Ketamine Seizures (1098A/20)
Request
I’m writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act to request data held by your constabulary on ketamine seizures in the past three years. (2020, 2019, 2018).
Whether this involves the total amount of ketamine seizures, quantities or ketamine related drug offences resulting in arrests – whatever stats you have.
Also any copies of any reports or memos which mention ketamine seizures and arrests.
While this is a wide breadth as I’m asking for what you have (in case I am too specific and you say the information is not held or would involve heavily searching easy case file etc), should you have so much ketamine related info that you deem this FOI to take too long under section 14 – I am most interested in the total amount of ketamine seizures in the past 3 years and whether they have increased, to narrow it down.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Your request for ‘any copies of any reports or memos which mention ketamine seizures and arrests’ is too broad in scope. Relevant information could be held by various individuals/teams and would therefore require manually approaching each department. However, to conduct this manual search would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide relevant information relating to arrests and seizures of Ketamine, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.