We really feel sorry for all the poor bastards using brown and stone in Hackney (‘Crackney’ to some), Nottingham and Staffordshire. Elsewhere in the magazine, we have a piece on the mandatory drug testing pilot that’s going on in these areas. Now they’re adding to the potential grief users will get when nicked in these areas by piloting Drug Abstinence and Drug Requirement Orders. We warned you about these things a number of issues ago, but no harm in giving you the details again. Especially if you have the misfortune to live in the pilot areas. The idea behind the new orders, according to the Home Office, is to give users ‘help’ to stay off drugs.

Here’s how this ‘help’ will work. If you get nicked for what they’re calling ‘trigger offences’ – mainly theft, burglary, robbery and possession or supply of Class A drugs – and you get a positive drugs test for heroin or cocaine then you are a candidate for one of these two new community sentences. Drug Abstinence Orders are for those who the court think will ‘benefit from continued monitoring of their drug misuse, but where their offending does not justify any other community order being issued’. Translated, this probably means shoplifters and other less ‘naughty’ offenders. Drug Abstinence Requirements, on the other hand, will be attached to community sentences. In other words, make sure you’re drug free down the carwash or doing some old lady’s garden on c.s. If you get one of these, you’re probably teetering on the edge of being banged up (again). Each of these orders can last for 6 months to 3 years, and you’ll be tested twice a week for the first 13 weeks, which can be reduced to once a week if probation think you’re being a good girl or boy. If the pilots are ‘successful’, and believe me they will be once they’ve been evaluated by the Home Office’s tame academics, then all the rest of the country will get these blessings. There was even a rumour before Xmas that Bolton was being looked at as a pilot site. Luckily, it was only a rumour

Again, anyone who thinks Blunkett is a liberal on drugs compared to Jack Straw, just because he sounds soft on draw should watch what’s really happening . And anyone who puts their hands up for one of these wants their heads testing, not their piss. It’s the fastest route to nick we know of. What people like Nurse Ratchet (see this issue) and other well meaning professionals need to understand is that the drugs war is a war on the socially excluded. Things like drug testing of offenders, these latest orders and all the other bollocks, are about policing the excluded and locking them up, not for their original offences but for their lifestyles. It’s the perfect way of controlling a population that’s no longer wanted. Put half of them in jail and the rest on community sentences with drug testing attached. You can then monitor them and, if they misbehave again, send them to join the rest.