Law chief: Get tough on wealthy drug users

MIDDLE-CLASS drug users should not be treated leniently by the courts because they are fuelling “distressing” levels of knife crime among the young, the Lord Chief Justice said yesterday.

Lord Burnett of Maldon said there was a growing recognition that law enforcement should focus not just on suppliers but also that users “should be looked at in a less benign way”.

He said Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, was “absolutely right” that affluent drug users “should bear very much in mind the huge social damage that they are doing further down the chain”. He told his annual press conference: “She had in mind all the county lines problems that we have where particularly young vulnerable kids are being used to run drugs all over the country.”

Asked if he believed the courts should take a “less benign” approach to middle-class users, Lord Burnett said: “It’s important to look at all cases individually, but if ever it was thought, for example, that affluent people caught with class A drugs should be viewed as really not very serious offenders, I certainly don’t agree with that.”

Lord Burnett, the most senior judge in England and Wales, expressed concern at the rise in knife crime, up 16 per cent in a year and at its highest level for eight years. He was particularly worried that carrying a knife had become a habit for some young people.

He said: “There’s an increasing number of knife cases coming through our courts. A distressingly large proportion of these cases involve young people or children. We as a society have to come to terms with the fact that increasing numbers of people, particularly young people, are carrying knives as a matter of habit.

“There’s increasing violence centring around drug trafficking, which is another underlying problem which society has got to grapple with.”

Cocaine use among wealthier households is said to be at its highest in nearly a decade, with 3.4 per cent of 16- to 59-year-olds in households earning more than £50,000 saying they had taken the drug in the past year.

Asked about The Daily Telegraph’s campaign for a legal duty of care on the social media firms to combat abuse and online harms, Lord Burnett said that any such move would have to be global.

He said: “It seems to me that regulation of social media is something that is almost too big for a single country to deal with because so much of the social media networks are international by nature. My instinct is that there needs to be a global response to some of the problems that have resulted… rather than simply a domestic one.”

He said judges had been subjected to abuse online but were not unique, noting that the abuse of politicians was “utterly unbelievable”.

“Many people seem to think it doesn’t matter what you say or write on social media,” he said. “There seems to be a tendency, particularly among those who like to shout a lot, to resort to social media without any thought.”

Social media allowed people to hide behind an anonymous identity to do “all sorts of harmful and mischievous things, that can include undermining the rule of law,” he said.

‘Middle-class users should bear in mind the huge social damage they are doing further down the chain’