IN addition to costing you and a I billions by being responsible for a third of all crime, the country's druggie scum are now set to take another £217 million out of our pockets.

For it has been decided that treatment of this order, rather than prison, is the answer to defeating the droves of addicts who turn to crime to fund their £20,000-a-year habit.

This, of course, means a still greater explosion of the army of counsellors, therapists, social workers, methadone dispensers, needle exchangers and sundry do-gooders already making a living off the back of this curse.

But when are we going to get rid of the soppy notion that drug-abusers are "victims" rather than feckless, anti-social escapists who voluntarily resort to chemical means to dodge reality - and, in the process, become criminals who turn millions of decent people into their victims by robbing them?

We hear from the first annual report of Britain's new drugs czar, Keith Hellawell, that 90 per cent of those caught using drugs return to prey on the community by stealing.

But isn't this because they are given such soft treatment instead of proper punishment? Automatic custodial sentences for drug use, together with making our prisons drug-free - surely, not an impossible task - and the prospect of no release until offenders are drugs free would, I am certain, do far more to curb this menace than still more "treatment".

Throw them in jail and let them do cold turkey - then we would see that re-offending figure plunge from the 90 per cent that's sustained by the help-them approach for these parasites.

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