FRANK in 2011.  That is when they did it.  It is dreadful because I completely re-wrote all their cannabis stuff for them and they just ignored it.  I just don’t know how to get through to them.  As you all know, I was a teacher at a boy’s grammar school and in charge of drug education.  My boys did not want to use drugs.  They just didn’t want to know and what they wanted from me was the true information about cannabis which I gave them.  They collected this information and gave it to friends from other schools so they could say to them; this is why I don’t want to take drugs.  There was also a survey at the time, with an initiative with the local police where they suggested bringing in sniffer dogs.   They did a survey around 6 local schools, mine included, 82% of these children wanted the sniffer dogs brought in because it gave them a reason to say no.  Kids don’t actually want to take drugs and are looking for reasons to say no.  Drug education in schools is supposed to be prevention and in 2010 the coalition government brought in prevention education – it didn’t happen  They commissioned Mentor UK, who call themselves a prevention charity but in reality they are a harm reduction charity and they are in charge of all the drug education in schools.  So they give them “informed choice”, and they don’t inform them properly, and you can’t give choice to children aged from the age of seven.  Seven year olds are completely incapable both physically and mentally incapable of making informed choice.  It is just criminal.  I have tackled them on that.   Lucy and I went to one of their meetings and I mentioned this.  I could feel it bubbling away all around us.  There were lots and lots of young women, primary school teachers there who were obviously in charge of the drug education in their schools.  After a while I stood up and said something about it being illegal and there was an absolute ripple of mirth that went all around the room.  Then I challenged him on choice and about the fact the brain doesn’t develop until much late and the risky bit develops before the inhibitory bit etc.  Professor Alex Stevens went into an absolute rant at me about choice that of course children should have choice and that young people could choose to join the army and be shot at etc.  Lucy said be careful Mary because he is beginning to foam at the mouth.  He was actually.  Now, that is what is in charge of our drug education in our schools.  That is the sort of education that they are receiving.

David Burrowes:

I have six children, they are at two different schools and I have dealings with some others as well.  I think that it is variable.  It depends on school governors. The drug policy has to go before the board of governors and they have opportunities to comment and to change things and I have been involved in that in my own children’s schools.  There are opportunities to be at least involved in the drugs policies quite apart from the national goings on, both in the strategy and how they are delivered.  In some ways though there is disinterest actually and it is taken over by people with a liberal agenda I think.  My time seeing the inner workings of governments, the department of education has been the least involved in drugs policies, both in terms of the strategy and beyond. The priority has been relentlessly about has been some of the other basic issues in schools that have been going wrong and have needed to be sorted out.  So the relentless focus has been on those so others things have just been left to carry on with no ministerial attention to the issue of prevention work in relation to drugs education.  So it is left to the same old national stuff but also is left to the schools discretion.  There must be an opportunity and there is an opportunity for governors and parents and others too, to ensure that in their schools the quality of drug education is better.

Dr Barry Twigg:

How do they do that?

Richard Ayres:

We rolled out a programme in 2012 to schools in East London.  We asked 32 schools to take part in our programme and only one school came back to us and that was only because we got in through the police liaison officer who was working there.  My colleague here knows that person so we literally got in through the back door.  The schools were frightened to become involved and have people coming in and talking about drugs because they did not want to admit that they had a problem in that area.  We also went to the head of child services in that borough as well who said that they couldn’t be seen to support this.

Charles Walker:

Just something interesting that they are doing in Wales.  The Welsh Assembly is funding mental health counsellors in primary and secondary schools, so each primary and secondary school has an emphasis on mental health and someone who is funded to deal with student welfare and of course you cannot separate the use and abuse of drugs with the issues of mental health which is why many of us are here today and I do feel that it is potentially, if that is a success, a route that perhaps we could go down within our schools.  The government’s issues and voluntary guidance around mental illness and adolescent health and well-being in young persons and of course again is something that you could suggest. Whether that is picked up in a school depends on whether there is a champion within that school who feels that it is crucially important to do something about it and I think you will also find that with drugs.  I am attracted very much to the welsh model.  It is relatively new and it has only been up and running for a couple of years, but I think that adolescent and young person’s mental well-being is so important.  It offers some hope I think if policy makers in our country, in England, decide that it is worth trying here.  What would your view be David?

David Burrowes:

Yes I agree but I think that the issues here are much wider.  They have initiatives for such thing as road safety.  Road safety comes up and then they have a whole day looking at road safety and they have other events.  When you get to sixth form they deal with other things like drugs.    They need to know that cannabis use approximately doubles car crash risk.  They need to know the mental health aspect and associated impacts of cannabis which should raise it to a high level of interest so it is not just seen as this is the slot, the drugs bit because it literally affects lots of levels of a child’ s opportunities.  It does need as well, and I am just quite sceptical about the level of the quality of governments central dictats in relation to policy particularly in relation to drugs education.  It needs to be informed and it needs to be accurate and that is vital at the very least and you are right to champion that.  In order to make it happen, it is going to come down to schools and how we ensure that governments as much as anything have it right up there on their radar.  This is a matter of children’s welfare and it is up to all of us.

Dr Barry Twigg:

Can I just add one thing?  In the past lots of local authorities, mine amongst them, used to have a drugs education team, Now this included people from the voluntary sector and those who had “street cred” and they were able to deliver because they were properly trained in this, absolutely excellent drugs education and they took this responsibility away from the head. They said to all the parents, “we go to every school you see, it is not just us, we  don’t have a drug problem, they go to EVERY school”.  Those drug education teams were absolutely superb and then in the funding cuts they just vanished.  And this is the answer and I keep on saying it.

Deirdre Boyd:

Can I just say that the more calls there are for legalisation the more people confuse marijuana and the more vulnerable and confused people are.  They confuse medical marijuana for stuff that gets smoked. It is a completely different product and it absolutely does not help when the deputy prime minister suggests legalising it. It shows absolutely the split government with no unity and it kind of sums it up.  Where is the leadership?

Charles Walker:

Clegg should be little seen and less heard!

Deirdre Boyd:

Well where can we see that Cameron or anyone is not kowtowing to the legalising brigade? It just sends out a disastrous message.

Susan Bedak:

My son is at the moment is in the Gordon hospital in Victoria.  I don’t know if you have been to a psychiatric hospital in England?

David Burrowes:

I have.

Susan Bedak:

I have been in about eleven.  My son has been in eleven may be twelve.  The one he is in at the moment, if I didn’t take sleeping pills I wouldn’t sleep to get through the week. It is absolutely horrendous where he is.  I went there Sunday lunchtime and the food is awful.  He can’t eat the food but sometimes he has to because he is just so hungry.  He has lost just over two and a half stone in weight and I have been trying to get the nurses to weigh him.  I have gone through the matron, the matron Odina who is lovely has now given in her notice.  Everybody at the hospital who is good leaves.  You get a good member of staff, like a manager, and after a year they are suffering from stress and they leave.  The hospital is packed, absolutely jam packed.  In fact, every single hospital I have been to, not just in London, but Oxfordshire too, because I live in Oxfordshire and my son was in hospital in Headington.  Every single hospital is jammed to capacity. The ward he is on at the moment is a locked ward, there are two steel locked doors as he is under section, section three of the mental health act.  I went there on Sunday and they had lunch.  The smell of the food was absolutely dreadful and I felt sick.  He wouldn’t sit.  He doesn’t sit with the other patients.  I think half of them are homeless people. There are people from all over the world there.  I don’t know where they are from, they barely speak English but they all suffer from schizophrenia on this ward.  My son was sitting on his own and he had this bowl, and I wish I had my camera with me because sometimes I take pictures, and he had this bowl of like sort of tinned tuna lumps with gravy and he was eating it with a spoon and I thought, that is not my son there.  You know somebody who was so bright and clever and he started smoking cannabis when he was sixteen, smoked a lot of cannabis.  And although I have had arguments with the doctors over the years, I am so pleased over Professor Wayne Hall’s report. 

Charles Walker:

The problem we have in this country is that we shut down far too many of our hospitals.  We still believe, and in many cases it is right that people are better off in their community, but actually there are some people that are so ill, so desperate that they need to be looked after for their own safety primarily.  Some times for the safety of others, but in the main for their own safety.  We have had a purge of beds for the last ten or fifteen years and we now have adolescents, sometimes fourteen, fifteen being ferried around the country two or three hundred miles from their parents because there are no beds.  At the most extreme it is sometimes suggested that they are put in young offenders institutions because there is such a shortage of beds and it is a national disaster.  I got a telephone call from radio 4 who were going to do an investigation and they wanted me to attack Norman Lamb and the government and I said, look, I am always more than happy to attack the government but actually, many of these decisions were taken by local trusts. We in parliament said that they were making the wrong decisions. Unfortunately the civil servants, this was under both governments, go back to the trusts and get some waffle about why this is a good idea and the minister stands up and says we hear your concerns but we have been told by the trusts etc etc.   This has been a disaster and your son finds himself caught up in this terrible situation.  I think you should raise this with your member of parliament.

Susan Bedak:

I am going through that stage now.  At the moment I am trying to get him out of there.  He has been suicidal in there.

Charles Walker:

You really must raise this with your member of parliament.

Susan Bedak:

The nurses don’t like me going there, they don’t trust me.  It is the most shocking place.  It is called the Gordon Hospital and it is an awful place.

Tony Bright:

I find it so sad.  What is the department of health doing?  And the Home Office – what are they doing?  They seem so far removed from Planet Real World. I am not a policy maker or anything but they seem so far removed from Planet Real World.  You have been talking about drug problems, I am forty nine, and you have been talking about drug problems for thirty years and yet nothing has changed.  Drugs are a part of society and they ruin lives but the government message is – well I don’t know what the government message is. Nothing changes and I find that really sad.

David Burrowes:

I think the responsibility for drug policy is not just a national or a political one.  It is a local one as well and a plague on both their houses, but it is also the case that at a local level the accountability for decisions that are made on spend on drug treatment for example is one that is not a local decision but a national one and the problem is though, that it is competing priorities.  It is all about champions in an area and there aren’t that many champions with local areas for drug and alcohol treatment.   Now this is something that we all really need to get on to.  We really need champions for drug and alcohol treatment in local areas.  I am happy that there are some glimmers of hope with what has been done with drug policy, but when we are dealing with young people, particularly in relation to issues such as cannabis, there does appear to be a blind spot.

Charles Walker:

That is why Professor Hall’s research is so important because it really does, and I can’t think of any other single piece of research that aids our argument more than Professor Hall’s report.  I think it really has changed the terms of the debate and now we can ask “so why do you think that is the case when twenty years of research suggests that you are wrong and we are right?”

David Burrowes

I think that the only other thing that now is changing is on a matter of usage as much as government intent is the change in terms of use of opiates.  People’s use has changed which challenges the system which has been so overly based on supplying substitutes for opiates and it then means that if you are going to provide any decent treatment you are going to have to look beyond simply traditional opiate substitute treatments into a whole wider range of interventions and specialist interventions as well and that really challenges the system that has been predicated to one simply to just maintaining people just on substitutes and so in one way that is shocking as well.  But when one looks at specialist treatments, and some of you in that sector will recognise that there is a limit to the number of residential centres that we have as well and the community alternatives aren’t really set out to deal with anything other than predominantly opiates as they are predominantly opiate based treatment centres.  That is another reason why systematically cannabis doesn’t get a look in, whether it is young people or older people because the system just isn’t structured to deal with that.  You remember that I likened changing policy to turning a tanker.  Well this government inherited a tanker which needed to be shifted to a different course which led to a destination, rather than people just being maintained on a system of drugs.  They have started to shift it but there are still those with vested interests sadly who are happy for this system to be maintained.

Kathy Gyngell:

May be we should drug test all the social workers and all the youth workers and teachers who say on don’t bother.  Oh David, we have been in meetings, even with MPs, you have seen them, where they just say that it is not a problem and that you just can’t get kids off drugs, they will all do it.  These are even people who are frankly and directly meant to be on the team working with those children minimising problems.  And I always think maybe they too are recreational cannabis users.  Why don’t they see that it is a problem in the kids?  Now I think we need more adult drug testing now and we need to say that this is just not acceptable any more, and that we can’t keep running these risks anymore.  You cannot be casual as adults about children and these risks anymore.  I am just dismayed but the casualness of so many adults and it is not just those in positions of responsibility but actually also the front lines of those who should be loving those children. There seems to be a denial that cannabis thing is a problem.  It just seems bizarre, and these are people who are meant to engaging with the children when they have been defined as having a problem.

John Stewart:

I am a psychologist and psychotherapist and for twenty years I have been working.  What I just wanted to say is about the medical profession itself is just the unbelievable ignorance, with great respect to general practitioners, of addiction in general.  So what we are getting, which was happening when I was training in 1995, and are still getting is a lack of training, and leads to the same old thing with diagnosis  People are getting a diagnosis such as you are depressed, you are anxious, take some Prozac, etc.  General practitioners of course don’t have the time to ask lots of questions and they don’t recognise addiction. They don’t have the training that is why.  We may get angry with a doctor who doesn’t recognise addiction, but the reason is, the first sight GPs see of any people with an addiction problem is in accident and emergency when they are doing their training and where they are likely to be told by that person to eff off etc so they don’t have a great deal of empathy when they actually get into that situation.  Then they don’t recognise many of the poor people they then come into contact with who have addiction problems so they stick a depression label on them.  I feel that one of the greatest things that we could do towards dealing with all addiction is to put an enormous, a much greater input into educating our doctors in addiction.

Charles Walker:

I am just going to agree with you about that.   It is extraordinary; we had evidence from GPs on another mental health committee that I sit on, they said that 20% of GPs do it well, 40% do it passably and 40% don’t do it well at all and this was from heads of GPs from the department of health.  Now GPS are independent contractors. Now if I was running a business and I realised that I was not meeting the needs of 40% of my customers and even up to 80% I would go and get the training that I needed as a businessman because I would say to myself “you need to do this better” and I think that sometimes GPs who do a good job, but they are well rewarded,  are very passive in their approach, both to mental health and addiction and as surgeries expand and grow and the services they offer increase, I think we need to more emphasis on GPs actually facing up to what they need to be putting into services as well.  It is a two way street.

Now thank you all for coming, Please do stay and chat.