HEROIN, CRIME AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

I was 75 on Saturday, the 3rd June. It turned out a much happier
birthday than I had expected. My grandson died of a heroin overdose in
April. An addict for seven years, he survived his first suicide
attempt on the 28th February. His eventual painful demise did not
merit even a fleeting reference in the news media. But then, sure why
would it? Joe Stalin once described a single death as tragic but a
million deaths as a mere statistic.

Some eighty young people succumb to heroin annually and to put it
bluntly, nobody in authority gives a tuppenny damn about them. That's
no surprise either. After all, they are of the labouring classes, and
so, in the eyes of smug, condescending, affluent Dublin 2000, they are
all highly expendable.

Occasionally, a well-heeled youngster dies at a rave from an E tablet
and Official Ireland goes berserk. Six or seven workers' kids are
interred into early graves every month and nobody cares, except their
families.

When I awoke on Saturday 3rd, I was depressed and melancholy. By
mid-afternoon I was truly elated. I heard on a radio news bulletin of
the shooting dead of Derek Dunne. I have two regrets about his
passing. Firstly, it didn't come early enough. Secondly, why oh why
was that vile, malevolent degenerate permitted to enjoy the luxury of
such a merciful dispatch?

To the namby-pamby libertarians who claim decriminalisation is the
only solution, I say you are talking absolute bunkum. Take Amsterdam -
toleration of narcotics has turned that city into a septic sewer of
filth, degradation and a comfortable sanctuary for big time
international drug dealers.

Idiot pseudo intellectuals assert that the anti-drugs war is lost. How
the blazes could it be over when it never started? The only certain
way to choke off the supply of heroin is to - quite literally - choke
the suppliers! I guarantee that hanging for heroin dealing would
transform the situation beyond recognition. It works in Indonesia,
Malaysia, Singapore and many other countries; so why not here?

Criminals don't give a fig about the CAB. or lengthy prison sentences.
What would put the fear of God into them is the realisation that
involvement with the sale or supply of heroin leads to certain death
on the gallows. If it requires constitutional change, a declaration of
a state of emergency or military courts to achieve this, then so be
it. All of these things have been done before to facilitate
establishment imperatives. I can already anticipate cries of foul play
from whingy "criminal" lawyers who for decades, have had their own
sumptuous standard of living sustained by representing vicious vermin,
usually at public expense.

Allegations of "draconian" are ritually chanted by the wigs and
quills. I have never heard any expression of concern from that
profession for the plight of young men and women in the deadly grip of
drug addiction; their health utterly destroyed, turning to crime and
prostitution to bankroll suppliers, buying a little more time before
the inevitable.

Drug dealing is a social cancer which can only be eradicated by
capital punishment. I'm not advocating a complete reinstatement of
hanging - I wrote to various Justice ministers from General Sean
McEoin to Oscar Traynor putting forward the case for total abolition,
between 1948 and 1961. It is now my unshakeable belief that heroin
dealers and their contract murderers belong to a special category.
They are irredeemably rotten to the very core of their being and can
only be rehabilitated within the strangling confines of a hangman's
noose.

I believe in the interests of public health and hygiene, the carcass
of Derek Dunne should not enter this republic. Aviation workers,
funeral undertakers, and clergy ought to boycott this gross obscenity
on grounds of moral decency. He was an obnoxious piece of humanoid
sewage. In death, all that remains is a hazardous pile of excremental
carrion.

It's time this nation got up off its knees and used democratic power
to send a forceful (though belated) wakeup call to long slumbering
politicians, judiciary and police, just four years after valiant
Veronica Guerin died in vain. Derek Dunne was Satan incarnate. May his
poisonous and malignant soul suffer excruciating and tortuous agony in
the roasting bowels of eternal Hell.

Mervyn Crampton
Whitehall
Dublin 9