My Lords, I have no particular difficulty with the first amendment concerning “synthetic”, and I think I indicated that to the Minister some time ago before it was actually formulated as an amendment.
However, I have considerable difficulty with the second amendment and how it is going to work. If somebody produces this material and that production is to be a crime, in the general view I have about the law he must at least have the means of finding out whether what he is doing is criminal. The difficulty that has been expressed before in relation to these psychoactive substances is that they are produced so quickly and changed so quickly and the harm is done so quickly that the Misuse of Drugs Act can hardly catch up with them. That is a very serious problem.
I agree very much with what the inspector has said in his report about the difficulty of prisons. Indeed, I have been told before that there are considerable difficulties with the input into prisons, by whatever means, of these legal highs. They certainly seem to have the effect of producing considerable violence, which is undoubtedly a social problem if ever there was one. How is this to work? The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will have to give advice. Will that not create exactly the same difficulty as the attempt to use the Misuse of Drugs Act to control these legal highs has proved to have in the past? That is the need and reason for the production of the Bill.
The noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, said that the definition is very wide. My view is that, on the whole, the legal effect of a definition is rather more related to its precision than to its particular width. In some cases, the definition of what is made criminal is very wide indeed—as undoubtedly it should be to
encompass many methods of carrying out the offence. I cannot see how the mechanism suggested here is going to be capable of working, given the problems that exist. I have been trying to think of how this could be modified but so far without too much success, except that something depends on the intention of the laboratories producing these substances. What are they doing it for? Are they intending to help people to sleep well or behave well and so on? I think they are probably not.
The purpose for which these substances, which may be synthetic, are produced seems highly relevant but it is quite difficult to get at defining an offence by reference to that. However, if the purpose for which the substance is produced is something that the state considers should be criminalised, that is a possible way to define an offence. That would at least have the effect of it being decided in relation to the time of production. It might not be possible to prove it immediately but the essence of it would be something that has happened before that production was put into the hands—or the body, one way or another—of the person receiving it, which is part of the crime that the Bill seeks to establish.