Cameron, Clegg & Crack Cocaine

I don't really drink alcohol any more – a dismal shandy on special occasions – but when I did it was at my local JD Wetherspoon.

Cheap beer, some of it high quality, good company — many of my neighbours drink there, people I've known for twenty years — capable staff, a soothing fug in Winter, no damn pop music, the occasional game of chess or backgammon, the eccentric Tim Martin railing against the EU in the Wetherspoon magazine.

I live in a poor area of London so the pub attracts its share of ne'er-do-wells. It's close to a prison and a police station so people tend to roll in after being released, or from visiting incarcerated relatives.

My neighbourhood's an 'entertainments centre' i.e. a binge drinking district and a place where people come to purchase illegal drugs, particularly cannabis and crack cocaine.

So, without inviting any into my home, I got to know a few local criminals, drug dealers and crack addicts. It was impossible not to. On the whole, to me, a middle class white man who minds his own business and doesn't take drugs, they were harmless and, in some cases, charming.

The point of this reminiscing? To prove my street cred, of which I have none? No, to examine the economics of crack addiction.

None are capable of holding down a regular job – too chaotic – so they fund their addiction with crime.

Many are physical wrecks — you get that way if money you should spend on food goes on crack — so the notion of them mugging anyone, except for the frailest old lady, is ridiculous. The few old ladies left in my neighbourhood have learned to lock their doors and wait for meals on wheels.

Burglaries are not as lucrative as they once were. Tesco sells a DVD player for £19.95. So where do crack addicts get their cash? A vigorous habit costs several hundred pounds a week to maintain.

The women are prostitutes of course. The less good looking they are, the less they charge, and the more desperate they become. They're sad figures for whom prison is often a blessing. I've never met a male crack-prostitute but they surely exist.

The dole funds some crack cocaine. The pub was always lively on dole day. Lots of people pulling out thin wads of notes from the Post Office and paying off crack-debts run up over the previous two weeks.

But shoplifting's the major source of income. Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's, Tesco and WH Smith keep a small army of crack addicts supplied in my neighbourhood. Or, rather, their customers do — you and me — as the costs are passed on. It's a highly successful public-private partnership.

I'd be sitting with friends, or alone with the paper, and every half-hour or so someone would arrive with something to sell. The bar staff threw them out when they caught them. But they were like King Canute before the incoming tide.

I've been offered everything from sirloin steak to the latest Harry Potter to high-end fountain pens to a widescreen TV which one particularly enterprising crack addict (if only he'd kick the habit he'd end up on Dragons' Den) managed to extract from Currys. No one knows how he did it. It sold in the alley behind the pub.

I see today that Sir Ian Gilmore, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians, has come out in favour of drugs decriminalisation. He's backed by Nicholas Green, chairman of the Bar Council. And just about everyone else who knows anything about the subject and isn't a Daily Mail leader writer.

Rolles pointed out not only that criminalising drug use had exacerbated health problems such as HIV, which can be spread by the use of contaminated needles, but had created a much larger array of secondary harms, including "vast networks of organised crime, endemic violence related to the drug market, corruption of law enforcement and governments, militarised crop eradication programmes (environmental damage, food insecurity, and human displacement), and funding of terrorism and insurgency." Source

Will the politicians finally face down the Daily Mail? Come on Cleggeron. Now's the time to do it before you become wildly unpopular.