Dinner party cocaine users ‘should feel bad’ about stabbings
MIDDLE-CLASS cocaine users who take the drug at dinner parties should feel responsible for rising levels of teenage violence and murders in inner cities, the Justice Secretary has said.
David Gauke said the drugs trade was “strongly linked” to violent crime, as he took aim at people who take the class A drug in their homes. He said they were damaging “the fabric of our society” by buying illegal drugs, and that they should feel guilty when they read reports of teenagers being stabbed on London streets.
Mr Gauke’s intervention comes after Simon Kempton, the deputy treasurer of the Police Federation, blamed the wealthy for creating the demand for cocaine, while Ben Wallace, the security minister, warned that the UK was “fast becoming the biggest consumer” of the drug in Europe.
Mr Gauke agreed it was not just street gangs who needed to be targeted in the crackdown on drugs: “The violent crime that we see, inside and outside prison, is strongly linked to the drugs trade.”
Recent statistics showed knife crime soared by almost a quarter last year. The police recorded just under 40,000 offences involving a knife in the year ending in December, up 22 per cent on 2016.
A spate of knife murders in recent months has also led to calls for a rethink on how police are using controversial stop and search powers.
Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner, warned earlier this month that middle-class children were being used to traffic drugs by gangs spreading their networks into “most towns of substantial size”.
Mr Gauke has previously said drug smuggling was so prevalent in prisons that criminals can order “Deliveroostyle” deliveries of illegal substances direct to their cells. He said yesterday criminals were developing increasingly sophisticated methods of getting drugs into prison.