ANOTHER VOICE
Two different ways for
society to crack up
AUBERON WAUGH
In parts of Tottenham, I was told last week, no whites and very few blacks go out after dark. No doubt the same could be said about parts of Washington, parts of Detroit, parts of Los Angeles. We do not hear much about it, because the people who live in those parts of Tottenham are Poor, often inarticulate and also, partly as a result of the self-imposed curfew, almost completely unorganised. But for women living alone, in particular — and a growing Proportion of women do live alone there — this restriction makes life appallingly bleak. Many, of course, are on the dole, and can therefore spend what little money they have — £33 a week — in the daylight hours. But for those who return from work at about 6.30, they must simply go to their bedsitters and watch television or (in a few cases) read, and that is it. There is no social life, and no hope of an excursion.
Tottenham is worse than other places, of course, because, coming under the notor- iously loony Haringey Council, it offers few of the ordinary local government services, despite extremely high rates (which do not affect those on the dole) and a crippling poll tax to come (which will). The streets are virtually unpoliced, except for motorised 'snatch' squads.
The reason for the state of terror which descends on Tottenham every evening is very simple. The price of hard drugs — most particularly cocaine, but also heroin — is so high that devotees must be pre- pared to work nearly 24 hours a day mugging and robbing in order to feed the habit. Which is very sad, of course, but the more cheerful aspect of it all is that one does not, as it were, live in Tottenham. For as long as I can remember, there have been People starving in the Bihar desert. Tot- tenham may be a bit closer than that, but it IS still sufficiently far away to present no Immediate danger.
Well-to-do people like ourselves — edi- tors of Sunday newspapers and suchlike — have nothing to fear from all this violence unless we decide to go slumming in Tot- tenham — at any rate until it spreads to Notting Hill, Chelsea and the whole of central London. Then, frustrated by a Population which stays at home behind locked doors after dark, the muggers will Spread to the suburbs until eventually we find them beating down the doors of Private houses and flats. If I did not think this development was inexorable, I would certainly not have wished to suggest that the Government is eventually going to have to change its mind about the legalisa- tion of these highly dangerous substances. There is no valid case for legalising them on libertarian grounds alone, as I have been pointing out for years (see 'The real case against heroin', Another voice, 20 October 1984). Legalisation will bring in its trail a large number of deaths among people who might never have ex- perimented with drugs in the first place. Whole sections of the population — although not, I dare say, much bigger ones than do already — will live in a more or less permanent state of intellectual, physi- cal and emotional disarray, until they succumb to an early and probably rather squalid death. That is the price of making drugs freely available and it is not a price which any sane person would be prepared to contemplate unless the price of unsuc- cessfully trying to suppress them was not a great deal higher.
At present, it isn't. There can be no question of a change in the law until the terror of Tottenham has spread to such an extent that many more people are fright- ened — up to and including the editors of family newspapers. Meanwhile, we must simply wait and watch things get worse, as we do in so many fields — watching also the growth of other disagreeable conse- quences of authority's unwinnable war: a huge increase in the powers of police, customs and other anti-drug agencies, in official surveillance of private citizens and interference in their private lives. As bad as anything, perhaps, will be the spectacle of endless government ministers striking Churchillian poses as they declare wars against crime, crack-downs against drug- pushers and all the rest of it.
My reason for trailing these future de- velopments is not to urge them so much as to express an anxiety that in the current climate of stupidity and affectation things will be allowed to get much worse than they need before the inevitable alternative is applied. I was not at all surprised to be called out by name — along with Jonathan Guinness and the Economist magazine — in the Mail on Sunday's main leader this week. Even Brian Walden, in the Sunday Times, seemed to think that we realists are offering a solution, rather than pointing to a necessary alternative to present trends. But the arguments deployed in the Mail on Sunday were more interesting, in that they illustrate the level of intellectual debate on which these matters will be decided: Some adherents of the campaign . . lay the blame for the horrendous criminal industry which has grown up around drugs . . . on world governments who insist that the pro- duction, supply and use of drugs should remain illegal activities.
Well, yes, if they were not illegal there would be no criminal industry.
Smugly, they cling to the image of cocaine as the 'champagne' of drugs, used only by beautiful people in beautiful surroundings. Their hideous arrogance knows no bounds. For it pays no heed to the fact that far from their sophisticated salons, a generation of young people are facing a cocaine night- mare. . . . But the largely middle-class liber- ationists don't give a damn about the plight of the crack-threatened inner cities . . not if their precious 'rights' to use their drugs are threatened.
Students of popular journalism will no doubt applaud this example of transferred indignation — also known as the Pilger gambit — by which the drugs war is deliberately confused with the class war, making complete nonsense of both. As a largely middle-class liberationist I am de- lighted to join battle in the class war at any opportunity which offers itself, but it really has nothing whatever to do with the ineffectual postures of President Bush and Mrs Thatcher in the drugs war.
Never mind that I have not the slightest desire to use these drugs and have never had a cocaine habit, so it is most unlikely, as the Mail on Sunday suggests, that it was my habit 'which brought the drug to these shores in the first place'. It was precisely concern for the state of the inner cities which prompted my raising the matter. The distinction between the harm done by the drugs — which is self-inflicted — and the harm done by addicts who mug and rob in order to pay black market prices, which is inflicted on the rest of society, is plainly above the heads of our current debate. The criminal trade in cocaine is apparently worth £400 billion a year, largely exacted at knifepoint. Is that really worth preserv- ing for the pleasure of striking a few bullfrog attitudes? Might we not at least examine and try to quantify the disaster threatened by an alternative policy?
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