The law's gone potty!

THE debate on the legalisation of drugs was cranked up again this week with the findings of the survey on BBC1's Panorama showing the police much more tolerant than they used to be about cannabis - to the extent that some officers regard coffee, alcohol and tobacco as more harmful.

Maybe it is, but that is no excuse for the police determining, in effect, what the law should be - rather than doing as it demands and throwing the book at the potheads.

Yet, even if the law is potty on this issue, should we not ask where tolerance leads to?

From my own observations amid the hash-filled atmosphere of anything-goes Amsterdam, what you get in return for such liberal permissiveness is public places full of stoned, workshy, benefit claimants lolling about in a permanent daze - much as we have our own crop of scrounging and aggressive Giro-drawing winos cluttering up the public benches of the town's in Britain.

Does anyone really imagine that the drugs problem will diminish if the stuff these drop-outs crave is legalised?

The upshot can only be that you institutionalise the problem - and pass the bill for it from the countless victims of drugs-related crime we have today on to the taxpayer.

In other words, the decent, law-abiding members of society still end up picking up the tab for the feckless druggies to indulge their irresponsible weakness at their expense.

Do you want any part of your hard-earned wages going to help them escape reality?

Yet, heed the words of pro-decriminalisation Labour MP Paul Flynn on the supposedly better approach to the problem after visiting Rotterdam where he saw addicts inject themselves with a mixture of heroin and cocaine in the sort of project that the tolerant would no doubt like to see here. "They were in a hygienic room, using clean needles with which they had been supplied, and with people to support them afterwards," he said. "We don't see what happens in our own towns, when an addict does the same thing, probably in some foul back alley." Quite right, we don't - though, heaven knows, there are enough publicly-funded support workers and needle issuers to assist the criminal junkies to shoot up.

If the stance taken by such as Mr Flynn and the deluded legalise-all-drugs trendies was, for instance, extended to the problem of the alcho-addicts in our community, we would have social workers and counsellors handing out bottles of full-strength cider and cheap sherry to the town-centre winos,

Yet if such a notion is a quite evident madness, what makes the campaign to legalise drugs any more sensible?

Tinpot tyrant's

not all crazy

THINGS have come to a pretty pitch when a tinpot tyrant such as Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe can lecture us on our moral standards - with some truth.

Last week saw him ranting that Tony Blair ran a Cabinet full of homosexuals and declaring that if he wanted to turn Britain into the United Gay Kingdom, he should not go around lecturing other countries.

Mr Mugabe exaggerates, of course

The Cabinet is not full of gays - there are only three we know of.

The country is not in the grip of preference for homosexuals - even if the instance last week of a two-year-old boy in Lewisham being removed from the foster parents he has known from birth and placed in the care of a two gay men was described by the council as "not unusual."

Nor is it any reflection of the power of the gay minority in Britain that homosexuals are next month no longer to be banned from the forces - despite the majority of their members and service chiefs being opposed to this. Neither is the government's intention to scrap the law banning councils from promoting homosexuality or promoting the teaching in schools of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship an indication that the gay lobby is a back-seat driver on government policy.

Mad, bad, backward Mr Mugabe has the wrong idea. It is not a "gay Cabinet" that oversees this trend, it is the entire homosexual rights lobby that has frightened the majority from protest, lest they be branded politically-incorrect bigots - rather than sane and decent people who do not want children adopted by single-sex couples or taught the "normality" of such "families" at school and do not want their servicemen or 16-year-old schoolboys exposed to the predation of gays.

Aren't we lucky that we are not subject to the crazy values of crackpots like Mr Mugabe?

Scruff pierced

by conscience

WELL, hats off to Louise Casey, the government's new "tsar" on homelessness, for her frank admission of what lots of us had known all along about people living on the streets - that many are there by choice.

Ms Casey this week called for an end to the do-gooder soup runs and handouts, arguing that they encouraged people to sleep rough rather than find a permanent home or job.

I agree - for this was something that struck me only last Saturday when a scruffy young woman urged me to buy a copy of the Big Issue magazine, sold by the homeless for their support.

She was festooned with body-piercing blobs of metal in her nose, ears and mouth - the cost of which, I concluded, she must have given greater priority to than finding somewhere to live or making herself a presentable candidate for employment. But if she and the thousands of others like her are making such choices - and, as Ms Casey sensibly points out, have sentimental saps and charities, not to mention the welfare state, assisting their drop-out behaviour - why should the rest of us feel sorry for them, when we are subsidising them sticking their hands into the pockets of those who have to work hard and long in order to keep a roof over their heads?

It used to be that, fewer than 20 years ago, you had to travel to some flea-bitten foreign place to come across the experience of beggary. Now, thanks to the permissive values that undermine the stable family - the single mums explosion, rampant divorce and the surrender to the druggie culture - we have institutionalised it in our society, to the extent that homelessness and benefits dependency is not only commonplace, but for many a chosen way of life.

But, now at least, thanks to the frankness of Ms Casey, the workers and taxpayers among us have no reason to feel guilty for it.

Loonies have

election rights

IF ever there was a telling insight into the self-importance of our rulers, it came the other day with the plans being considered by Home Secretary Jack Straw for substantially increasing the deposit put up by parliamentary candidates, so that the so-called frivolous sort might be priced out of the contest.

The sort he means are the Monster Raving Loonies, the Lord Bucketheads and the Miss Whiplashes whose ilk add colour and fun to our elections. But is it not sheer pomposity on the part of Mr Straw to assume that members of the "serious" parties have - in a democracy, of all things - a superior right to ask for your vote than the silly beggars who stand against the political big-shots and, invariably, have a pomposity-puncturing beano at their expense, particularly in mid-term by-elections?

I would not vote for any of such idiots for love nor money, but I would not be so arrogant to deny or hinder their right to stand either.

Mr Straw should re-read the passage in George Orwell's classic 'Animal Farm', in which the presumptuous pigs assume greater equality than others in the sort of equal-opportunity system that he champions as a government minister - and then ask himself whether he deserves being put up against in Blackburn by a spoof candidate who campaigns under the slogan: "Pigs for real democracy" in order to show up the elitist thinking behind this proposal.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.