WAR AGAINST HEROIN IS A BATTLE IRELAND CAN WIN

In 1839 the Chinese official, Lin Zexu, wrote the following words to Queen
Victoria: "Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium
for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it;
certainly your honourable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused."

Lin's letter was a vain attempt to persuade Her Majesty's government to
call a halt to the opium trade which was having a devastating effect upon
growing numbers of the Chinese population.

Following the conquest of large parts of India, the British invested
massively in the manufacture and distribution of opium and imported it into
China as a way of balancing its trade with that country. Beginning with 200
chests of opium in 1729, by 1838 the number had reached 40,000.

The following year, Lin, having won the backing of his government, decided
to act. He hit the smugglers hard. He had the Portuguese drive the British
out of Macau which had been used as a point of entry into China. He put
under lock and key the British opium supplies in China.

A British expeditionary force was sent to China and Lin's country was duly
pummelled into submission. The opium routes were reopened, Hong Kong was
given to the British as a new conduit for the trade, and for good measure
the Chinese had to pay the British the cost of sending the expeditionary
force in the first place. This was one of the most humiliating defeats ever
inflicted on China by a foreign power.

It was followed by a second opium war which extracted from the Chinese more
concessions.

Opium was already being used in China before the British arrived, but
thanks to them, by the end of the 19th century an estimated 10% of the
population were using the drug with roughly a third of that number, or 15m
people, addicted.

Prior to Lin's efforts to close down the opium trade there were efforts
made to legalise the drug. Those in favour of legalisation pointed out that
attempts made earlier in the century to wipe out opium had failed. The
problem was too widespread, they said. Officials were too easily bribed.
The major dealers could not be traced. There were too many smugglers and
too long a coastline.

If this argument sounds familiar, it should. Ireland's growing heroin
problem - the modern equivalent of opium - is giving rise to a
pro-legalisation lobby in this country. Its arguments are identical to
those used in China more than 160 years ago and they have been given added
impetus by the recent spate of heroin-related deaths.

The Chinese experience should help us to put our own problems into
perspective. If Ireland had a heroin problem as grave as the opium epidemic
faced by China a century ago, it would have not 13,000 addicts as is
currently estimated, but 100,000, plus an additional 250,000 users. Dwell
on those figures for a moment. Think of the amount of death, degradation
and heartache contained in them.

No doubt if the problem were as bad as this, the call to legalise heroin in
Ireland would be nigh irresistible. We would conclude that heroin use was
so deeply embedded in the culture, that the best we could hope for would be
a reduction in the drug-related death rate, and maybe a long, slow process
of educating people out of its use.

Under no circumstances should we go down this path, nor do we need to,
because the legalisers are wrong - heroin can be defeated. Other countries
have successfully done so. So can we.

Starting out with a far greater drug problem than anything faced by
Ireland, China had all but eradicated opium use by the middle of the last
century. It did so by going after the supply just as Lin did more than 100
years earlier.

Other east Asian countries met with similar success, again by targeting
suppliers. To this day drug traffickers in countries such as Singapore face
the death penalty. Since our horror of such punishment exceeds our horror
of the drug problem, we cannot employ those methods here - but we can copy
Sweden.

That country experimented with legalisation in the 1960s. Within a year of
beginning the experiment, the number of addicts doubled. Under public
pressure the government backtracked and put in place strict, well-enforced
anti-drugs measures which we would do well to emulate in this country.

Tackling drugs is as much a question of will as it is a matter of putting
in place the right policies. The will must be there to tackle both the
supply and the demand side of the problem. In Ireland we lack that and,
what's worse, we are beginning to listen to "solutions" put forward by the
left - namely needle exchange programmes, injecting rooms and heroin on
prescription.

People from the left are the last we should listen to because it is they
who helped visit this problem on us in the first place.

In the 1960s, members of the radical left, who had already been using drugs
for decades, managed to persuade society that certain drugs presented all
kinds of creative, mind-expanding possibilities. Second, by attacking the
family, tradition, religion, and most sources of authority, they increased
levels of social alienation by a quantum factor.

It is especially those who have no family, no religion, and are
disconnected from traditional ways of life who are most likely to turn to
drugs for escape.

If, on top of this, the left succeed in legalising drugs, they will have
succeeded in normalising their use. Once that is accomplished, Lady Heroin
will have us in her embrace forever.