Second Delegated Legislation Committee

7 July 2026

Contents updated on 7 Jul 2026

Chair opens proceedings and the Minister moves the motion, outlining the emergence of synthetic opioid orphines, associated UK and international deaths, and UNODC/ACMD evidence of serious public health risk. She explains the Temporary Class Drug Order’s controls, offences and penalties, its Schedule 1 treatment, the made affirmative procedure, and signals forthcoming legislation to reclassify orphines as Class A within a year.

Second Delegated Legislation Committee Tue, 7 Jul 2026 House of Commons

00:03 - 00:18

Speaker 2

Order. The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 Temporary Class Drug Order 2026. I call the Minister to move the motion.

00:18 - 02:37

Speaker 4

Thank you, Mr. Vickers, it's a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I beg to move that the committee has considered the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 Temporary Class Drug Order 2026, which was laid before Parliament on the 10th of June. This instrument places controls on a new, highly lethal class of drug. Orphines are a type of synthetic opioid which emerged in force in the UK drugs market last spring. At that time, they have been in that time, forgive me, they have been involved in at least 22 deaths, 14 of them between December and March.

Between 2024 and April 2026, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime received 206 reports from multiple countries of drug samples containing orphine compounds. The report of the 30th of April from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for which I am very grateful, stated that, and I quote, "the risk to the population from these recently emerged compounds is sufficiently great that urgent steps are required to protect public health." We have taken those urgent steps. Less than six weeks after the report was published, we enacted a temporary class drug order, the first in a decade, to control seven orphines. I will spare committee members the complex chemical names, but they're all set out in the order and the explanatory memorandum.

But I can confirm that three of the seven have been involved in UK deaths and that the other four have been notified by the EU Drugs Agency as being present in EU drugs markets. The temporary class drug order, or TCDO, makes it a specific offence to produce, supply, or offer to supply these seven orphines, to possess them with an intent to supply, or to import or export them. Penalties are the same as for class B drugs, namely maximum sentencing of 14 years in prison. The TCDO also provides that the substances should be treated as if they were in schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001. Schedule 1 covers substances with no known medical uses, as is the case here, and requires anyone who doesn't need to make legitimate use of them, for example for research, to obtain a Home Office licence.

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