IT'S getting rather like the Wild West down here in London. The Home Office has just announced there were three times as many shootings last year as the year before - a colossal increase from 322 to 939. Handguns were banned, you remember, in 1996 following the Dunblane massacre. I wrote in this paper at the time that, when guns are legally banned, the only people who will possess them are criminals.

And listen, folks, there's no cause for you to feel so smug up there in the North-East. Last week, Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said gun gangs are spreading across the country: "We have to stem the large number of guns coming in. You can buy a gun for £200-£300. The price of buying or hiring a gun has come down because there are more guns in circulation."

Violent crime is out of control, and one of the causes of this is the disastrous Macpherson Report which, by describing the police as "institutionally racist", has made officers less ready to conduct stop and search. But muggings and killings are not being perpetrated by ethnic minorities alone: all races are contributing to the present crime wave. There are some sickening examples. The other week, 82-year-old Violetta Vella was discovered dead in her home in north London in a pool of blood. The next day, a woman was shot dead in leafy Hertfordshire. On the same day, a drug addict was given 26 life sentences for murdering two eighty-year-old war heroes in their front room and for wounding more than 20 other pensioners in the course of his robberies.

Of course, most of the violent crime is committed by drug addicts looking for money to finance their habit. On the rare occasions that these offenders are caught, they are not locked away for a long time - because there are simply far too many of them for the prisons to house. And in any case, the Government prefers to avoid custodial sentences at all costs. Why, apart from the shortage of jails? Because a steep rise in the prison population would give the lie to repeated Home Office claims that "overall" crime is on the decrease.

Given that the crime wave is largely caused by criminal drug addicts, why not decriminalise all drugs, make them available at licensed outlets and let the Inland Revenue pocket the tax - as they do already on booze and fags? The only people who seem to be against the decriminalisation of drugs are misguided evangelical Christians and the drugs barons themselves who, of course, benefit from the high prices which illegality confers on the illicit substances. The various Government attempts to curtail drug-taking are laughable and the "war on drugs" was lost years ago.

The official condemnation of drug-taking is as nothing compared with the universal advertising of drugs by the pop music industry and the world of the fashion models. The whole disco, club, clothes scene is unimaginable without drug-taking. Addiction is a fashion-accessory which no cool clubber dare refuse. Legalise the lot and allow people to choose to go to hell in their own way. That's what they're doing anyway.

Published: Tuesday, March 5, 2002