CRACK ALLEY

Has Brixton's Soft Line On Soft Drugs Backfired?

There's a place under a yellow sign on Coldharbour Lane -- Brixton readers
may know it all too well -- where it used to be alarmingly easy to buy
crack cocaine. Up to 30 dealers would gather on the street there each night
with lumps of the stuff wrapped up in cellophane in their mouths and down
their gullets. For the right price they would regurgitate it, and police
seldom got in the way.

There are fewer dealers now, under the yellow sign at least. On Wednesday
night the managers of Living, an impeccably bourgeois dive bar across the
street, could spot a handful at most. "There seem to have been more police
raids in the last few weeks and a lot of them have been dislodged," the
Living people said. "The police have definitely been more active."

If this were the whole story to be told about Brixton's new drugs rules it
would be a story with a very happy ending; happy for Lambeth Police
Commander Brian Paddick, who "decriminalised" cannabis on his patch six
months ago to free up officers for the more dangerous war on crack and
heroin; happy for Brixton's image as both hip and safe; and happiest of all
for British potheads, who would no longer have to go to Amsterdam to buy
and roll up and smoke in peace.

But it isn't the whole story. Coldharbour Lane is the engine of Brixton and
the urban laboratory where this Government hopes to find a more workable
drugs policy. Commander Paddick's superiors want the rest of London to
follow Brixton's lead and stop making arrests for cannabis possession. But
the head of the Police Federation, speaking for the force's rank and file,
has told MPs that the Brixton experiment is fuelling more hard-drug dealing
and drug-related crime, not less. It's a view that most voices on the
street end up supporting, whether they mean to or not.

In an unscientific but thorough crawl of Coldharbour Lane's pubs and clubs
I heard evidence at almost every turn of an upturn in petty crime (much of
it unreported), in the number of hardened addicts and dealers causing it,
and in the number of unsuspecting middle-classniks falling victim to it.

For example, I met Sarah, 28, Louisa, 30, and Katherine, 26, living it up
at Living after a day at work at a market research company round the
corner. "Where were the police when we needed them?" they asked the moment
the subject of drugs and crime was raised. They described being robbed of
their handbags outside Brixton Tube station after a night out last month.
Then they said: "It was our fault for not being alert enough, so don't
print that bit about the police. It was a joke."

Oddly, it didn't seem that funny. Nor did Sarah's admission that she no
longer brings a wallet to work -- only a change purse, to limit what can be
grabbed. For the same reason none of them uses outdoor cash dispensers when
in Brixton.

They're all fond of Brixton, but they don't live here. They like it for a
drink after work -- but since the handbag incident, Clapham wins for a
night out.

This is exactly what Neil Kindness doesn't want to hear. He manages the
Dogstar, a bar and music venue at the east end of Coldharbour Lane that
launched Fatboy Slim. "We're very aware that 'nice people' won't come here
if they feel they are going to be mugged," he says.

For now, business is good, and not just because of the Dogstar's music.
Kindness readily admits that since the introduction of Commander Paddick's
new rules on cannabis he has fielded an influx of well-bred youth from
elsewhere in London, especially Westminster, which recently bucked the
trend towards decriminalisation by announcing a zero-tolerance policy on
all drugs, including soft ones.

"We get a lot of affluent kids who could ruin their careers by getting
caught in Westminster," he says. "They come in here and say 'it's Lambeth,
it's legal'."

The trouble is, it's not. The new rules mean that minor-league users are
not arrested, but police can still take names and confiscate drugs, and
Dogstar staff are under orders to put out lit joints. This is still
required by law (indeed, at Living, users are asked to leave) -- and good
for business. "The last thing we want is a lot of people getting spliffed
up in our bars because beer consumption goes down," Kindness explains.

He insists that Brixton's new visitors are increasingly vulnerable to the
"scumbags" (the term seems to have semi-official status) who use and deal
in heroin and crack. "During the day we're getting more people coming in
trying to use our toilets to shoot up, and more general nutters cracked or
smacked off their faces trying to rob our pool table. It never used to be
like this. There's been a definite upturn in predatory street crime."

Such as? Kindness calls over two of his barmen, Christophe Malak and Robert
Olejniczak, both in their twenties, both from Poland, both looking
apprehensive, both with good reason. Malak was robbed at knifepoint on his
way home from work on Tuesday night. Olejniczak lost cash, a mobile, his
consciousness and several teeth when he was hit with a brick late last year.

They try to be phlegmatic about it. "I think it was always like this in
Brixton," Malak says. But what should be done? "There should probably be
more police on the streets, especially at weekends," Olejniczak says. "Or
they could instal alarm buttons in busy public places, like we have in
Gdansk." Kindness has decided not to wait. Taxis now take his staff home
after work as a matter of company policy.

There are two very divergent visions of Brixton's future. In the more
optimistic one the place that shook Thatcherism to its foundations with the
riots of 1981 becomes London's trendiest 'burb; a blend of northern
European liberalism and Giuliani's Manhattan in which a friendly and mildly
subversive cannabis culture is protected from the ravages of hard drugs
with the kind of tough but targeted policing Amsterdam never achieved.

At the other end of the range of predictions lurks apocalypse: the SW4
no-go zone, where decriminalised cannabis leads headlong to decriminalised
crime. This is what Fred Broughton, of the Police Federation, and
businessmen like Neil Kindness fear. "I sometimes wonder if the street
criminals are trying to use the drug-dealer model and commit so many crimes
that police step back as they did from the dealers," Kindness says. "It's
as if the criminal underworld has realised the power of mob rule."

The good news is that such anxieties are almost certainly overblown.
Compared with the rest of South London, Brixton has a vibrance that
everyone who lives there knows is its best asset. Its profile is also too
high for central government to allow a descent into anarchy, and its
history too violent for old-timers to be bothered by a rash of muggings.
"It was pretty heavy in the Eighties," says David Jane, an artist and
regular at the Prince Albert pub on Coldharbour Lane who moved to Brixton
23 years ago. "There's always been risk here, but the new drugs rules
should mean everything calms down. I think it's already more relaxed."

Even Sarah, Louisa and Katherine, the Living trio, insist that despite
their own experiences Brixton is growing safer, and on one score at least
the data backs them up. According to a recent local survey just 8 per cent
of Brixtonians consider police harassment -- a prime cause of the 1981
riots -- still to be a serious issue.

Yet there is bad news, too. Street crime is so much a part of Brixton life
that locals have all but surrendered to it. The Living trio never reported
the loss of their handbags. Adam, an employee at the same bar, was burgled
six times before he moved to another neighbourhood. And the new drugs rules
have failed even to satisfy committed smokers.

"It's crazy," says Steve MacLeod, 27, who once lived for six months in The
Hague. "People like me who haven't lived here long enough to have a regular
dealer still have to go down dark alleys to buy spliff, and we risk being
robbed in the process. In Holland I could go to a commercial outlet and get
an ounce of whatever blend I wanted and be sure I'd get it, not an ounce of
cigarette butts wrapped in plastic. Now wouldn't that be wonderful?"