My Lords, it is important that in this Bill, it is not proposed that there should be a criminal offence of possession of psychoactive substances. In due course we shall see how that works, and it may well be that the lesson to be learned from that could have an effect on the older legislation to which the amendment refers.
My Lord, as I understood the noble Lord, Paddick, he said that one of the successful police techniques is the conditional caution, which of course depends on the underlying offence—that is the power on which the conditional caution rests. It is an extremely valuable approach to this difficult problem. I agree entirely with what has been said about how difficult a problem this is. I have no doubt at all about that and I do not need to reiterate the point. The conditional caution has a degree of authority behind it to persuade the person who receives it to do what it requires him to do. That is extremely important. The difficulty I have with this amendment is that if a senior officer suggests or requires that someone should attend one of the systems as defined by the Secretary of State in a later amendment, there is not much power to ensure that that will happen.
It is a long time since I had experience as a judge in criminal cases involving drugs where possession was an issue, but I distinctly remember the sadness I felt when sentencing a lady with a young child who had been in possession of quite substantial quantities of prohibited drugs. As the sentencing judge, I had the power to invite her to subscribe to a programme as a condition of her probation, rather on the same principles as the conditional caution, except at a slightly more authoritative level. The lady was obviously very attached to her child and there was a risk that if the situation continued, she might be separated from the child by the social work authorities. I was keen, it if was possible,
to help her get out of that situation. A good programme aimed at helping people out of addiction was being run in Glasgow at the time. I got her agreement to attend the programme, subject to the probation order, which, as noble Lords will know, meant that if she left the programme she had agreed to attend, there would be other possible consequences. It was to my extraordinary sadness to discover that after she had been getting on well for a few months, she suddenly left. That is one of the difficulties of a programme which has no authority to continue.
I am not good at getting into the minds of very young people, for reasons which are obvious, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, would attest, but there is the question of the psychology of all this. There is also the question of a level of authority, so that the treatment becomes something a person is required to undertake in order ultimately to get out of the criminal justice system. I agree that this is an important matter, and it would be good to see how the regime set out in this Bill works. It might have a good lesson for the existing legislation.