Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Home Department – in the House of Commons at 2:30 pm on 15 July 2013.
I spent over an hour last week speaking to the New Zealand Health Minister about precisely this subject. It is a very interesting area of policy development and we will study carefully what is happening in New Zealand and the policy there. I should offer a word of caution, however, to the hon. Gentleman, who has a long record of campaigning on the issue. Over recent years, we have seen quite big falls in the use of some of the most serious illegal drugs—heroin and crack cocaine—so the illegal status of those drugs does not appear to have led to the rise in use, as he claims would be the case.
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John Leeson
Posted on 16 Jul 2013 3:53 pm (Report this annotation)
One does really despair at our politicians when it comes to drug Policy. Jeremy Brown cites the fall in use of heroin and crack cocaine.Yet when heroin was legal in the early 60's and dispensed by GP's we had around 1000 users now we have well over 100,000. Moving heroin out of the doctors surgery onto our streets has not been a success by any measure. Regulate and control all drugs for our citizens, communities and Countries sake