§ Lord Aveburyasked Her Majesty's Government:
Whether they will investigate the allegation made to the Chief Inspector of Prisons that prisoners in Lincoln Prison A Wing switched from cannabis to heroin use following the introduction of mandatory drug testing. [HL2505]
§ Lord Williams of MostynThese allegations have been investigated. The results of random mandatory drug testing at Lincoln do not indicate that prisoners there have moved from using cannabis to heroin following the introduction of testing. Results for prisoners on A wing are not separated from the rest of the prison.
This allegation has been made in relation to a number of prisons and is not specific to Lincoln. However, statistics on mandatory drug tests results have never supported the contention that prisoners are switching from cannabis to heroin.
Because of the concern surrounding this issue, the Prison Service specifically commissioned independent research into it. Separate studies by the National Addiction Centre (NAC) and the Oxford Centre for Criminological Research examined the evidence. The NAC draft report found that, overall, the results do not directly support substantial switching from cannabis to opiates. A 4 per cent. sample of drug misusers in the Oxford research had experimented with heroin for the first time because of mandatory drug testing, but none had persisted with it.
The Government are not complacent about this and the Prison Service will continue to examine the results of drug testing carefully. My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Mr. Howarth) recently announced the new Prison Drugs Strategy, which sets out a more discriminating approach to provide a greater emphasis on tackling the misuse of drugs which cause the greatest harm, and this is a measure of our concern about the use of opiates, such as heroin in particular.