The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.

About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.

No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.

It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?

I wish I could be that hopeful.

hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..

Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.

The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?

But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.

I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?

Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?

Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.

Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.

But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.

The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.

UPDATE

As if to prove my point….