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. - --- MAP posted-by: Elaine