Don’t believe that drugs could never blight your life

‘County Lines Codgers”. It’s a great headline. Must be a bunch of oldies supplementing their pensions with a spot of medical waccy baccy redistribution, right?

Three drug dealers with a combined age of 169 sounds like a variation on last year’s film Boundaries, in which Christopher Plummer played a cannabis-dealing grandpa.

Except these men weren’t just selling weed. They were flogging heroin and cocaine in market and spa towns.

County lines refers to the way city drug dealers use children to traffic their merchandise into rural areas. Usually it’s directionless young kids on bikes desperate to belong – even to a gang.

But now we have adults doing the same thing. This week Adrian Tipping, 61, John Kettle, 55, and Anthony Clarke, 53, were all found guilty of conspiracy to supply class A drugs.

Their leader, Nicholas Ward, 32, from West Bromwich, received a nine-year sentence. It emerged the trio supplied more than 80 “customers” in Malvern, Worcestershire, and Ledbury, Herefordshire.

They were mostly paid in drugs. But before decent people shudder and move on, we should pause and consider how drugs are ruining ordinary lives in ordinary towns.

If you are under the illusion that drugs only affect other people, let me recommend the book Mum, Can You Lend Me Twenty Quid?, by former Bath girls’ boarding school teacher Elizabeth Burton-phillips.

It is the most frightening, truthful, courageous account of a middle-class family’s descent into hell – after her handsome, privately educated twin boys turned into lying, cheating, stealing junkies. One, Nick, eventually died. I have met Elizabeth, and it was a deeply humbling experience. She has retrained as a drugs counsellor and set up the DRUGFAM charity.

Elizabeth, who has been made an MBE, speaks at events in the UK and abroad, where audiences are left sobbing. If anyone out there refuses to believe drugs could ever touch them, I suggest they read it and weep.