Pubdate: Sun, 17 Dec 2006
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2006 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: Jasper Gerard, The Observer

TAKE THE WAR ON DRUGS TO THE POPPY FIELDS

Heroin isn't a snob. Nor, to be strictly accurate, is it an inverted 
snob. Here at least it cannot be faulted. Class As are impressively 
classless; heroin is happy to enter your bloodstream whatever your 
bloodline. Ask any news junkie who has overdosed on recent stories: 
an oh-so-nicely-brought-up young woman from a Suffolk village is 
strangled; Pete Doherty leaves a flat after a young man has fallen to 
his death; grannies are battered, girls killed in drive-by shootings, 
families destroyed. Thank heroin.

The left, invoking Trainspotting, blames addiction on poverty; the 
right, invoking Iain Duncan Smith, on social breakdown. Such 
self-serving analysis hardly helps the five Ipswich women murdered 
after addiction propelled them to prostitution. Gemma Adams hailed 
from one of those apparently prosperous, two-parent homes the BBC 
likes to hold up on budget day as insufferably middle class; yet 
drugs from the Khyber Pass led her down Sir Alf Ramsey Way to a 
psycho she otherwise might never have met. A fondness for smack 
produces the strangest bedfellows.

Supposedly socially concerned commentators have been no more 
insightful than politicos about these stomach-churning 
strangulations. The killer has already matched Jack the Ripper's vile 
tally, yet columnistas squabble over whether victims should be termed 
'working girls' or the equally euphemistic 'sex workers'. Can't we 
give sophistry a night off and agree victims are human beings? The 
real question is how we can stop other cracked lives from breaking?

Drugs policy, unlike the drugs, offers no quick fix, but there is 
hope: 80 per cent of heroin here is from Afghanistan. We now lead 
European peace-keeping efforts there. One thing the EU excels at is 
food mountains, so why not stock-pile heroin hills?

Alas, we are so keen to keep farmers onside and off the Taliban, 
soldiers are told to ignore poppy fields. Sure, America's preferred 
alternative - a kind of wistful, guilt-induced afterthought - of 
napalming pretty well the entire country won't win many hearts or 
minds. But there is a third way. Why not buy heroin from farmers? Or 
give grants to grow other crops, perhaps even - and this is really 
radical - food. And if farmers still sow fields of poison, bomb the 
buggers. More than social engineering or tax tinkering back home, 
this would transform lives. For most British crime comes back to drugs.

Yet for all the Home Secretary's hoary headline-chasing crime 
crackdowns, does he even have an anti-drugs strategy worthy of the 
name? Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, calculates 
New Labour has made over 3,000 pastimes illegal, from setting off a 
nuclear bomb to importing Polish potatoes to selling grey squirrels. 
Acts weighing more than two John Prescotts have been passed, some of 
which attack our democracy, such as our right to protest. But we 
don't feel safer as the cause of crime - drugs - is tossed into the 
'too hard' basket.

Labour's is an airy-fairy authoritarianism. Imagine the effect on 
crime if ministers tried three things: cutting the heroin supply, 
providing compulsory rehabilitation for every addict in prison and 
instigating more police patrols. That is the way to stop the greatest 
serial killer of all.

Then we would all score. Until then, the heartbreaking harvest from 
the poppy fields of Helmand Province will continue to be reaped. In 
the morgues of a Suffolk town.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine