IT IS far easier to spell out the extent of Britain's drugs problem than it is to put forward convincing solutions.

It is not surprising, then, that in unveiling its White Paper strategy on fighting the drugs menace, the government acknowledges that there are no easy answers.

For at least half of all UK crime is drug-related.

There will, then, be total support for the plan to plunder the profits from this misery in order to fight it.

The government proposes that money seized from traffickers, currently some £5million a year, should be used to fund anti-drugs programmes.

Additionally, there will be backing for the call for courts to be given powers to send addict offenders on compulsory treatment courses. But the public may not be so sure about the idea that the national curriculum should include lessons on the dangers of drugs for children as young as five.

The disclosure that nearly half of all children will have tried drugs before they are 20 points to the real need for education to be a prime weapon in the anti-drugs war.

But the doubts about taking the campaign into the classroom centre not, as some teachers complain, about dumping social problems on schools, but purely on the risks of warning children as young as five about drugs when it could, instead, entail teaching them about drugs when they would otherwise be totally ignorant of them.

Yet, schools must have a role in this war - and, indeed, many already do - for, in addition to imparting knowledge, it has always been their function to seek to produce responsible young citizens.

And if the innocence of childhood has now to be eroded as part of the process, it will perhaps be a price worth paying.

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