ninme

The Times - Blame the rich for feeding the drug industry
The police will never be able to win the war against drugs. It’s the culture of tolerance that is the real problem, by Melanie Reid

Bear with me, if you will, while I skim through a random selection of people who in one way or another were found in possession of Class A drugs in recent months.

Scott McEvoy, 24, from Liverpool - 40 months in jail. … [etc etc]

And, as of this week, Hans Kristian Rausing, 45, and his wife Eva, 44, from Holland Park - a conditional caution and all charges dropped without a court appearance. With not even a £15 victim surcharge, £60 when multiplied by four, on account of their four young children.

The distinction is, of course, that the people in the second paragraph are just names plucked from the massed ranks of the oikish or the ordinary. Whereas the Rausings are some of the richest people on the planet, heirs to the multi-billion- pound Tetra Pak fortune. …

At what point do we start to look at legalisation as an exit strategy in a war we cannot win? Is it possible to turn drugs into a health rather than a crime issue? Or should we blame Britain’s excess of tolerance for turning it into one of the most drug-blighted countries in Europe? As one leading expert, Neil McKeganey, of Glasgow University, puts it, at what point do we stop regarding illegal drug use as human right, and start seeing drugs as a destructive social cancer?

These are uncomfortable questions for both the Left and the Right but it is time we started asking them. We have to accept that this is no longer an argument about drug availability; this is about the existence of a drug culture that has spread to every corner of society. The poor old police can plug away at reducing supply until they are exhausted, but they cannot begin to address something that undermines them at every turn.

Sir Ian was unfairly mocked for announcing that middle-class addicts who snort cocaine at dinner parties were not above the law. He was on a loser when he said it, but he was right. Every recreational drug user - wealthy, liberal, educated, naughty, dabbling for the fun of it - is feeding an industry that threatens all that is good and positive in society. It is a nihilistic act. But one is, of course, sneered at in fashionable circles for saying such a thing - by people who have no answers to the problem, nor have ever witnessed the horrors of what street drugs do to vulnerable people.

Mm-hmm.