TAKE THE WAR ON DRUGS TO THE POPPY FIELDS

Heroin isn't a snob. Nor, to be strictly accurate, is it an inverted
snob. Here at least it cannot be faulted. Class As are impressively
classless; heroin is happy to enter your bloodstream whatever your
bloodline. Ask any news junkie who has overdosed on recent stories:
an oh-so-nicely-brought-up young woman from a Suffolk village is
strangled; Pete Doherty leaves a flat after a young man has fallen to
his death; grannies are battered, girls killed in drive-by shootings,
families destroyed. Thank heroin.

The left, invoking Trainspotting, blames addiction on poverty; the
right, invoking Iain Duncan Smith, on social breakdown. Such
self-serving analysis hardly helps the five Ipswich women murdered
after addiction propelled them to prostitution. Gemma Adams hailed
from one of those apparently prosperous, two-parent homes the BBC
likes to hold up on budget day as insufferably middle class; yet
drugs from the Khyber Pass led her down Sir Alf Ramsey Way to a
psycho she otherwise might never have met. A fondness for smack
produces the strangest bedfellows.

Supposedly socially concerned commentators have been no more
insightful than politicos about these stomach-churning
strangulations. The killer has already matched Jack the Ripper's vile
tally, yet columnistas squabble over whether victims should be termed
'working girls' or the equally euphemistic 'sex workers'. Can't we
give sophistry a night off and agree victims are human beings? The
real question is how we can stop other cracked lives from breaking?

Drugs policy, unlike the drugs, offers no quick fix, but there is
hope: 80 per cent of heroin here is from Afghanistan. We now lead
European peace-keeping efforts there. One thing the EU excels at is
food mountains, so why not stock-pile heroin hills?

Alas, we are so keen to keep farmers onside and off the Taliban,
soldiers are told to ignore poppy fields. Sure, America's preferred
alternative - a kind of wistful, guilt-induced afterthought - of
napalming pretty well the entire country won't win many hearts or
minds. But there is a third way. Why not buy heroin from farmers? Or
give grants to grow other crops, perhaps even - and this is really
radical - food. And if farmers still sow fields of poison, bomb the
buggers. More than social engineering or tax tinkering back home,
this would transform lives. For most British crime comes back to drugs.

Yet for all the Home Secretary's hoary headline-chasing crime
crackdowns, does he even have an anti-drugs strategy worthy of the
name? Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, calculates
New Labour has made over 3,000 pastimes illegal, from setting off a
nuclear bomb to importing Polish potatoes to selling grey squirrels.
Acts weighing more than two John Prescotts have been passed, some of
which attack our democracy, such as our right to protest. But we
don't feel safer as the cause of crime - drugs - is tossed into the
'too hard' basket.

Labour's is an airy-fairy authoritarianism. Imagine the effect on
crime if ministers tried three things: cutting the heroin supply,
providing compulsory rehabilitation for every addict in prison and
instigating more police patrols. That is the way to stop the greatest
serial killer of all.

Then we would all score. Until then, the heartbreaking harvest from
the poppy fields of Helmand Province will continue to be reaped. In
the morgues of a Suffolk town.