Now Playing: the Moderator
Topic: News Views
WITH THE RECENT MURDER of five drug-addicted street prostitutes in Ipswich, the papers are full of letters on the issue of drugs.
These comments from today’s Daily Mirror:—
The Ipswich killer is a piece of trash who will be caught anyway bit I regard him as the secondary killer.
The people who took these girls’ lives in the first place are the scum who deal drugs.
They have been slowly destroying our country in ways that Hitler or al-Qaeda could only have dreamt of.
Put resources into stopping them before they finish the job.
Says Ian Crichton of Birmingham.
Heroin should be made available on the NHS which would curb drug dealing and prostitution. It’s time for a more enlightened approach.
— E Cosby, Leeds
We need to adopt a realistic attitude towards prostitution — I suggest regulating it as the Dutch and Scandinavians do.
Drug addiction is also a nightmare but trying to stamp it out will not work. We must seek to lessen its malignant influence by licensing drugs. Poverty too leads to degradation and despair.
Perhaps these deaths will jolt enough people into realizing something must be done.
— David Sawtell, Tydd St Giles, Cambridgeshire.
— Yes, but what?
The tabloids have not always been so open-minded regarding drugs as they are today.
But in a society where most people have a son or daughter, niece or nephew or at least know someone whose family has been blighted this way, it becomes more and more difficult merely to write off addicts as “scum”.
There are too many of us about nowadays — and I don’t say this with pride — to ignore this situation. Addiction to hard drugs crops up e.g. on TV talk shows incidental to the main subject so frequently it suggests to me that the Government’s figures, a quarter of a million supposed heroin addicts in a population of 60 million, are wildly underestimated.
There’s no point my demanding that someone ought to do something because I know they won’t. The problem will only get worse and society, like an already iceberg-hit Titanic, will continue to creak and groan and sigh in all its agonies. I believe our society is literally falling apart.
One day soon, just like the legendary boat, our civilized society will suddenly sink without a trace.
We’ll be left in anarchy and chaos, wondering how we managed to go so badly wrong.
