Stuff

I think that must be the most SEO-unfriendly post title I've written in a long time. I'm too lazy to come up with another title. I've been feeling quite lacklustre about blogging altogether, lately. I think it's probably a knock-on effect from having that idiot flashing a knife at me and stealing my bag.

Don't get me wrong, I'm over it. I didn't get hurt, and he came off a lot worse than I did. I just lost my bag and its contents. He's lost his liberty, hopefully for a long time to come. I'd like to think that a long stretch in prison will help him sort himself out, I really do. What he did, to me and his other targets (I hate the word 'victim', and refuse to use it), was cowardly and shameful. But at least he didn't use the knife, which tells me that there may be some semblance of humanity buried beneath his drug habit.

That said, he shouldn't have waved a poxy knife in my face at all, or stolen from me, period. What annoys me most about this incident, and all drug-related crime, is the fact that there are other villains in the picture, who, all too often, escape punishment for what addicts do. I'm talking about the lowlife scum who live in posh houses, drive big cars, holiday in the Caribbean and send their own kids to expensive, private schools, on the profits of the filth they peddle to other people's children.

The UK is awash with drugs, and addicts desperate for money to buy them. Where will it all end? And why are policing budgets being cut? It makes no sense to reduce the resources available for law enforcement, when the UK is caught up in such a pernicious epidemic of drug-related crime. Surely money spent on targeting drug dealers and traffickers would be an investment in this country's future?

Afghanistan supplies an estimated 90% of the UK's heroin. Grown mainly in the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province, it often makes its way to the UK via an unholy alliance between Taliban drug lords and Russian gangsters. Giving the drug lords guns in exchange for heroin, the Russians then flood the UK market with their deadly wares. For this reason alone, I'm supportive of British troops remaining in Afghanistan. Heroin is not only wrecking the UK, it's fuelling Taliban insurgency and boosting terrorism.

It's crazy, isn't it? Here I am, on the Welsh coast, personally affected by terrorists, in a roundabout way. It's strange how even the most seemingly unconnected of events, can often be intimately intertwined, when you take the trouble to analyse them. Anyway, this post is fast turning into a thesis, so I'll leave it here for now.