My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, hit on the essence of the Bill at the beginning of his contribution. It takes a different approach from the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, because of the speed with which these new products are coming into our society. We all at least agree that their impact is one of tremendous and peculiar harm. The Labour Front Bench supports the Bill and the essential concept behind it. We had a manifesto commitment to address legal highs and we approve of the device used, which is a wide definition with exceptions. That is the difference between the two
sides in this debate. We therefore, as a generality, oppose the narrowing of definitions, as that would go to the essence of how the Bill is designed to work.
Amendment 1 would narrow the definition to “synthetic”, which would potentially exclude a large group of naturally occurring substances. Amendments 2, 5, 6, 8 and 9 all seem to be about the same concept, with the same words used over and over again, as in Amendment 2, to limit the definition to,
“any drug which is, or appears to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to be, misused and of which the misuse is having, or appears to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs”—
here we get to the key words—
“to be capable of having, harmful effects sufficient to constitute a social problem”.
Those ideas would drive right through the concept of the Bill and reverse its essence, meaning the psychoactive substance would first have to be proved harmful. The Bill is poised the other way round: if the substance is psychoactive, it is presumed to cause harm and is illegal under the Bill unless exempted.
The wording and framing of those amendments seems also to leave out the concept of self-harm, which the Bill seeks to address. It certainly takes out the more complex issues of harm such as dosage, volume et cetera. We therefore cannot support those amendments.