Recently, I had an article pointed out to me featuring my local MP (for Canterbury and Whitstable, Kent), Julian Brazier, complaining about Parliament's response to his questions on the 28th October about drug policy.

Before this, Mr Brazier has been making statements for some time about the need to "toughen up" regulatory policy on drug use, claiming the Misuse of Drugs Act is not "fit for purpose". This dates back to the deaths of Taig Lloyd and Hugo Wenn, and has resurfaced after the hospitalisation of Matt Ford.

I'll go into the circumstances of the incidents first, since Taig was a friend of mine, and Matt of my sister.

Taig and Hugo drowned in a pond. They were intoxicated on methoxetamine (also known as MXE), a dissasociative similar to ketamine and PCP in some aspects. Taig had been dealing with his own ketamine issues for a while, and the last time I spoke to him he'd left his band because of his inability to keep a schedule. It was around this time he started using MXE, roughly a week before they disappeared.

If you fall into a pond heavily intoxicated and unable to properly move your limbs, and then your friend jumps after you and gets caught, it doesn't really matter what drug it is. It doesn't matter what the law is. What matters is that an incredibly dangerous situation ended awfully. The situation would have happened had they been so heavily intoxicated on any depressant or dissasociating drug: it would not have happened had they not been so intoxicated, or had they not been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The deaths were ruled misadventure. Banning a substance does not in any way stop misadventure.

Matt Ford has a similar story. He walked into a head shop, bought a legal high with no ingredient information, no dosing instruction, sold not fit for consumption. He took the entire pack, and had to be hospitalised shortly afterwards.

I would wholeheartedly agree with the point that UK headshops act completely unethically, and with full disregard to the safety of the public. Not by selling drugs specifically, but by selling any unregulated product with absolutely none of the information necessary to even attempt harm reduction.

It's a brazen case of profit over people, and simply assuming your customers will be fully aware of all the risks, interactions, safe dosing levels, allergy test procedures, and the nature of full-agonist cannibinoids is not a defensible position in any sense.

I would disagree, then, that this has anything to do with the Misuse of Drugs Act. This is a matter of proper regulation.

Having addressed why I feel his appeals to emotion are misplaced, I will address Mr Brazier's complaints about the misuse of drugs act more directly.

Mr Brazier believes the Misuse of Drugs Act is not fit for purpose, outlined in the above links. And the Home Office response to his request that "if someone dies or becomes severely ill as a result of taking a drug that is a close chemical cousin of a banned drug, that should throw up a criminal offence?" was "The Home Office already takes steps to ensure that when a new substance appears that could be injurious to health, we seek to ban analogous drugs—the family of drugs—as a consequence. Some of the banned drugs have often not yet been created, but if and when they are created, they are already covered. We are trying to deal with this through anticipatory methods as well as by other means. We also try to have an early response system, so that when a substance appears, it can be picked up and banned very quickly".

To be clear, the Misuse of Drugs Act already makes it an offence to possess, supply, allow to supply in premises, or intent to supply, any controlled substance. Analogue laws are already in place, and novel substances are acted upon swiftly by the ACMD (the Advisory Council on the Misuse Of Drugs, who recommend the classification of drugs to the government). The complaints are groundless.

However, the ACMD themselves have made it clear that they consider the development of novel substances to be organised by an extremely pharmacologically and legally sophisticated group, who have shown sufficient knowledge in both areas to be able to create new active compounds that are chemically different enough to avoid legislation in a short time.

And Mr Brazier's response was, quite simply, "this is hard to believe".

I'd like to use this as an example for the main point of this article. The government has no interest in science or evidence-based policy. They are fully happy to use tragic events for their own ends, regardless of the absurdity and complete baselessness of their campaign.

This statement is, of course, biased. But it is biased only in the light of the evidence. We only need to look at the firing of Professor Nutt and mass-resignation of the ACMD in wake of Jacqui Smith's (the former Home Secretary) absurd rejection of the evidence and dangers involved in reclassifying ecstacy as a class A drug, or Theresa May's (the current Home Secretary) ban on khat and rejection of harm reduction and education-based policy.

So we end with a question. Why do politicians feel entitled to continually reject even their own most successful police constable's advice on drug policy, a field they have utterly no experience or education in, when they recommend a new debate?

As a suggestion of an answer, simply put, there is too much political pressure from America to consider even the long-game of forward thinking drug policy, and no pressure inside the UK to end it. Groups like Release and CLEAR continue to suffer a lack of coverage, and the total lack of understanding of the social causes of drug addiction and misuse among the public make it an easy votewinner to just stamp your feet and argue for harsher and harsher penalties.

This is not a conservative problem. This is a politics problem. It is a politics problem we have long had the answer to, and yet do nothing about.

The continuing death and disenfranchisement of addicts across the UK is an utter disgrace, to which we should hold our politicians accountable for.

Author: Colt Kennedy