Part of Drugs Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 3:56 pm on 1 February 2005.
I have a slight concern about false positives. The all-party group on drugs misuse, of which I am the chairman, performed quite a detailed inquiry—followed up by DrugScope in a more detailed response—on testing of drugs. One of our conclusions was that the drug testing industry is totally unregulated. I am not saying that all firms that the police and others use are cowboys—far from it. Nevertheless, some are. Has the Minister, or her Department, given any consideration to regulating this industry? After all, it is a growth industry and this Bill will help to achieve that.
False positives can come about in other ways. I am concerned, for example, for those suffering chronic pain, particularly the pain that cancer produces. My wife had a dear friend, whom we have now sadly lost, who had to take morphine for a long time. She led a normal life, shopping, going out to the cinema and so on. She was on morphine for more than two years towards the end of her life, to kill the terrible pain. That was, of course, legally prescribed. I do not know whether the Committee is aware of this, but when heroin gets into the body it undergoes a chemical reaction called deacetylation, and is turned into morphine. People who are legally on morphine could be—if, of course, they have committed a trigger offence, or an offence covered by new subsection (1A) (b) in subsection (3)—picked up by testing in the police station. These people are already very ill, and I am a little concerned about the humiliation that these people may suffer in police stations as a result of taking legal morphine.