UK Drug Policy Reform: Who Can Actually Change the Law?

UK drug policy reform runs through one Act and one minister. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 sorts drugs into Classes A, B and C, and the Home Secretary can move a drug between those classes with a vote in each House of Parliament, no new Act required.

That is the short answer to who can change UK drug law. The longer answer is that almost everyone else in the debate has some lever, and none of the others is the law. Scotland can set prosecution policy but not the classes, and London can push policing priorities but not penalties. The expert council advises, and is regularly overruled. Knowing which lever someone is pulling is the fastest way to read any headline about UK drug law reform.

Who can change UK drug law?

Parliament and the Home Office, between them. There are two routes, and they are not equally hard.

The slow route is a new Act. A government bill, or a private member's bill that the government chooses not to block, could rewrite the 1971 Act or replace it outright. That is the only way to build something the current Act has no room for, such as a licensed market with shops, growers and tax. It is also the route nothing has yet survived. Every cannabis bill so far has been a backbench effort with no government time behind it, and we keep a record of how each one ended in our look at the cannabis legalisation bills.

The quick route is secondary legislation, and it is how almost every real change of the last twenty-five years actually happened. Section 2 of the Act lets the government amend the list of drugs in each class by Order in Council. The draft has to be approved by a resolution of both Houses, and the Home Secretary has to consult the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs first.

The schedules work the same way one level down: the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 decide who may lawfully prescribe, hold or research a drug, and a minister can amend them by statutory instrument without a single new clause of primary law. Cannabis went from Class B to Class C in 2004 and back again in 2009 that way. In November 2018, cannabis-based products for medicinal use were moved into Schedule 2 that way too, which is why medical cannabis is legal in the UK without any Act saying so.

So reform does not need a grand bill to start. It needs a Home Secretary who wants it.

Does the government have to follow its drug advisers?

No. The Act says the Home Secretary must consult the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the ACMD, before changing a class. It does not say the advice has to be taken, and governments of both parties have made a habit of not taking it.

Cannabis is the clearest case. In 2008 the ACMD advised that it should stay in Class C. The government moved it back to Class B anyway, from January 2009. When the council's chair, Professor David Nutt, kept arguing the point in public, he was dismissed that October, and several members resigned with him.

The pattern held under later governments. In March 2023 the ACMD advised against bringing nitrous oxide under the 1971 Act. Eight months later the Home Office made it a Class C drug, promoted as part of an anti-social behaviour plan. The advice was published; the decision went the other way.

None of this makes the ACMD irrelevant. Its reports set the evidence a minister has to argue against, and its research work is behind the slow loosening of the rules on Schedule 1 studies covered in the fight to reschedule psilocybin. But anyone reading "experts call for change" as "change is coming" has misread who holds the pen.

What has the UK government actually proposed?

Mostly tougher enforcement, plus treatment funding. Reform in the sense campaigners use the word has not been on any government's list.

The current framework is the ten-year plan published in December 2021, From harm to hope. It put new money into drug treatment and recovery services and paired that with a promise to go after supply chains and "county lines" dealing. It did not touch the classes.

In July 2022 the Home Office went further on the enforcement side with a white paper called Swift, Certain, Tough. It proposed a three-tier scheme for people caught in possession: a fine or drug awareness course first, escalating to sanctions like losing a passport or a driving licence for repeat offenders. The consultation closed in 2022. More than three years on, the gov.uk page still says the department is analysing the feedback. No outcome has been published and nothing from it has become law.

Since the change of government in July 2024 the line has been short. When the London Drugs Commission recommended in May 2025 that small amounts of natural cannabis be taken out of the 1971 Act, the Home Office said it had no plans to reclassify. The detail of that report is in our piece on whether weed is legal in London.

Where does Scotland fit in?

Scotland is where UK drug reform has gone furthest without the law changing, and the reason is the line between what Holyrood controls and what it does not.

The Scotland Act 1998 lists the misuse of drugs as a reserved matter. Holyrood cannot reclassify anything, decriminalise anything or license anything. In July 2023 the Scottish Government published A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland, which asked for possession of all drugs for personal use to be decriminalised. The UK government rejected it the same day.

What Scotland does control is prosecution. The Lord Advocate, Scotland's chief prosecutor, has used that power twice in ways that matter. In 2021 police were allowed to give recorded warnings for possession of Class A drugs, rather than reporting every case for prosecution. In 2023 the Lord Advocate said it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people for possession inside a supervised consumption facility. That statement is what let the Thistle open on Hunter Street in Glasgow on 13 January 2025, the UK's first such service, as a three-year pilot.

The Thistle runs on a prosecution policy that covers one building. Drug law across Scotland is unchanged. It is the clearest working example of reform by discretion, and also of its limit: whatever discretion grants, a later prosecutor or a later Home Secretary can take back.

What would real reform need?

An Act, for anything that looks like a legal market. Reclassification can lower penalties and rescheduling can open up research or prescriptions, but neither can create a licensed shop. The 1971 Act has no licensing regime for adult use to amend, so one would have to be written from scratch, the way Germany wrote its own in 2024. Nobody has introduced a government bill to do that in the UK.

Short of that, the realistic levers are the ones above, and they move in small steps. A schedule here, a pilot there, each one reversible by the next minister. Parliament's own Home Affairs Committee called in August 2023 for a health-led approach, support for the Glasgow pilot, and urgent rescheduling of psychedelics for research. The government's response that November accepted very little of it.

Reading reform news well means asking one question of every story: does this change the Act, the regulations, or only how the existing ones are enforced? Most of the time it is the third. As for when the first will happen, nobody honest can give you a date.

High in Hackney is a waitlist for the day UK law changes for adults, for cannabis and for psilocybin. Nothing is sold here and nothing can be until Parliament acts, but the people on the list hear first when it does. Join the waitlist