COOL IF YOU ARE RICH, CATASTROPHIC IF POOR; DRUGS FURTHER DEEPEN THE CLASS
DIVIDE

Across my local park, beyond the allotments, there stands a fairy
castle. Or it looks that way, on summer evenings, with the light
glinting off its cream battlements and tiny spires.

For years, I wondered vaguely what it was - an aristocratic
pleasure-dome, perhaps, marooned in south-west London suburbia? A
folly? Some half-forgotten palace for the lesser queens? Not so far
wrong; I eventually realised it must be the Priory, that now-famous
clinic for the relief of addicted aristocrats, celebrities and the
merely rich.

Inside, it doesn't have the silk tapestries or gorgeous brocades that
its silhouette suggests. It is just a private hospital for people with
a range of disorders, from serious depression to drug addiction; a
post-pleasure palace, at most.

But the clientele is flash - part Knightsbridge, part Groucho Club -
and its entrance drive is as used to intrusive photographers as Sophie
herself. In some circles, having spent a few weeks at the Priory is
like letting drop that you February'd in Antigua.

Very close to the Priory, there are other signs of the drug culture.
There are estate doorways with needles in them; kids selling UKP20
hits of heroin; the giveaway little islands of broken glass at regular
intervals on the pavements where cars were violated and had their
radios ripped out. Throughout London, and every other city, and now
through the rest of the country too, there is an underclass drugs
economy, based on schools, estates and prisons.

And never the twain shall meet - the media-friendly junkies of the
Priory and the media-despised users in the streets. If you are rich,
fashionable and young, then using cocaine is cool and acceptable.
Heroin isn't yet, but things are creeping that way. If you have the
money to buy good gear, and you don't have to share dirty needles,
then you can maintain your habit for years without disaster.

Coke is easily available throughout Medialand. Tom Parker-Bowles is,
in his world, just an ordinary lad with ordinary habits. And if the
reporters who stung Lawrence Dallaglio or the Heartbeat actor were at
all surprised, still less shocked, by what they heard, I'm a nun.

The market which supplies heroin, cocaine, Ecstacy and cannabis in
Britain is almost as well organised as our great supermarkets - a
shadowy mimicry of global consumer capitalism at its most confident
and successful.

Like the supermarkets, the drugs market is controlled by a small
number of very rich families. The heroin trade is dominated by certain
Turkish families living in north-west London, not so very far from the
Priory (though you'd never see any of the rich London Turks fall low
enough to need to check in). The cocaine trade is still, of course,
dominated by the Colombian families, linked by couriers to their
contacts among the 60,000 Colombians living here.

Like the supermarkets, they transport their produce efficiently round
the world, paying little to the local growers in South America or
Kashmir and making huge mark-ups by the time the goods are repackaged
for the consumer. Most of the mark-up goes to some of the most violent
and unpleasant people on the earth, from right-wing paramilitaries in
South America to resting terrorists in Northern Ireland.

In one respect, of course, the drugs market is much better-organised
than Sainsbury's or Tesco - it has many more outlets, and more staff
too. It can recruit new consumers inside schools. Its street-to-street
and door-to-door delivery system is second to none. On peripheral
estates (peripheral in every sense), the drugs couriers are said to be
quicker than the pizza delivery boys. And, according to a Guardian
report from Bradford's Buttershaw estate, the drugs trade even has
parents of young addicts chauffeuring them direct to dealers to avoid
the violence and danger of the street-corner dealers.

And, in terms of pure market philosophy, they have the ideal product
to sell - it costs next to nothing to make; you can sell at a high
price; people don't get bored of it; they keep coming back.
Commercially, the heroin and cocaine families have discovered the
philosopher's stone - they can turn mud to gold. So the more drugs
seized, the more drugs appear on the streets. Even Customs and Excise
don't think their dramatically increased seizures represent a rising
proportion of the drugs entering the country.

Short of outright legalisation of everything, and state-subsidised
heroin from Post Offices, or the complete suspension of civil
liberties, there is no way this trade can be stopped. It would be like
sauntering into Yukon in the early years of the century and asking the
folks to refrain from digging up the gold because it was ruining the
scenery.

Everyone is happy. Everyone, that is, except the families and victims
of the young users among what used to be called the working class.
For, like so much else in Britain, this is still a class matter. The
real disaster of heroin and cocaine is the crime, prostitution,
worklessness and apathy it engenders among the lowest-paid and least
employed people in the country.

They get the prison sentences, the jobs refused. Their neighbours get
the broken-into cars, the hopes for their children blighted. No Priory
for any of them. If that sounds a little melodramatic, consider the
official figures, which are almost certainly underestimates. Among
unemployed people aged between 16 and 29, drug use is running at
around 45 per cent. It's slightly more than that for the homeless. And
around a quarter of schoolchildren aged 14 and 15 are said to have
taken drugs in the past year.

Overall, there are said to be up to 200,000 people in Britain with a
'serious' drug problem, and it costs around UKP20,000 - after tax,
naturally - to feed an average heroin or cocaine habit. The link with
crime is therefore obvious, and, surprise surprise, a Home Office
study showed that 61 per cent of people arrested tested positive for
at least one illegal drug. One survey of 664 addicts found they
committed a staggering 70,000 offences over a three-month period.

This is the underworld above which the drug-tolerant metropolitan
media world pirouettes and pouts so gracelessly. There's a phrase for
what is happening - 'Trahison des clercs', or treason of the
intellectuals, who glamorise drugs because they are too vain and
stupid to understand what is really happening out on the
unfashionable, hidden-away ghettos and estates of this country.
Trainspotting, which explained why people take heroin with admirable
honesty, and didn't glamorise it, catapulted its author, Irvine Welsh,
into the giggly, cooing lap of Medialand. What a card; what a hard
man; what a Caledonian scream! Will Self, who is an OK-ish novelist,
achieved fame by fixing himself up in John Major's aeroplane. And
these are only two bristly peaks in a vast range of semi-celebrities
whose use of drugs has brought them infatuated attention.

It's cool to use drugs. It's fine to use drugs. Singers do heroin.
Supermodels do heroin. Journalists do cocaine. Rugby players,
footballers, advertising gurus ... hey, everyone's doing it. Actually,
everyone isn't doing it - that figure of 200,000 is a tiny proportion
of the British, confined mostly to a few rich, high-profile people at
the top and to the poor and young at the bottom, but it suits the coke
culture to pretend otherwise. The Government is concentrating now on
hard drugs and treatment, rather than banging up dope users in
drug-infested jails. The really radical option of decriminalisation is
judged by the vast majority of voters to be an experiment too far.

But what possible chance do Jack Straw and Keith Hellawell, the 'drugs
tsar' who has all the street cred of Barbie's Ken, have against all
this glittery, self-obsessed and vain cavalcade of drug-using
celebrity? None at all. However earnestly and intelligently the
Government funds treatment and propaganda against drugs, the combined
might of the media, the music and film industry and sport is so much
greater. But the rich and the lucky, the talented and the articulate,
aristocrats with trust funds or leather-trousered filmmakers, have a
duty to the rest of the country, and the worst-off in particular,
which goes beyond paying taxes.

They have a duty - how else can I put it? - to set an example, to give
leadership, to accept the responsibility that privilege brings. But
when it comes to drugs the cultural lite, for the buzz and the cool,
is betraying the young and the poor. As in the days of fairy castles,
the right word is treason.