I ALWAYS love reading the special articles in daily newspapers, rather than obtain my total education from events broadcast on television, as unfortunately many do.
Occasionally I come across some special snippets in newspapers that I believe others should be made aware of, like a recent column by Daily Telegraph commentator Miranda Devine.
Following is what she had to say about the relationship between crime and drugs.
As a passionate anti-drugs campaigner who cares about our future generations, I believe she is right in her assessment.
“And if it’s not the crims shooting each other, it’s cops shooting violent, uncontrollable young men in the grip of drug-induced psychoses, typically from methamphetamines,” she wrote.
“What the incidents have in common is drugs. On the one hand we have criminals – whether bikie gangs or Middle Eastern crime gangs – fighting a turf war for the lucrative illegal drugs market.
“On the other hand we have those unfortunate victims of the drugs market, both the users suffering a psychotic breakdown in which they become a danger to the public and the police who have to risk their lives to stop them.
“Into the middle of this social disaster rides the drug legalisation crowd, to make everything much worse.
“Pushed along by St Vincent’s Hospital’s irrepressible Dr Alex Wodak, along with such luminaries as our new Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, a think tank called Australia 21 released a report this month urging politicians to decriminalise illegal drugs because the war on drugs has been a failure.
“The problem is not that the war on drugs has failed; it is that we have surrendered our first line of defence to the criminals.
“We’ve made it as easy for drug importers and gun-runners as we did for people smugglers.”
Warren Woodley
Tamworth
