THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE

No one would be foolish enough to deny that drugs are rapidly destroying
our culture and society. Just about every day in this newspaper there is a
report of drug-related crimes, many of which involve young people.

Drugs are killing our kids. The social and economic cost is like the head
of a nuclear explosion. It is a rapidly expanding mushroom that envelopes
the thin support at its base, which inevitably collapses. Many of
tomorrow's junkies will start by experimenting with soft drugs at school.
This is an intolerable situation and has to be addressed.

The so-called experts will tell us that education is the key but the very
nature of the ones we are trying to educate is to ignore adult pressure and
go with the flow because it is the cool thing to do around their own
groups. Virtually all of Western society is blighted with this disease
because we have all followed the path of the soft options put forward by
the academics and mind-benders.

It's time we did something else and turned back the clock to a much harder
line. The view of the "experts" is that this is a simplistic line and the
problem is far more complicated than that. I believe that there is no point
in getting older unless you are going to get wiser and wisdom tells us that
the simpler you can make something the better it is.

Lawyers have for years been getting criminals off the hook by making their
cases very complicated and creating so much doubt in the eyes of juries
that no one is game enough to convict under those circumstances. The
simplistic view would be that no drugs on the street means no junkies and
therefore no crime and no more social destruction. No drugs on the street
would have to mean the complete removal from society of these peddlers of
death.

A second conviction should mean an automatic jail term with hard labour for
street dealers and for those at the top of the supply chain it's goodbye world.

The politically correct approach seeks to make some aspects of crime
acceptable by trivialising them. It would imply that if we open shooting
galleries then society will accept it is now a normal part of life just as
we now hear young kids in the streets using the F-word regularly so the
academics' answer is to put it in the dictionary to give it some form of
credibility and acceptance.

Morally, of course, they are wrong and if we do not arrest the slide in
these attitudes then we must be prepared to see yet a further increase in
drug-taking and all that goes with it.

Jeff Butler
Leschenault