The Psychoactive Substances Bill (2015): A thematic analysis of parliamentary debates and newsprint media

Abstract

The Psychoactive Substances Act (2016) is the UK’s most recent legislation addressing use of recreational drugs. It implements a blanket ban on all psychoactive substances pre-emptively, with no required assessment of the harm of a substance as a condition of being banned. Hence, this Act presents a potentially new and profound move in the state’s role regulating substance use. There has been little research into the inception, implications or potential consequences of the Act. This research focuses on the political and media discourses leading up to passage of the Bill into law to address this gap. It thematically analyses parliamentary debate throughout the Bill process and newsprint media at the concurrent time in order to explore links between parliamentary and media discourse. From the data analysed, this researcher found that themes of harm and legitimacy ran through both samples. This is despite the notable absence in the Bill of a scale of harm, or classification system, for substances legislated for, indicating the gap that can exist between the ideas driving a policy and its eventual contents. The researcher had suspected media reportage may contain sensationalised stories, and parliamentary debate may refer to such media stories, however this supposition was not evidenced by the samples analysed. This research ultimately concludes that drugs policy is driven by ‘real life’ experience over media representations of drugs, and that the current UK government approach to drug use promotes a criminal justice approach over minimising social harms.