YOU MIGHT THINK I'M MAD - BUT SHOULD WE MAKE ALL DRUGS LEGAL?

Anybody interested in cutting crime by eighty or ninety per cent? In
making urban streets instantly safe?

In utterly destroying in one masterstroke the livelihood of every
gangster, mugger and ne'er do well in this country?

In reclaiming childhood as a time of safety and innocence?

In emptying our prisons? In cutting by a vast factor the impossible
pressure on our police and social services?

And at the same time, in giving an incalculably better life overnight
to millions of people living in desperate conditions?

Wouldn't make a bad social programme for the average political
manifesto, would it?

But until this week, I doubted if any of our parties would dare even
think about the ballsy, radical move needed to make it possible.

Now, at last, a glimmer of sense has entered the drugs cataclysm that
is quite literally ruining much of life in this country.

The news of high quality heroin becoming available to addicts on the
NHS under David Blunkett's new drugs strategy probably left you cold.
It was one of those news-for-other-people stories that zip by you like
a non-stopping train.

But I would like to think it struck terror and panic into drug barons
and everyone else, from smugglers to petty dealers, who make money out
of supplying drugs.

For imagine what would happen to their rich living if Blunkett's new
thinking were taken to its logical extreme, and all drugs - possibly
even crack - were legal and available free or at low cost.

If every line, every spliff, every wrap, was state supplied from a
state monopoly. Quality assured.

Medically supervised. Available to anyone over 18 who requested them
in an interview with a doctor. And provided on premises licensed and
secured by the state and opened in every town and city.

Sounds insane? It does to everyone at first, until they think about
it.

Then they say it's interesting but a bit on the daring side. Then, as
I've been finding, they tend to conclude that, wacky as it seems, it
could actually work.

Look at it this way. Almost all crime committed today is drug
related.

Almost everyone in prison is in for drugs. Almost every mugger is off
his head and doing it for drug money.

The reason for this mad and dangerous mess is not that drug producers
and suppliers are on some secret mission to undermine society.

It's because there is a market and they want to make a lot of money
with minimal effort. It is part of the human condition to enjoy
mind-altering substances. Always has been - hence the prosperity of
the great, Tory tobacco, brewing and distilling dynasties.

It is equally part of our make-up to try to make money by the easiest
possible means and ignore any paltry risk the law may put in our way.

Hence the prosperity of a tax avoidance industry for the
wealthy.

The extent to which drugs have corroded decent life, attacked the
foundations of society, in this country can not be
exaggerated.

I have been speaking to a social worker whose patch includes housing
estates near Glasgow where a hundred per cent of the adults are on
heroin.

Where two and three-year-olds play outside at night, and, when asked
where their mummy is, say she's at home, but she's high.

It's the same in most inner cities, and in ex-coalmining
areas.

Wherever drugs and the drug business grip an area, the hinterland is
devastated in their wake, too.

The drug users are generally unemployed, but are compelled to spend
all their time and ingenuity securing the next fix. Which means
burgling your house, stealing your wallet, nicking your kid's phone.

But even if local drug centres - supermarkets, if you like - put drug
dealers irrevocably out of business, wouldn't they also create more
hard drug addicts?

Possibly, for a while. But my plan envisages that, while cannabis
would be sold at a reasonable price to take home, the hard stuff could
only be used in highly controlled surroundings - which frankly,
wouldn't be very pleasant, but would be safe.

The new drug centres would erode the glamour, as some see it, of hard
drugs. They would look like a cheerless, dreary hospital.

But the cheapness of the "official" drugs would be so cheap that there
would be no chance of a black market developing for home use.

A few dealers might stick around to service the likes of pop stars and
City bankers, but neither side of that deal poses any great risk to
the rest of us.

The dealers whose customers are the young and the poor are the danger,
and they simply won't stay in business if their only remaining market
is children with pocket money to spend.

HERE'S another important point. Our current assumption is that being
on drugs makes you useless for any kind of proper work.

But that's not true. What really makes you unemployable is that you
are "working" (or more likely nicking) round the clock to get the
money to feed your addiction.

There is actually no reason why plenty of addicts couldn't do a useful
job. Many of the Victorian writers and poets were heroin addicts who
could afford their fix. And you would be amazed by the number of
doctors and lawyers kept going by a steady stream of cocaine and, in
some cases, heroin.

The screams of righteous anguish from some on the silly right about
David Blunkett's sensible new initiative this week were
predictable.

But I hear from another social worker based in London and whose job is
teaching colleagues how to deal with drugs that my "drug supermarket"
idea and others similar to it are already being discussed by some of
this country's leading researchers and academics in the drug field.

"It sounds strange," he told me, "but you know what I long for, having
worked in this for a few years and seen the devastation the current
cat-and-mouse game over drugs is causing?

"I am actually desperate to be out of a job."