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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Crack Alley
Giles Whittell The Times
Friday 25 Jan 2002 Has Brixton's soft line on soft drugs backfired? There's a place under a yellow sign on Coldharbour Lane - Brixton readers may know it all too well - where it used to be alarmingly easy to buy crack cocaine. Up to 30 dealers would gather on the street there each night with lumps of the stuff wrapped up in cellophane in their mouths and down their gullets. For the right price they would regurgitate it, and police seldom got in the way. There are fewer dealers now, under the yellow sign at least. On Wednesday night the managers of Living, an impeccably bourgeois dive bar across the street, could spot a handful at most. "There seem to have been more police raids in the last few weeks and a lot of them have been dislodged," the Living people said. "The police have definitely been more active." If this were the whole story to be told about Brixton's new drugs rules it would be a story with a very happy ending; happy for Lambeth Police Commander Brian Paddick, who "decriminalised" cannabis on his patch six months ago to free up officers for the more dangerous war on crack and heroin; happy for Brixton's image as both hip and safe; and happiest of all for British potheads, who would no longer have to go to Amsterdam to buy and roll up and smoke in peace. But it isn't the whole story. Coldharbour Lane is the engine of Brixton and the urban laboratory where this Government hopes to find a more workable drugs policy. Commander Paddick's superiors want the rest of London to follow Brixton's lead and stop making arrests for cannabis possession. But the head of the Police Federation, speaking for the force's rank and file, has told MPs that the Brixton experiment is fuelling more hard-drug dealing and drug- related crime, not less. It's a view that most voices on the street end up supporting, whether they mean to or not. In an unscientific but thorough crawl of Coldharbour Lane's pubs and clubs I heard evidence at almost every turn of an upturn in petty crime (much of it unreported), in the number of hardened addicts and dealers causing it, and in the number of unsuspecting middle-classniks falling victim to it. For example, I met Sarah, 28, Louisa, 30, and Katherine, 26, living it up at Living after a day at work at a market research company round the corner. "Where were the police when we needed them?" they asked the moment the subject of drugs and crime was raised. They described being robbed of their handbags outside Brixton Tube station after a night out last month. Then they said: "It was our fault for not being alert enough, so don't print that bit about the police. It was a joke." Oddly, it didn't seem that funny. Nor did Sarah's admission that she no longer brings a wallet to work - only a change purse, to limit what can be grabbed. For the same reason none of them uses outdoor cash dispensers when in Brixton. They're all fond of Brixton, but they don't live here. They like it for a drink after work - but since the handbag incident, Clapham wins for a night out. This is exactly what Neil Kindness doesn't want to hear. He manages the Dogstar, a bar and music venue at the east end of Coldharbour Lane that launched Fatboy Slim. "We're very aware that 'nice people' won't come here if they feel they are going to be mugged," he says. For now, business is good, and not just because of the Dogstar's music. Kindness readily admits that since the introduction of Commander Paddick's new rules on cannabis he has fielded an influx of well-bred youth from elsewhere in London, especially Westminster, which recently bucked the trend towards decriminalisation by announcing a zero- tolerance policy on all drugs, including soft ones. "We get a lot of affluent kids who could ruin their careers by getting caught in Westminster," he says. "They come in here and say 'it's Lambeth, it's legal'." The trouble is, it's not. The new rules mean that minor- league users are not arrested, but police can still take names and confiscate drugs, and Dogstar staff are under orders to put out lit joints. This is still required by law (indeed, at Living, users are asked to leave) - and good for business. "The last thing we want is a lot of people getting spliffed up in our bars because beer consumption goes down," Kindness explains. He insists that Brixton's new visitors are increasingly vulnerable to the "scumbags" (the term seems to have semi- official status) who use and deal in heroin and crack. "During the day we're getting more people coming in trying to use our toilets to shoot up, and more general nutters cracked or smacked off their faces trying to rob our pool table. It never used to be like this. There's been a definite upturn in predatory street crime." Such as? Kindness calls over two of his barmen, Christophe Malak and Robert Olejniczak, both in their twenties, both from Poland, both looking apprehensive, both with good reason. Malak was robbed at knifepoint on his way home from work on Tuesday night. Olejniczak lost cash, a mobile, his consciousness and several teeth when he was hit with a brick late last year. They try to be phlegmatic about it. "I think it was always like this in Brixton," Malak says. But what should be done? "There should probably be more police on the streets, especially at weekends," Olejniczak says. "Or they could instal alarm buttons in busy public places, like we have in Gdansk." Kindness has decided not to wait. Taxis now take his staff home after work as a matter of company policy. There are two very divergent visions of Brixton's future. In the more optimistic one the place that shook Thatcherism to its foundations with the riots of 1981 becomes London's trendiest 'burb; a blend of northern European liberalism and Giuliani's Manhattan in which a friendly and mildly subversive cannabis culture is protected from the ravages of hard drugs with the kind of tough but targeted policing Amsterdam never achieved. At the other end of the range of predictions lurks apocalypse: the SW4 no-go zone, where decriminalised cannabis leads headlong to decriminalised crime. This is what Fred Broughton, of the Police Federation, and businessmen like Neil Kindness fear. "I sometimes wonder if the street criminals are trying to use the drug-dealer model and commit so many crimes that police step back as they did from the dealers," Kindness says. "It's as if the criminal underworld has realised the power of mob rule." The good news is that such anxieties are almost certainly overblown. Compared with the rest of South London, Brixton has a vibrance that everyone who lives there knows is its best asset. Its profile is also too high for central government to allow a descent into anarchy, and its history too violent for old-timers to be bothered by a rash of muggings. "It was pretty heavy in the Eighties," says David Jane, an artist and regular at the Prince Albert pub on Coldharbour Lane who moved to Brixton 23 years ago. "There's always been risk here, but the new drugs rules should mean everything calms down. I think it's already more relaxed." Even Sarah, Louisa and Katherine, the Living trio, insist that despite their own experiences Brixton is growing safer, and on one score at least the data backs them up. According to a recent local survey just 8 per cent of Brixtonians consider police harassment - a prime cause of the 1981 riots - still to be a serious issue. Yet there is bad news, too. Street crime is so much a part of Brixton life that locals have all but surrendered to it. The Living trio never reported the loss of their handbags. Adam, an employee at the same bar, was burgled six times before he moved to another neighbourhood. And the new drugs rules have failed even to satisfy committed smokers. "It's crazy," says Steve MacLeod, 27, who once lived for six months in The Hague. "People like me who haven't lived here long enough to have a regular dealer still have to go down dark alleys to buy spliff, and we risk being robbed in the process. In Holland I could go to a commercial outlet and get an ounce of whatever blend I wanted and be sure I'd get it, not an ounce of cigarette butts wrapped in plastic. Now wouldn't that be wonderful?" giles.whittell@thetimes.co.uk
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