WHO ARE THE ADDICTS, THE VICTIMS OR THEIR FAMILIES?

The Case Of A Novelist's Son And The Tragedy Of A Baby Expose Our
Moral Confusion Over Drugs

It's an interesting question. Do we, as a nation, consider drug users
to be (a) victims or (b) libertarians, people exercising their right
to choose? Were one to put this to Harriet Harman's now famous court
of public opinion, it would be fascinating to see how the country split.

It might be close. The caring professions, the liberal consensus, the
tolerant and the gentle would vote for "a", while the pragmatists,
the no-nonsense, hard-working centre Right and everyone who takes
recreational drugs would opt for "b".

The question is important, given the prevalence of drug use, but the
schism runs deep. Our public policies are indeed founded on the
liberal notion that drug users need support, but the opposite view
prevails in the country. The result is an underlying tension that,
for the most part, we successfully ignore. Just occasionally,
however, the moral issues surrounding drugs, and our inability to
deal with them, are painfully exposed.

Where, one wonders, does Jake Myerson fit as a drug user? When he was
17, his mother, the novelist Julie Myerson, ejected Jake from home
because of his abusive and occasionally violent behaviour.

As a teenager in South London, Jake, now 20, became a user of the
addictive and powerful form of cannabis known as skunk; on the
receiving end, many would say, of peer pressure. His parents, worried
about their younger children, gave him a chance to reform and when he
didn't, they changed the locks. Jake was taken in by a friend's parents.

Did the Myersons do the right thing? Was it a child they threw out, a
victim of drugs; or an abusive young man who needed to be shown the
consequences of his behaviour?

Jakes's father is Jonathan Myerson, also a writer, magistrate and
former councillor. The couple are educated middle-class people - very
smug, in Julie Myerson's own words - who saw themselves as good
parents. Were they confused about where the boundaries lay?

Plainly, they suffered private agonies. So much so, in fact, that Ms
Myerson's new book, The Lost Child, a candid version of events, with
Jake's name removed, is due out shortly. We cannot pass judgment on
its contents, but we can, I think, observe that misery literature, in
all its forms, is still a bestselling genre.

Victimhood, however, is a crowded town to live in. Jake condemned the
book this week, saying that he did not want it published. He resents
that his mother has been writing about him "for the past 16 years".

He's not an addict, he says, describing his parents as naive, insane
and emotional about his use of drugs. And there we have it: a
man-child who feels rejected, exploited, his rights abused, who says
that the drugs are no big deal. A victim, in other words. And a
mother who feels understandably violated by her child's drug use, and
who has, probably brilliantly, turned private trauma into literary victimhood.

Everyone is on ambiguous moral ground. The Myerson case is, in many
ways, a classic example of how confusing it can be when a
comfortable, creative lifestyle rubs up against the harsh realities
of drug use.

In the case of Brandon Muir there was no cosy lifestyle, but the same
questions about a drug user's rights and the fallibility of liberal
attitudes are raised. How far must we consider the drug user as the
victim? Sometimes, until they kill someone other than themselves.

The story of Brandon, 23 months old when he died at the hands of his
mother's heroin addict boyfriend in Dundee, is as ghastly as that of
Baby P. His mother sold her body for drugs while her son was dying
from a fatal blow that ruptured his duodenum. The toddler, who had 40
injuries to his body, was then taken to a squalid drugs party, where
he vomited brown liquid while, all around him, young addicts partied.
They laughed at him being sick. Hours later he was dead. His killer
was convicted on Tuesday.

Brandon was not on any at-risk register. Why should he have been,
when social policy emphasises that drugs users be supported in their
lifestyle, not told to wise up? From top to bottom in the existing
system, that ethos rules.

Addicts are official victims. They are not regarded as people with a
choice. The presumption, therefore, is on keeping their children at
home with them, not removing them. Suggestions that contraception be
a condition of receiving methadone for addicts caused an outcry in
Scotland, with accusations about eugenics.

Which take precedence? The human rights of the infant born to the
junkie, or the right of the junkie to have both lifestyle and
children? At the moment, it is firmly the latter. Social policy
remains studiously non-interventionist; non-judgmental; passive.
Hence the confusion. Hence the increasing number of babies raised in
addict households; and hence - if you like-the increasing number of
screwed-up middle-class teenagers.

According to an Audit Commission report today, children's services
deteriorated last year and remain the least good area of councils'
work. We should not be surprised. Among both families and
professionals, only confusion and lack of confidence will reign until
we begin to address the moral status of drug taking.