Daily Mail, 2008
A father of two is murdered when he tries to stop two drug addicts stealing his car radio; a boy is stabbed to death in a London street by a gang calling themselves MDP–that stands for Money, Drugs, Power; a popular television presenter kills himself when his actress girl friend dies after a drug-fuelled twosome; and we watch bemused as within a few days both Amy Winehouse and Peaches Geldof are questioned (although not charged) by police about possible drug offences.
Drugs–they are everywhere in our news headlines because they are everywhere in our country, from the marbled bathrooms of the richest banks in the City to the most rancid kitchens of our sink estates.
They are in public schools and comprehensives, sixth form colleges and universities, and lavatories, clean and dirty, in thousands of pubs, clubs and restaurants.
Rife in our prisons, they are the sticky tentacle which entraps and then ties girls to the servitude of prostitution, as we saw during the investigation into the multiple murders in Ipswich last year; while the street sale of heroin across Britain helps provide the funding for the Taliban to obtain guns with which to kill our soldiers and condemn Afghan women to life in the Middle Ages.
Drugs are the scourge of our time. Soon the Home Secretary will introduce legislation to reclassify cannabis as a class B drug, reversing the decision four years ago to downgrade it to class C.
Armies of people who believe themselves to be forward looking are angry at the decision, and it has to be said the decision flies on the face of both the government’s own advisers and some police.
Others, like Julia Donaldson, the author of the Gruffalo books, whose son committed suicide after depression that she believes was caused by years of smoking cannabis, applaud it. And neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has long warned that cannabis can precipitate psychotic attacks and have long-lasting effects on the brain.
Clearly there is a difference of opinion on this, but I’m with Julia Donaldson, and the parents of so many other young people, whose lives have been ruined, some lost, by drugs.
Something has gone wrong in our society. How did we ever get into this state where a coroner reports that so-called recreational drugs are involved in an increasing number of road deaths, a university study reveals that many teenagers routinely use ecstasy, marijuana and cocaine to spice up their sex lives, and magistrates courts are littered with tales of muggings in pursuance of funds to feed heroin or crack habits?
We are a well-run, well-informed, educated, civilised, democratic, caring people. How could we have allowed all this to happen? What could we have been thinking of?
The truth is we weren’t thinking. Drugs have become the problem they are because we let it happen, you and me and everyone else who smiled and thought it didn’t concern them.
It’s no use simply blaming government inactions or wrong actions over the past forty odd years during which the plague has been spreading; or to pin the responsibility on the police, customs controls or magistrates.
We have to face up to it. It’s our own fault: our own responsibility. As parents and teachers, professional people and unprofessional, rich and poor, clever and not so bright, too many of us have collectively turned a blind, unworried, unchallenging eye to the growing curse in our midst.
And why? Mainly, I suspect, because we didn’t want to be thought of as “unhip” or old fashioned.
“Everyone does it,” some of us told ourselves, smiling indulgently as decade by decade the habit spread. Then, even more lethally, “It’s part of being young,” others parroted as new, ever more potent drugs followed, as pot became skunk and the taking of ecstasy became the norm in clubs. “It’s normal,” it was agreed.
But; in what way is it normal? Generation upon generation of people lived quite happily when drug taking wasn’t a normal part of being young at all. When I was at university in central London in the early Sixties (just before the arrival of what came to be known as the “Swinging Sixties”) I didn’t know one person who had ever tried drugs. I was by no means a goody-goody, nor were my friends, but drugs just weren’t part of our lives.
And, no, we didn’t get out of our skulls on booze every weekend, either, as some who are in favour of the liberalisation of drugs will probably throw back at me. Young people rarely did then. They couldn’t afford to. Yet, looking back, it seems to me, we had a pretty good time. Being young is good fun in itself.
So how is it that the notion that drug-taking is “part of being young” has come to be accepted? Is there something that makes today’s youth different from all the other earlier generations when drugs weren’t available? Have we produced in the past couple of generations a new, mutant breed of human beings who are chemically distinct in that they need new stimuli to enjoy themselves?
Or have we simply allowed ourselves to believe a convenient, defeatist myth because we don’t know what to do about a problem?
It seems to me that what makes today’s youth different is its bad luck to be endlessly targeted by a worldwide, criminal drug production industry, which has its distribution networks spreading to every town and city in the country. Until the late Sixties that had never been the case.
But that’s only part of the problem. Because at the same time as the growth in the drugs industry a culture has arisen that implicitly supports that criminal industry by making “recreational” drugs appear as cool as any designer accessory.
And in that respect my generation is complicit. For forty years we’ve made uncritical jokes about the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” excesses of rock groups. Then we’ve watched in amusement as the super-rich and glamorous turned their druggy excesses into fashionable behaviour—a lifestyle to be admired and copied.
Look at it another way and the phrase “sex, drugs and rock and roll” might be interpreted as part of a devastatingly successful advertising slogan for an exciting life, a life which the rest of us by our silence have sanctioned.
Because seemingly no matter how often role models to the young get into trouble with drugs, few of their careers ever seem to suffer.
Obviously there are some tragic individuals who pay the ultimate price with their lives, people like rock star Kurt Cobain and Paula Yates.
But, let’s be honest, the vast majority of beautiful people who are doing drugs are cocooned by a widespread attitude of tolerance. Television chat show producers and interviewers still kneel in supplication before clearly coked-up Hollywood stars, and model agencies still find clients with millions to spend on the right pretty face, no matter how many scandals there have been connecting her with drugs.
We all know and shake our heads about the prevalence of drugs in the inner cities, with those squalid Trainspotting images of dirty needles. But somehow in television, in advertising, in the music industry and in the City that image of drugs is washed clean. Attractive, clever, successful people do drugs in those professions, we are told. What can be the harm in that? In truth, everything.
Drugs are drugs, whoever takes them, and wherever they take them. They are harmful to those who use them and they are the product of a violent industry. People kill each other in turf wars for the “right” to sell them; and while the criminal bosses prosper, poor people risk their lives or their freedom by carrying consignments across borders in their suitcases and in condoms inside their bodies. And when those condoms accidentally burst…the poor person, the “mule” as he or she is known, faces an agonisingly slow death.
Do any of the beautiful, professional people with their cool attitudes to the drugs they use ever consider this? Do they ever think that by doing a line of cocaine in a shimmering clean bathroom or in a state of the art studio that they are recruiting officers for a dirty, dangerous trade?
Some years ago there was a campaign in the United States for young people built around the slogan “Just say no”. It had some success.
But would it, I wonder, have been more successful if it had been combined with a crusade aimed at an older generation of drugs users, the trendy rich, the successful City traders, the popular media stars who revel in their super-cool images, all of whom, with a wink and a nod, seem to condone drug taking and make it fashionable?
For three full generations, since the end of the Sixties, the drug problem has been growing. Now many pessimists believe that it can’t be stopped. I disagree. It isn’t inevitable that young people will get into drugs. It isn’t written into their DNA. They didn’t once. They needn’t again, though with the battalions of the criminal drugs industry laying siege to them it gets more and more difficult for some of them to resist.
But they’ll need help from us all. Not just changes in the law, but changes in our mindset. To turn the tide against drugs it isn’t enough to simply preach about the dangers and corrosive nature of ecstasy or crack cocaine.
We have to change our own attitudes to drugs. We have to stop thinking that stand-up comedians are funny and streetwise when they make light of the subject; we have to show disdain for those hip-hop and rock musicians whose very images are defined by drugs; our club and pub owners have to bar the pushers from their premises; and our broadcasters and advertisers have to show zero tolerance for those rich, careless celebrities who flaunt their drug habits.
But mostly we all have to stop surrendering to the pushers’ campaign that drug taking is normal, usually harmless behaviour among young people.
It isn’t. We know it isn’t.
