The Home Affairs Select Committee spent a year on its drugs inquiry, and its hefty report is finally published today. During the inquiry, MPs heard from charities, ministers, and Russell Brand, who called committee member Michael Ellis his ‘mate’ during evidence.
But the committee members haven’t had such a matey response from ministers. The Home Office has already made clear that it doesn’t believe the ‘Drugs: Breaking the Cycle’ report’s central recommendations need to be enacted. The committee wanted a Royal Commission to ‘consider the best ways of tackling drugs policy in an increasingly globalised world’. It also suggested that decriminalisation ‘merits significantly closer consideration’, the idea that has unsurprisingly received the most attention in the press this morning.
The Home Office isn’t just questioning those ideas: its minister, Jeremy Browne, made it clear he doubted the underlying assumption in the report that the department’s drugs policy is currently failing.
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