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37th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs

COMMITTEE EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

1525

The Chair (Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.))

Mr. Paul Flynn (Labour Member of Parliament for Newport West, Parliament of Westminster)

1530

1535

1540

1545

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot, CA)

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

1550

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

The Chair

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

1555

The Chair

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

The Chair

Mr. Réal Ménard (Hochelaga--Maisonneuve, BQ)

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Réal Ménard

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Réal Ménard

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Réal Ménard

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Réal Ménard

1600

Mr. Paul Flynn

1605

Mr. Réal Ménard

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Derek Lee (Scarborough--Rouge River, Lib.)

Mr. Paul Flynn

1610

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Paul Flynn

1615

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Derek Lee

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

1620

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

1625

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Derek Lee

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

Mr. Kevin Sorenson

1630

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

Mr. Paul Flynn

The Chair

CANADA

Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs

NUMBER 027

1st SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

COMMITTEE EVIDENCE

Tuesday, February 26, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¹ (1525)

[English]

The Chair (Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.)): This is the Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs. We're very pleased to have with us today, from the British Parliament, the Parliament of Westminster, the Mother of Parliaments, Paul Flynn, who is a Labour member of Parliament from Newport West.

Mr. Flynn, I understand you've been very involved in the drug issue in Europe and in the U.K., and so we're very pleased, while you're here for some other meetings, you can spare some time to talk to us. Of course, the idea came to us from our colleague Derek Lee.

Mr. Paul Flynn (Labour Member of Parliament for Newport West, Parliament of Westminster): I'm extremely grateful to you. Merci bien de votre mot de bienvenue.

My report, which is knocking round the Council of Europe, if it had a headline on it and it were a newspaper article, would be “The Drug Laws Don't Work”. I saw you, Madam Chair, on the television last night, so I am trying to get some idea of where your committee is. It's a very exciting time in the way parliaments are approaching the laws on drugs.

If I could describe what my view is of what's happened over the past century, I believe that we're in a time now when we have an opportunity for change, and that's being realized in North America, in your country at least, and in many parts of Europe, where there are great changes now taking place and changes that are planned within the next 12 months.

The first period we could look at for drug use is the period before 1920. In the 19th century and up until then most of the drugs that are now illegal were freely available, all the ones except the chemical drugs that have been developed lately. It was quite easy to buy opium, the daughter of opium, heroin, cannabis, and cocaine in medicinal preparations. They were sold freely, and there were very few problems. Occasionally people would become addicted to one of the drugs, but they would be in a position of someone who's addicted to benzodiazepines or another medical drug now. Addiction is a problem, they're tied to it possibly for life, but they can get a supply of known potency that's clean from a doctor.

That was the position until 1920, and in various countries, but almost around the same time--I believe it was 1923 in Canada --they banned marijuana. That came from the fundamental religious movement in the United States that started the move toward prohibition of alcohol. They wanted prohibition of all drugs, in the belief that prohibition would lead to the elimination of the use of those drugs. I think we're all very familiar with what happened with the prohibition of alcohol. It did reduce the use of alcohol in the early stages, but its consequence was to kill many people with alcohol that was produced without proper controls; people were poisoned by it. But its main legacy was that it created an empire of crime that is still with us now.

The banning of certain drugs wasn't done on a basis one could defend now as being rational. They weren't the most toxic drugs, they weren't the most addictive drugs, they weren't the most poisonous drugs. From that period on, from the 1920s to the 1960s, there was a slow growth in the use of all drugs throughout the world.

The disaster year was 1961, when the United Nations convention persuaded many countries to sign up to prohibit, in a harsher way than previously, the use of those drugs. Perversely, it didn't do anything of the sort. It eventually led to an increase in the drugs. In Great Britain, if I can give the figure for that, which is one I'm very familiar with and one that is debated now at great length, because we know the figure precisely, marijuana was never used as a recreational drug until it was prohibited. Heroin use in the 1960s was confined to fewer than 500 people. Some of them were veterans of the First World War who had become addicted to heroin on the battlefield, where battlefield surgery took place, and they were getting this along with their state pension. But there were 500, that's all. One of them was Enid Bagnold, who is the celebrated writer of National Velvet--I don't know if it's popular in Canada. She was a user of injected heroin in prodigious amounts, and she died eventually a serene and peaceful death in her own bed at the age of 91.

¹ (1530)

Contrast that to the position now. Now the official British figure for the number of addicts of heroin and cocaine is 280,000. That's after the imposition in 1971 of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which was designed to eliminate the use of drugs. In contrast with the case of Edith Bagnold, 50 young people in Scotland and Ireland last year injected a much smaller amount of heroin, and the results were that they died a dreadful death in an alleyway in awful circumstances. I would suggest to you that they weren't killed by heroin, they weren't killed by the drug, they were killed by prohibition. They were killed by a system that said, you are addicted, we don't treat you in the same way we treat alcoholics, as patients, but we treat you like criminals, and we'll dump you on the illegal market. I would put it to you that the conclusion we must reach from that experience is that the best way, and probably the only way, to collapse the evil trade in drugs that's run by irresponsible criminals is to replace it with a market that is legal, that can be licensed, regulated, policed, controlled. That's the starting point.

The document I did for the Council of Europe was an attempt to look at the outcomes. Most countries tell the truth about their own drug experience, but they don't tell the full truth about others'. I think the most spectacular example of this was the American drug czar a few years ago, who had the effrontery to arrive in Amsterdam and announce to them that their murder rate, because of drugs, was double the American murder rate, this to aghast journalists from Holland. He had to correct this afterwards, and the correction was that the murder rate in the United States was actually four times the rate in the Netherlands. He excused himself by saying what he actually did was confuse those who were murdered in America with those who were murdered plus attempted murders in the Netherlands. His explanation for this was that the Dutch are so zonked out on drugs that they can't even murder people in an efficient way.

What I did was go to four countries. We took the two extremes. There are 43 countries in Europe, all with different experiences, all with different ways of measuring their drug use. The two most pragmatic at the time I did the reports were the Netherlands and Switzerland, and the two most prohibitionist were the United Kingdom and Sweden. We got the information from the country and we put it into a computer to make sure we were measuring pears with pears, not pears with apples, and to look at the outcomes over a period where we had reliable data, and that was from 1986 to 1999. I'm sure you're familiar with this, but the harshest penalties by far are in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Sweden still is, I think, the only country in the world, apart from the United States, that believes you can totally eliminate all drug use. They reconfirmed that last year.

But the guts of the report lie in the comparison between the outcomes in those four countries, and I've done the comparison in several ways. The best figures, the most robust figures, are the ones as between the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. After 30 years in the United Kingdom, with the harshest prohibition in Europe, drug use has gone up by at least 2,000% in all categories--I gave you the figure for the heroin use. After 25 years of regulated decriminalization in Holland, their drug use in all categories of illegal drugs is about half that of the United Kingdom. Their drug deaths are a tenth of ours. There's a dramatic difference between the two. If the drug laws were working, if prohibition was a success, the figures should be exactly the reverse of that. But we have the situation in the Netherlands of a great success. The figures are in the report, which I will let you have. I've done it as the number of drug deaths per million, and it's a ratio starting with a hundred. In Sweden and the United Kingdom the rate of increase in drug deaths--and there are other factors we've used on this--is at least twice that in the two countries that have followed pragmatic policies.

¹ (1535)

We praised in the report the courage of the Dutch and the Swiss, who've taken on the public prejudice on this issue, have realized where things have gone wrong, and have embarked on policies that are pragmatic and have turned out to be successful. The Swiss experiment I'm sure you're familiar with, where there's a dramatic drop in the number of crimes involved, for obvious reasons. There are houses called shooting galleries in Germany and user spaces in the Netherlands, and these are used for addicts--and they must have been addicted for some time and have been on courses of treatment--to allow them to have clean needles, and after they've taken their drug, there's assistance there.

There's also support. If you want to go on a trip to Europe, I would commend the Paulus Kerk in Rotterdam, a church maintaining about 300 heroin addicts in decent conditions, also giving them training in IT and getting them into work, and they publish their own newspaper, a very positive one. So instead of the addicts being abandoned and left to their own devices, there is support for them, and there's an improved group getting off the drug itself.

I believe at the moment there is a movement in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom renewed their prohibitions policy in 1997, to our eternal shame, I say, as a member of the government party. We had a drug czar, who is rather a sad, pathetic figure now, and the fate of other czars, I think, has come his way; he's no longer a full-time person. He had a 10-year strategy, which has crumbled in ruins. One of the aims of the 10-year strategy was to reduce the amount of heroin coming into the country by half. If he'd been successful, it would have started off a crime wave, because the addicts would have had to steal more in order to pay for their own heroin. But as it happens, they've had no effect on this, and the price of heroin is one of the few things in the British economy that's never increased, even by inflation, because it is coming in great quantity.

What is taking place at the moment is that the government, in its second term, has summoned up more courage, and they're moving away from the strategy of increased prohibition, so there will be changes. The way they're doing this is slightly oblique. The government have asked our committee on the misuse of drugs whether they would recommend the regrading of cannabis from B to C, which means a non-arrestable offence. They appear to have forgotten that the committee did ask that them to do that two years ago, so we know entirely what the answer is going to be from the committee itself.

There was also another group called the Police Foundation, like your Le Dain commission, and all the other commissions that reported during the 1960s and 1970s throughout the world recommended less coercive policies, and none of them was followed by government. But the government have also given evidence to select committees that is very much pointing in the direction of what will be reported. They're going to recommend that heroin be made available, not methadone. That's still there, and it's been used in an increasing number of cases; there has been an improvement in the number of people who have been treated. But heroin will be available from the health service for greater numbers of people, in order to maintain them and make sure they can get away from the cycle of taking the drug, committing crime, and then taking the drug again. They also get rid of that awful cycle from their lives, and that's the main reason there. They're also going to suggest the downgrading of ecstasy from an A drug to a B drug. At the moment it's classified the same as heroin and cocaine.

I think the problem here is one of contact with young people. The government in 1997, lacking the courage to take the bold moves necessary, decided to adopt alternatives and say, we'll spend more money on education. I don't know of any case, with one possible exception in Holland, where an education process was looked at with a controlled group and found that there was a minute difference at the end, where education has had an effect on drug use. There are spectacular cases in America where drug education has actually led to drug use. I believe much of the drug education given in Britian is as accurate and as scientific as the education I had from Jesuits when I was a young boy, who told us certain sexual practices would make us go blind. We've vastly exaggerated the dangers of many drugs to young people, and there's a problem of credibility. I think the reason for downgrading ecstasy will be that, because young people are very well aware that ecstasy has its dangers, but is nowhere near in the category of heroin or cocaine.

¹ (1540)

Changes are taking place in other countries as well. The sad thing, I think, for us, for all fellow politicians--I was discussing with a colleague when we came in the role of parliamentarians, and that's something I have great interest in; I wrote a book some years ago about how to be a parliamentarian, believe it or not--is that we're being bypassed in this matter. While I'd love to say the changes are taking place in Britain because of my advocacy of this line for 15 years, the pressure on the government has come from the police, who are refusing to implement the law, because they say it's a stupid law: why should we arrest people for a victimless crime? There's a policeman in one part of London who has introduced, almost off his own bat, a policy of de facto decriminalization, which is hugely successful. He had an interesting experience a while ago. He'd previously tried the prohibitionist line, and he arrested all 24 dealers of hard drugs on his patch. The result was that a fortnight later they were replaced by new dealers, who were all armed. So the position was greatly worse than it was before. There are other experiences like that.

We're well on the way towards legalizing medicinal cannabis, but that's again come about through civil disobedience. First of all, the police are reluctant to arrest, even when people use it blatantly, although as recently as four years ago there were two people imprisoned in Wales for using it, though they were seriously ill. There is now state-grown cannabis in Britain, which is being used by 300 or 400 volunteers, mostly MS sufferers, chronic pain sufferers. The results for chronic pain are wonderful. One of the researchers came up to me and was bursting to tell me about this case. All my life, he said, I've been working on research into drugs, and this stuff really does work. The example he gave to me was an interesting and entertaining one. He described someone whose pain was grade 10, the worst pain, unbearable pain, so much so that he had to take chemical drugs that left him with no feeling whatsoever in his legs--if he was watching television and his dog was coming and gnawing his leg, he wasn't aware he was there. But on cannabis he was comfortable, the feeling was there, the pain was controlled--great news for the patient, bad news for the dog.

The other thing that's going on is the court on medicinal cannabis, where the police were foolish enough to bring people to court. There was one famous case where a man admitted to running a cooperative and supplying cannabis to 30 people. He'd go to prison for life in Britain for that offence. He was carried with cheers on the shoulders of the people in the court, because the jury said, this man is there sitting in a wheelchair, and are we going to send him to jail for using a medicine? So that has caused a change there.

The other thing is public opinion. Public opinion is way ahead of political opinion. I believe there has been a period of timidity with many parliamentarians on this issue, especially with the leaders of parties. The change will come in Great Britain. In Belgium, I believe, within a very short time they will adopt a policy that's very similar to that in the Netherlands. Portugal has legalized all drugs for personal use. And we know the history of the Netherlands and Switzerland.

I'm delighted by what I gained from the interview with you, Madam Chairman, l saw last night. I'm looking forward to Canada being not only the gold medal nation in hockey, but also the gold metal nation of America as far as the anti-drug laws are concerned.

¹ (1545)

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Flynn.

For those of you who keep looking at me, I did a little interview with CPAC last night and I'm glad you found there was some interest. It was a broad discussion, not with too many conclusions I thought, about what the committee is doing, where we're at, and what we're hearing. It was fairly factual, I hope.

If you are able, we have probably more than a few questions to ask you.

Mr. Paul Flynn: As do I.

The Chair: We have approximately three quarters of an hour remaining.

Mr. Sorenson, did you want to start?

Mr. Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot, CA): Thank you for coming, and welcome to Canada.

You said there are 280,000 addicts now in Great Britain. You also mentioned that there were 50 who were killed by what you call prohibition. Is that 50 a year, 50 a day, 50 a week?

Mr. Paul Flynn: The deaths every year are just under 3,000 due to illegal drugs--that's a 1999 figure. There are many addicts who maintain themselves through the health service and through supplies they can get, if they can guarantee a clean supply. It works out very badly for the people at the bottom of the pile. I presume it's the indigenous Canadians who suffer the greatest here. There's something like a 30% difference between people who die from drug harm in the most deprived areas and those living in the least deprived.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Are you advocating here legalization or access to hard drugs, the clean drugs?

Mr. Paul Flynn: It's an incremental approach. I believe we'll have reasonable rules soon on medicinal cannabis, and we need to say it's an ancient medicine that's been forgotten and has great virtues. I think that will come first. I think the next step for the United Kingdom will be the cannabis cafes or something similar, where cannabis is given on a regulated basis. It's the only way, I think, to keep cannabis out of the hands of children, who can freely get it now. There was a figure from France yesterday suggesting that 53% of 18-year-olds in France of the males and 48% of the females have used cannabis at that age.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: So creating more access to it is a better way to--

Mr. Paul Flynn: No, less access. Well--

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: It's going to be there, people know where they can go to get it. You believe that will keep it out of the hands of children. I think the more you make access available for adults, the more access is going to be available for children.

Mr. Paul Flynn: There are two points here. I don't think there's any child in any part of Britain, rural area, urban area, who, if they want access to cannabis, can't get it now. It's available universally, and there is no problem anywhere in that. The figures bear it out. The great majority of young people have tried cannabis at some time. It's part of their social life.

I'd like to stress the point, speaking as a chemist, that it's not the drugs themselves that are the problem, it's the way the drugs are taken, and cannabis in the United Kingdom is taken in probably the worst form it can be taken, by smoking it. We're mixing it with an addictive, killer drug, tobacco. If you ingest cannabis in other ways, if you eat it or take it in a cake, the health risks are minute compared to smoking it.

There's an issue in Sweden--and Sweden is almost embarrassed about this--of whether they go for harm minimization or continue on the path of total elimination of drug use. But they have the greatest success story in Europe on harm minimization, and that's in the number of males who die of cancer from the use of tobacco. Among women in Sweden the average is exactly the European average. The average for males in Sweden is half the European average, and the reason for it is that they take their nicotine without smoking it. They take it in the form of snus, which is a moist snuff. Twenty percent of Swedish males use snus, and 17% smoke the tobacco. Snus is actually illegal in the United Kingdom, it's illegal in the rest of Europe, because there was a belief that it was going to cause other forms of cancer, such as mouth cancer. That's not true, it hasn't happened. So they've got a great record of harm minimization by altering the way the drugs are taken.

The advantage of having a legal market in cannabis is that it will be taken, I think, in other forms, in safer forms. If you have a legal market, people have a choice, and many of them don't go for the strongest forms of drugs. Most of us perhaps drink beer or wine rather than spirits. People go for decaffeinated coffee. In Holland, where there's a list of drugs available of known strength, they don't go for the ones that have a high potency, because they don't want to be stoned out of their minds--they want to do something, to busk, whatever it might be. The choice, then, in a free market is generally for the weaker form of drugs, but in a market that is prohibitionist there's little choice and people have what's given to them, which is usually the strongest form.

¹ (1550)

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: If you made snuff or snus illegal in Great Britain, it's no wonder pro rodeo and baseball aren't big over there.

What do you believe is the most important input or contribution your government or our government could make to combat drug problems? You've talked about incremental changes. When I think of incremental steps, I think of just that, steps raising us in elevation or moving us forward. Maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong approach, but I would say the steps you are offering are not going to advance us, but move us backwards.

Mr. Paul Flynn: I think the main problem with the illegal drugs is the illegality. I'm a campaigner against the deaths from pain killers. I've given you those figures for illegal drugs, but here's one pain killer in Britain, paracetamol, that killed 600 people last year, the year before, and the year before that. There's one anti-depressant, dothiepin, that killed 250, while all antidepressants killed more than 500.

If we look at the scale of drug harm, the really harmful drugs are tobacco and alcohol, because of their nature. But many of the illegal drugs are harmful mainly because of their illegality. I believe a prominent reason is the decision taken in the twenties, under that extraordinary revivalist spirit of fundamentalism, to divide certain drugs and say, these drugs are terribly harmful and we must ban them, they're wicked, they're awful, but the other drugs are okay.

One of the things that is being proposed at the moment is that we get hold of cannabis and we separate the ingredients. There are 600 ingredients in natural cannabis, as there are ingredients in everything, in cabbage, in most substances. We've been using cannabis for at least 5,000 years in its natural form. If you take away one of the cannabinoids and use that, canabinoid 37, we might well find that canabinoid 58 is one that's neutralizing it, and you might well find that if you have a chemical extract, it creates new problems. Virtually all the problems we had with thalidomide, oprin, and others over the years have been with chemical drugs.

The precedent for this is what happened when the chemists went into the laboratories in 1894. They said, we've got this drug called opium, and it's not selling well, it's down-market, it's associated with immigrants--we had mostly Chinese immigrants in Britain at that time--it's got a low image, and we really need to sell it with a new image. So they sent the chemists into the laboratories and said, we don't want opium, we want a nice clean, lovely, pure white shining powder that we can package in nice white boxes. And they did that. The chemists went in and produced this extract from opium. And they said, oh, how are we going to do this, how are we going to sell this? Opium is regarded as the drug of losers, we want to market this as the drug of winners. What's a word that's going to be associated with winners?. So they picked a word that was most like heroism in German and English and called it heroin. In attempting to get a safe form of drug, a marketable form of drug, we produced a chemical drug that is more addictive than opium itself.

What I would say is that if we use cannabis in its natural state and people drink it or eat it, the damage is far less.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Okay.

You have 280,000 heroin addicts now in Great Britain. What is being done to prevent the socio-economic and health problems amongst those injection drug users? We've had a tour now of Toronto, and they have mentioned that with the needle exchanges in Canada, we're actually seeing an increase in HIV and--

The Chair: That's not true. It's only in Ottawa.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: In Ottawa, all right.

¹ (1555)

The Chair: And that's because it's a different form of needle exchange.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Okay.

We can see an increase in use, an increase in health problems, because of people who are doing this, obviously. What initiatives are you implementing, or would your government implement, with those 280,000 heroin users, to help solve some of the problems that are going to be there because of it?

Mr. Paul Flynn: The only initiative I'm proud of in the British policy over the last 30 years is needle exchanges. We allow needle exchanges, they're encouraged, and because of that, there's a very low infection rate among injecting drug users. We come out well in that. The figures are in the report. But we haven't taken that as far as prison. It's sensible to do it, because there's drug use in every prison in the United Kingdom. It's part of the corruption of prohibition. The prison officers are corrupted, the police are corrupted, and states are corrupted in some parts of the world by prohibition. But the reason we won't do it is that we don't give free needles to many people who are suffering from ailments. It's a political decision and part of political timidity. But there has been a successful story with needle exchanges in the United Kingdom.

The Chair: Unfortunately, since drug use in prison is one of Mr. Sorenson's favourite issues, he does run out of time. I know that was going to be your next question.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Well, it's a good question.

The Chair: I think Mr. Flynn gave you a couple of reasons why it occurs.

Mr. Ménard.

[Translation]

Mr. Réal Ménard (Hochelaga--Maisonneuve, BQ): Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witness of paying us a visit today. I congratulate you on the battle that you are waging. It seems you have even garnered some support from the Royal Family.

Some Hon. Members:: Oh, oh!

Mr. Réal Ménard: I'm kidding, Madam Chair.

I have three questions for the witness. My first is of a more personal nature. Which constituency do you represent? Secondly, how did you come to be interested in this subject? Finally, for the sake of our own cultural edification, do you think your Prime Minister, who visited our Parliament last year, shares your position?

After you've responded, I'll have several other substantive questions for you.

[English]

Mr. Paul Flynn: My constituency is Newport in South Wales. I was a chemist before I came into Parliament. I'm an energetic campaigner against all drug use. It may be obvious to some that I suffer from arthritis, I walk in a very funny way, but I haven't taken any drugs for arthritis for 25 years. I'm very hostile to drug use, and I start from that position, that drug use is harmful, all drug use is harmful. I think we're a drug-obsessed society. We believe every moment we have of pain, grief, discomfort can be solved by some kind of drug. So I start out from that.

My campaigns are on the use of neuroleptic drugs in residential homes, the vast overuse, as I mentioned earlier, of anti-depressants and painkillers. We're taught and conditioned to believe that if we feel sadder today than we felt yesterday, we're ill and need to take an anti-depressant drug. Giving an anti-depressant drug to someone who is depressed is like giving them a loaded revolver in many cases. I'd like to take the pistol away.

That's my reason for coming into this. We have a policy that is causing harm on a massive scale. The deaths from heroin in Britain are not caused by heroin, but by drug prohibition. It's we, as parliamentarians, who can change it. We can change the laws at least to treat the heroin addicts as patients and not as criminals. The worst place to send them is prison.

Mr. Réal Ménard: Don't speak so fast. You speak faster than Hedy Fry.

[Translation]

Mr. Paul Flynn: I'm sorry but I can't help myself. My spoken French is quite poor.

[English]

Mr. Réal Ménard: No, speak English, but don't speak so fast.

Mr. Paul Flynn: Okay, I'll try not to.

That's my position on this, that I am a campaigning MP. I think the word that's usually associated with me is controversial. Being controversial means that people agree with every word I say 10 years after I say it. I was saying these things 15 years ago. Now people say to me, what are you going to campaign on now? There's this realization in the United Kingdom that we made a terrible mess of it, and it's coming from all sides.

[Translation]

Mr. Réal Ménard: I understand that the battle you are waging pits parliamentarians against one another. You're not here today to espouse the formal position of the British Labour Party. In our party, members are entitled to hold marginal views. That's not a problem here.

[English]

Mr. Paul Flynn: I think there's an honoured role for backbenchers, and I commend my website to you; my writings on this are there. A backbencher has a role in questioning the executive, whether from my party or any other party. I have many allies, and I think now the majority of MPs in Parliament of all parties would agree.

A dramatic change took place 18 months ago, when Ann Widdecombe, who's very famous in Great Britain and was a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, made a speech saying everyone who uses cannabis should be thrown into jail. What happened was that in her own party seven members of the shadow cabinet said, we use cannabis, and we didn't end up dead in the gutter with a needle sticking out of us, we ended up on the Tory front bench--which is marginally better than lying in the gutter.

[Translation]

Mr. Réal Ménard: WIth your permission, I'd like to put another question to the witness.

To my mind, your most telling comment was about the City of Amsterdam which, by setting aside strategies banning drug use, has seen consumption fall off by 50 per cent. In countries where such strategies continue to be implemented - and that's the case in a number of European countries - drug use is increasing at an alarming rate.

I believe this committee is planning a trip to Amsterdam, if everything goes as planned. Of course, we have to agree on the arrangements first.

Perhaps you could give us a little more information on what I see as the most critical aspect of this whole issue.

º (1600)

[English]

Mr. Paul Flynn: There has been an increase in Amsterdam in some of the drugs, but the increase isn't related to decriminalization. Our Police Foundation report made the point that what happened in Amsterdam after legalization was that drug use went up, but it went up to a greater extent in America and in many other countries, in Norway, in Great Britain.

It's not an exact science. We tend to believe, as politicians, that there's a causal link between our policies and the actions outside. The main changes in drug use have been because of national trends. In Wales we had a campaign--we were very proud of it--called Smokebusters. It was a brilliant campaign from 1994 to 1998, concentrating on persuading young people not to smoke. Those who ran the campaign, the prohibition industry, said, this is great; we spent a lot of money, had lots of posters, lots of meetings, talked to tens of thousands of young people--aren't we doing wonderfully well? Yes, a wonderful campaign. The problem was, during that four-year period, the number of young women smoking increased by 50%. It was nothing to do with the campaign. Exactly the same thing happened in Malta and in Ireland, and possibly in Canada. The reason was that young women wanted to look thin, and associated smoking with looking thin. It was a world fashion trend.

I don't want to mislead you. We take 100 as an index from 1986 to 1999 of drug-related deaths. It was 100 in the United Kingdom, which increased to 219, 100 in the Netherlands increased to 145, 100 in Sweden increased to 199, and 100 in Switzerland increased to 144. So the two prohibitionist countries had double the rate of increase of the pragmatic countries. That was the conclusion there.

The success in Holland is in dividing the market. Young people can go and have the experience of taking cannabis, and most young people want to do that. They can do that without crossing the line of illegality and being exposed to the pushes of the hard drugs. And they've got a policy of maintaining the hard drug users. The average age is a significant figure in the Netherlands; it used to be 28, as it was in Britain in the early 1980s, it's now up to 40, because the groups are growing and the young people are not going on to it. They've got a home in Holland for geriatric heroin users.

There's a good friend, a man called Nick Davis, a journalist in Britain, who wrote a brilliant polemic about his own family. I don't believe he identified who it was in his family, but a close relative came, and he discovered he was using heroin. It took him months to discover where the source was, and the source was a doctor. The doctor said to Nick Davis, what do you want me to do? It happened to be a woman doctor on Harley Street. I can maintain your relative, she said, with heroin, a clean supply, and he might well live a full life. There's a vague chance of coming off it, but he is an addict. If I don't supply him, he'll rob you, he'll rob your family, he'll rob society, he'll become a criminal. What will kill him is not the heroine, but the chaotic lifestyle of the addict and the contaminated drugs. If you want to see someone who is an impassioned advocate, Nick Davis made a very big impression at our select committee.

I'm taking your time, I'm sorry.

º (1605)

[Translation]

Mr. Réal Ménard: Have any political parties from various countries banded together at this time to wage a campaign within the European Parliament and to advocate a stand similar to the one you have taken here?

[English]

Mr. Paul Flynn: This report has been accepted unanimously by the committee of social health and family affairs. The Council themselves are very reluctant to accept it, because there's this great divide in Europe between the prohibition industry and the reformers. The United Nations association and so on, who are campaigning for the total elimination of drugs, have many of the levers of propaganda in this. Their voices are dominant in many places in Europe. There is a great battle between the two in the Council of Europe itself. The committee that's been looking at it for two years and knows a great deal has accepted it unanimously. There's a greater understanding now.

I don't want to take too much of your time, but the main conclusion of this report is:

There's no evidence that measures designed to deter drug use have any effect whatsoever on the prevalence of drug use.

No one has ever attacked the figures and the conclusions in the report on those lines. You can't find any link between harsh penalties, throwing people into prison, and a reduction in drug use. It's a similar problem with the education program. It's very difficult to find any education program that has been demonstrated to reduce drug harm and drug use.

The Chair: Merci beaucoup, monsieur Ménard.

Mr. Lee--and thank you once again for arranging this.

Mr. Derek Lee (Scarborough--Rouge River, Lib.): You're welcome.

Your presence here today is very reassuring. I am pleased to see there are legislatures in other countries who are arguably a little further down the down the road with policy than we are here in Canada. That's one of the reason's I'm delighted to have you here, to pick your brain as to where we might end up.

You've had a look at the European countries as well as Great Britain. Would you agree that the two main reasons people support the prohibitionist model would be that they're using their own view of morality or they're members of a crime family, a crime syndicate, and the prohibitionist model is their bread and butter? Are those two reasons tongue-in-cheek?

Mr. Paul Flynn: I think that's fine. I've never understood the moral argument. Cannabis is part of nature, a gift from God to be used for good or evil, like many other parts of nature. The chemical drugs are rather different. But as you rightly point out, those who most enthusiastically support this campaign are in the drug trade. They're in a marvellous business. They've got the second biggest business in the whole world. They pay no taxes, and they're lords of all they survey. The chances of being detected grow less almost each year. The great problem is that if some young kid on the wrong side of town in my riding hasn't had a good education, hasn't had training, the only way he's going to earn a BMW when he's later on in life is to take on the drug trade. That's a choice he would be in.

We have this enormous market in drugs throughout the world, and I think there is a larger issue, which I believe is a great danger to us, if we follow the American path in Colombia, the disaster of the American policy. United Nations policy now, insane as it seems, is to eliminate all poppy growth and all coca growth. You beat up a third world country that uses coca as a staple diet for sickness at altitude and as an appetite suppressant. It was a western man--I'm sure it was a man, rather than a woman--who discovered that if you take it without eating it, without saliva coming in contact, it has a hallucinogenic effect.

But the great danger at the moment, I believe other people would object, is in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had a very fine record of reducing poppy cultivation by 91%. Our comrades-in-arms in the Northern Alliance increased them threefold. We could well see, if they carry out that Colombia policy of the United States, with the world following, in Afghanistan, the Colombianization of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and so on. You can see a huge area falling into the chaos that Colombia is in today.

º (1610)

Mr. Derek Lee: I just had the pleasure of reading a report from Myanmar, where they were very pleased to announce that they had burnt a hillside of poppies and were attempting to train the local farmers in the cultivation of buckwheat imported from Japan. I guess it's kind of a multiculturalism template on fighting drugs, with American helicopters in remote jungle regions--all of which has almost zero impact in downtown Toronto.

Mr. Paul Flynn: They're trying to solve the problems on the streets of Chicago by further impoverishing a third world country. How anyone can look at the experience of the United States with anti-drug policies over the past 40 years and not regard them as monumental failures, I don't understand. Look in a simple way at people in prison. I think it's 133 per 100,000 in Canada. The U.K. has a level of 120 per 100,000, which is far higher than the European average. The Americans have an average of 700 per 100,000 in prison, many of them for drug offences.

Mr. Derek Lee: As someone looking back at the United States of America from a further distance than we do here, do you see any benchmarks of success there?

Mr. Paul Flynn: In the United States?

Mr. Derek Lee: Did you note any benchmarks of success in the U.S.A., based on their apparent prohibitionist policy? Could you see any from Europe?

Mr. Paul Flynn: None at all. I think we're as close to America as you are culturally, we're all besotted with The Simpsons and Frasier and all the rest of America, but their drug policies have been a continuing disaster. They have had commissions in America that have just been rubbished by the politicians. Reagan threw out the report he had. Every commission that has reported looked into this in Britain, in the Americas, and all said, the policies are failing, we must try another way.

And it's the politicians. It's a cheap way of getting votes. You go along and say, I'm tough on drugs, and the next government says, I'm even tougher on drugs, when in fact their policies are not tough, they're stupid, they're self-defeating. No party in Britain has come along and said, we're not going to have a tough policy, we're going to have an intelligent policy that actually reduces drug harm. In Britain the graph goes on and on and on, with deaths, with use of drugs, and there's never been a serious dip since prohibition was entered into in a serious way in 1971.

The United States is fond of saying they've turned the corner. I think every President has said it. They've turned the corner so often they've been around the block a dozen times, but still they have the worst problems in the world, and still they've got the cheek to preach to us. They have this huge prohibition industry. They have things like the DARE scheme in America for education, and nothing actually works. They can't show by any independent analysis on any of them that they've actually reduced drug harm, but they're exporting these schemes.

º (1615)

Mr. Derek Lee: We had evidence out of Montreal--if this is a benchmark of anything--that 80% of our twenty-dollar bills have cocaine ions on them, detectable by our cocaine ion sensing machinery. That must say something.

Mr. Paul Flynn: Sure.

Mr. Derek Lee: As an elected policy-maker in the United Kingdom, have you seen negative political impacts brought upon the elected class there as a result of following the reformist pragmatic approach? There is resistance, there is political drag in this business, and many of my colleagues in the House of Commons would be reluctant to adopt a reformist approach, for some of the reasons you've mentioned, and they're simply afraid of the political impacts. Can you tell the committee if you've seen any of those negative political impacts?

Mr. Paul Flynn: I've been the most up-front of any British politician on this subject since 1987. I took the seat from a Conservative. My majority goes up every time. I've lost votes because of it, particularly among elderly people, but I hope I gain votes because I'm very interested in issues of the elderly at my great age. I'm 67, I'm a retiree, so I'm very keen on those issues as well. But what I've gained in abundance is votes from young people across the board, young people who generally don't vote at all, but if they're going to vote, they're going to vote for me. It's not because they want to use drugs, but they see an understanding there. There's a contact there, whereas with what the main parties are saying, they could be talking to a species from another planet, because they talk down to them, they preach, and the experience of young people is very different.

How do we square the fact that in Britain we have 2 to 3 million people every week using ecstasy? It's a drug I have a horror of, having children and grandchildren, because of its unknown effect on the mind. It interferes with the mind. It's at least as dangerous as Prozac, in my view. I'm very worried about that. Any drug that interferes with the workings of the brain over a long period has outcomes that are uncertain, but young people accept it, and 2 or 3 million use it. Deaths do occur, but few compared with the deaths from medicinal drugs or from other drugs. But they refuse to believe that it's as dangerous as heroin or cocaine, which the British law says. There have been terrible cases of young students who have been ruined because they have been arrested and thrown into jail for two or three years for using a drug that's used by millions of their friends.

Mr. Derek Lee: Thank you.

The Chair: Why not just get rid of the law? What happens then? Throw the doors open to my selling you heroin and selling him cocaine, and maybe I get to sell to your grandchildren too. Are there certain restrictions you still support?

Mr. Paul Flynn: This has been tried. Sweden tried it a while ago. Switzerland tried the needle parks, a disastrous idea, where they had zones that were free for all. I don't think any serious advocate is suggesting that should take place. There still have to be controls, there still have to be licences. If you go to Holland, you can see the way things are controlled there. The drugs can't be sold alongside alcohol, and they can't be sold to minors. We need something that's strictly controlled in the same way alcohol is controlled now. It's a far from perfect picture, but I'm convinced there's less harm under a controlled, deregulated legalization than there would be in handing that whole trade over to people who are completely out of control and outside the normal business ethic.

The Chair: As part of that, would you be guaranteeing quality or consistency with drugs?

Mr. Paul Flynn: If cannabis is legalized in Britain, the first campaign is to stop people smoking it, to advocate that pregnant women shouldn't use it and that children shouldn't use it. At the moment, if you advocate those things, you're part of this out-of-touch government that is not credible. There should be genuine help. There are grave dangers. With the ecstasy drug, again, my children have said, for God's sake, don't use it, but if you use it, don't overheat, take over a pint of water an hour, never do it alone, do it with companions, call a doctor if you are in trouble, don't be worried about it. If you give people simple advice, you avoid the deaths. I think what we tend to forget is how we felt at the age of 15, when my parents told me, as they've told many of us, I think, not to smoke or drink beer. And the first opportunity we had to do so, we did.

º (1620)

The Chair: We've had a lot of people suggesting that we need to have leadership, we need to have a drug czar, there has to be some central point within the government that deals with all these issues. Part of that, I think, is frustration at the fact that we technically have a drug policy, with a bunch of different departments involved, but they seem to spend more time thinking about meetings or in meetings, without actually getting a lot of activity. I thought I heard you, in your opening comments, not be in a favour of a drug czar or somebody who's a leader like this.

Mr. Paul Flynn: It was cop-out in Britain. The government got in and said, drugs, big problem, what'll we do? They refused to tackle it. One distinguished member of the last government says quite openly now that she wanted to tackle it, go for decriminalization. The reason they didn't go for it was fear of political fallout, of being accused of being soft on drugs. The result is that there have been several hundred deaths in Britain that were avoidable. I've said to Tony Blair, to his face, you've killed people. In politics we can't always do good, but we should avoid doing harm, and the policy of my party and every other party in Britain over these years has killed British people who would be alive today if we'd followed a policy that was more pragmatic, the Dutch policy.

What they did was something that gives an appearance of activity. You appoint a drug czar, and there was a big blaze of publicity about this. The drug czar we appointed was distinguished, because for a policeman, he had the most expensive haircut in the northern hemisphere, but his career wasn't distinguished in any other way. He was a sad figure.

We then said, we'll spend more money on a bureaucracy, and we sent out drug action teams everywhere. What we've done is get everyone together to do the same thing we've always done--no matter how you slice it, it's still baloney. You do set up this huge bureaucracy that achieves nothing. Again it's the appearance, there's activity. What are we doing about drugs? We're setting up DATs, we have a drug czar.

Of all the things being done, the only useful one was to increase treatment. It's a disgrace in Britain. Because of my position, I get calls from lots of mothers. A mother will ring up and say, look, I'm buying heroin for my son, and I have to say to her, that's probably the action of a loving mother. If he had to go on the streets and commit the crime, he's going to live a chaotic lifestyle and his life is in danger. But loving parents are doing that. Can she get him to treatment? Yes, she can, in six months time. As you all know in this field, drug addicts, sad figures, suddenly have a change in their life, a bereavement, a love affair, something changes, and they want to get off the drug. But that period might only last for hours, for days, and they think going onto treatment could be successful. If they wait six months, they may be dead, or they will never get that will to give it up again.

The Chair: I'm sorry my questions are disjointed, there's no central theme, but I seem to recall seeing a documentary, I think it was about Liverpool, where people were on a heroin maintenance program. I'm wondering what happened to that program.

Second, you mentioned the issue of prisons. Some people say, come on, we have rules, just follow the rules. What is the problem here? Just obey the law.

Mr. Paul Flynn: It's a sad story, the Mersey trial, because it was run by a visionary doctor who was prescribing heroin to patients. The results were phenomenal. The crime rate dropped, the local Woolworths gave him a grant, because the shoplifting almost disappeared. It was a hugely successful trial, and I'm afraid it was the forces of darkness that closed it down.

º (1625)

The Chair: Oh, it's closed.

Mr. Paul Flynn: He's now living in New Zealand, the doctor who was doing it. If you look at that trial and at the Swiss trial, the arguments there are firmly reinforced by the experiment. It's a shame we couldn't reproduce that throughout Britain, but that's what will come, I think, from the home affairs committee.

I didn't want to be nasty to the Tories, and I should have taken up the royal family one too, because there has been a long tradition of the royal family using drugs. Queen Victoria, who graces your library here, used cannabis every month of her adult life. And one of the best polemics around is written by Alan Duncan, who is a very prominent Conservative in the present opposition. There is a very strong case from libertarian Conservatives in Britain, who say we shouldn't interfere with people's lives in this way. So it's not confined to one side of the political spectrum, and people from principled positions, from all political points of view, are supporting reforms in the way of decriminalization.

The Chair: What about following the rules and obeying the laws, especially when it comes to being in jail?

Mr. Paul Flynn: Say that again to me.

The Chair: On following the laws, especially when it comes to our corrections facilities: the laws exist, stop using drugs, why is there such a problem with drugs?

Mr. Paul Flynn: By correction facilities, you mean prisons and so on?

We've got a group in the House of Commons that took evidence about drugs in prison. One day I had a letter from a Conservative MP, who's now dead, Alan Clark, from one of his police constituents, saying that in this particular prison we'd been taking evidence from there were wardens taking £1,000 a week for getting the drugs in. Drug use in British prisons is on such a scale that if the visitors were taking it in, they would be turning up with van loads of the stuff every week. Part of prohibition is corruption, and it's acknowledged that drug use in prison is the result of the corruption of the police officers. The governor appeared before us, and we asked the questions: Why is there so much? How does it get in? You search the prisoners--how on earth can they get so much in? How can it be freely available? And he exploded and said, do you realize how much money is involved in this? He virtually said there were millions of pounds available to get it in.

Drugs determine the discipline regime in prison. There was one delightful story in Swansea in Wales, where the police had a bust and cleared all the cannabis from the streets, and the result of it was that they then smuggled the drugs out of the Swansea prison onto the streets, because that's where the market was. That was probably a good thing, because in Ireland they had a period when there was a famine of cannabis, it wasn't around, and the young people went onto heroin.

It's an extraordinary market we have, but we've failed in prisons, and if you can't keep drugs out of a closed community behind 30-foot walls, where you've got security barriers, what chance do we have of keeping them out of clubs, pubs, and schools? None whatsoever.

The Chair: Mr. Flynn, it's a real shame we don't have you for many more hours.

You have a quick comment, Mr. Sorenson?

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: I've got one question and two quick comments.

First there are two misconceptions I've had cleared up here. Mr. Lee, I think it was you who said 80% of the twenty-dollar bills have some residue of drugs on them.

Mr. Derek Lee: Cocaine.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Cocaine. Well, thank you for clearing that up. All these weeks I thought it was 80% of your twenty-dollar bills that had cocaine residue.

Also worth noting is the comment on what we call safe injection sites. I'm not sure what you called them in regard to Sweden, but you said they were a disaster.

Mr. Paul Flynn: No. The ones in Holland, Germany, and Switzerland work very well.

The Chair: What didn't work well was the needle park in Zurich.

Mr. Paul Flynn: The needle park was a disaster in Switzerland. They had areas that were lawless. Not only were drugs being used there freely, but other forms of illegal activity were taking place. It was a bad idea.

The Chair: We sort of had one too.

Mr. Paul Flynn: If you look at the Swiss results, they went up in the period of needle parks. They're going down now. Their main success would be supervised injection of heroin. That was remarkably successful in Zurich.

Mr. Kevin Sorenson: Are you willing to increase drug dependency in the public as a trade-off for reducing drug harm?

º (1630)

Mr. Paul Flynn: No. I don't think that will take place. I think we're reaching almost saturation levels with drug dependency now. Anyone who wishes to take drugs can take them freely, and what they're faced with, particularly young people, is the pressure, and peer pressure is the main thing, from an illegal market to take drugs.

I'll you give you one final example. You've been very generous with the time. An example of how not to do it is what happened in the States in the 1950s and 1960s, where the approach with young people was to say, drug use is rampant in the great cities, so we'll go to the plains. They sent out drug teams to teach kids not to do drugs. The wheeze was that they had ex-addicts of 29 or 30, with long hair, attractive people, and they went to the schoolchildren, played guitars, sang songs, and said, you mustn't do drugs. We've done it, we've been through it, we've been through everything. We've been through every form of drug. We've had degradation, sexual orgies. It was dreadful, terrible, so you mustn't do drugs, because your parent's won't like you to do it, and it's wicked. Imagine, if your parents don't want it and it's wicked too--what do kids want? And it's very dangerous--an irresistible offer to kids. All the kids knew they were immmortal, they were never going to die anyway. As they went through that in the States, the drug use followed the anti-drug education programs as surely as night followed day.

I think so much has happened with good, principled people trying to reduce drug harm, but actually increasing it. That's the story, I believe, of the States and the rest of the world, that prohibition is the enemy, prohibition has fuelled dependency on all drug use. If you look at what happened before 1920, before 1960, the picture is overwhelmingly convincing.

The Chair: Thank you. We're going to arrange for you and Mr. Sorenson to have dinner tonight, with Mr. Lee perhaps. That actually might be a good use of our committee budget. It's been really terrific to have the benefit of your experience. It's not easy being a trailblazer--what did you call yourself?

Mr. Paul Flynn: Controversial.

The Chair: Controversial, sorry. Clearly, you are making inroads in your own country. We've been encouraged by, and perhaps caused to think about, some of the things you have told us today. I'll get the website--you have a website, I think, Mr. Flynn.

Mr. Paul Flynn: Yes I do.

The Chair: I'll get it for everybody on the committee, and perhaps we can arrange for some updates from time to time.

Mr. Paul Flynn: Please do. If you do get to Europe, please let me know. I can suggest people you should see from both sides of the argument, so you don't waste time with the noddies.There are, even in Europe, people who are still in the past on this. There are some dramatic examples of how prohibition has failed in Europe. It's all changing.

The Chair: We appreciate your passion on the subject as well, and wish you good luck in your career as a parliamentarian. It's nice that you took the time to come before us. I'm not sure what your other options were, but we really do appreciate your working while you' re here.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Paul Flynn: My pleasure.

The Chair: Colleagues, I'll adjourn, but don't leave the room. The next meeting is tomorrow at 536 Wellington, and it's the Department of Health.