Middle class drug users are fuelling the bloodshed on Britain’s streets, Sajid Javid warns

Middle -class professionals are fuelling bloodshed on Britain’s streets with their desire for drugs, the Home Secretary warned last night.

Sajid Javid said those who took cocaine and Ecstasy at dinner parties were ‘not innocent’ of the rise in violence sweeping the country.

In a hard-hitting intervention, he condemned recreational drug use among the wealthy for being responsible for warfare among gangs, including those running county lines networks, by bumping up demand.

He said middle-class men and women who took lines of cocaine or Ecstasy pills were fuelling the knife and gun crime epidemic that was killing young people.

Sajid Javid said those who took cocaine and Ecstasy at dinner parties were ‘not innocent’ of the rise in violence sweeping the country

Demand for drugs led to ‘county lines gangs’ luring children as young as 12 into becoming couriers – and unwittingly ensnared in a web of brutality and intimidation.

It is believed there are more than 1,400 county line gangs – named after the lucrative telephone lines used to organise the illegal trade – and that they are making an estimated £1.8 billion annual total profit.

Gangs based in Britain’s biggest cities groom boys and girls into becoming ‘drug mules’ to flood market towns and seaside resorts with heroin and crack cocaine.

Over the past weeks the Daily Mail has highlighted how the county lines menace has grown. Mr Javid pledged a ‘fightback’ against the criminals who ‘ruin lives and damage society’. He spoke out as he launched a major review – the biggest ever carried out by the Home Office – of drug misuse in the UK.

Javid condemned recreational drug use among the wealthy for being responsible for warfare among gangs, including those running county lines networks, by bumping up demand

Javid condemned recreational drug use among the wealthy for being responsible for warfare among gangs, including those running county lines networks, by bumping up demand

In April, the Government’s flagship Serious Violence Strategy highlighted evidence that illicit drug markets drove sudden surges in appalling violence as gangs competed for lucrative markets.

In an interview with the Daily Mail ahead of his Tory conference speech today, Mr Javid said: ‘We need to make people understand that if you are a middle-class drug user and you sort of think, “Well, I’m not doing any damage, I know what I’m doing,” well, there’s a whole supply chain that goes into that, youths whose lives have been abused, the county lines, other drug takers being abused, crime being encouraged.

‘You are not innocent – no one is innocent if they are taking illegal drugs. I’m very concerned by the rise that we’ve been seeing in serious violence and I wish there were some easy explanations about what was causing it.

‘Like so many of these things the causes are complex. But a large chunk of it is around county lines gangs, the changes that have been taking place in drug markets.’

Violent crime surged by 21 per cent last year, with 1.3million offences recorded by police.

Mr Javid said the review will look at who is buying illegal substances as well as who is selling them. It will focus on the use of drugs by professionals, such as City workers, and will investigate what drugs people are taking, how often and where they get them from. 

 

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk