Yet I have been astonished at how few people are prepared to mention the obvious driving cause of these young deaths and of so many lives lost to a cycle of crime and prison. It isn’t the absence of youth clubs, the growth of social media, or the shortage of police on the streets that has created gang culture. It is drugs and in particular the profits from drugs.
There are billions of pounds of profits being made each year by criminals fr supplying drugs illegally. That money is being fought over on the streets of Britain. Every part of the country has been parcelled up and is owned by one or other gang. The ‘owners’ of that territory have a huge financial interest to fight to keep hold of their patch and to expand onto the territory of others. The winners of those battles are the gang leaders who are the most violent, the best armed and the most aggressively disciplined in their insistence on group loyalty. They are very visible characters in their local communities and the money they earn is on attractive display to others either in small ways such as high quality branded clothing or in the form of fast and expensive cars. That is what has created the fashion for carrying knives and guns and it is why a culture of violence has developed that has then spread more widely. Many of the 50 young people who have been killed in London so far this year will have had nothing to do with drugs or with drug gangs. In the vast majority of the cases the person carrying out the crime will have been in some way corrupted by the atmosphere of violence generated by drug culture.
Those who have been stabbed or shot aren’t the only victims. A lot more people end up addicted and dependent than end up injured or killed by knife crime. That problem is also fuelled by the illegal drug business. Money can be made by whispering in the ears of young and vulnerable people that drugs are a bit of cheap and easy fun. Nowhere is safe. Even in the smallest of villages and the most affluent of environments drugs are now on offer to kids of remarkably young ages and we have reached the point where drug dealers are doing home deliveries and everyone’s child will be offered illegal drugs at some point in their youth.
Prohibition isn’t working. It never does. Back in the days when alcohol was illegal throughout the United States the gangsters became famous and characters like Al Capone fought machine gun battles with rivals and with police on the streets of America. That era came to an end not because of some wonderful new style of policing but because the government realised that it was losing the battle and got rid of prohibition.
The only logical solution to our current wave of drug gang violence is exactly the same. If you are opposed to people using drugs then the only effective way of controlling them is to legalise and manage the supply. Not just of supposedly soft drugs. You have to provide a source of reliable doses of even the most unpleasantly addictive drugs through chemist’s shops. That means government stepping in and taking responsibility for every step in the production and supply process so they cut the ground from under the feet of the criminals.
This is not a statement that I like making or that I make lightly. I am not arguing it from the perspective of liberalism or from a misguided belief that drugs are a light-hearted bit of fun. I worked in the inner city with young people for over 30 years and I have seen the impact of drugs at very close quarters. It is ugly and it is unpleasant.
The reason I want legalisation is because I am convinced that it is the best way to reduce the use of drugs and because I am certain that it is the only way to stop providing criminals with billions of pounds of income for encouraging addiction.
Most deaths from drugs result from inaccurate doses being taken as a result of buying erratic qualities of supply from dealers. Some of the attraction to use them lies in an interest in forbidden fruit. Both those problems can be removed if the products are available with clear health warnings from a boring but trustworthy source such as the local chemist.
If people choose to take the risk then the money they spend on their bad habits is better going to the government to run anti-addiction clinics, information campaigns and the health service than it is to fund the purchase of flash cars for dealers who can drive around in them advertising the source of their wealth.
Anyone who says this runs the risk of immediately being attacked for being soft on drugs. The exact opposite is the case. In reality anyone who argues for prohibition is arguing to provide funding for criminals to run a sales campaign offering every child in the country the chance to buy drugs. They are arguing for a continuing growth of crime and of violence. Supporting prohibition is supporting criminality.
If we really want to reduce the use of drugs and we really want to stop funding gang culture then legalisation is the only realistic way forward. Yet anyone in authority who says this is met with a storm of abuse. We live in a society where people would rather carry on making the situation worse than admit that the war against criminal supply of drugs can never be won and that the failure of that war is killing young people at an alarming rate. People who think themselves to be sincere advocates of law and order seem determined to sit idly by and watch whilst year after year the drug traffic strengthens crime.
The standard received wisdom is that sooner or later more police resources, better police intelligence and more vigilance will win the war against drugs. The reality is that every yet the death toll rises and the problems created by the war keep getting worse. Drug use has gone down because of the extent of the efforts made by educators and by parents to ensure that even the youngest of children know some of the dangers. But the culture of criminal violence and the death toll have continued to get worse. That will keep on happening until we are brave enough to face the reality that well-meant attempts to ban supply have failed and will always fail. The choice is not whether we can employ enough police and give them enough powers to cut off the supply or not. There can never be enough police embedded deep enough in the community to achieve that. The choice is whether you allow the supply to come from the worst elements of society and the money to go to those elements or whether you provide a boring reliable state-controlled supply.
It is time that we faced up to that stark and difficult choice. If you really want to vote for a law and order candidate at the upcoming local elections then find someone who is brave enough to tell you the truth about how to stop gang culture.