One of these coke heads who can now get a hit cheaper than a
cup of coffee ,  could terminate your life by driving into you when on
a high . Society has to protect itself from this menace . A kind of
two strike and you are out works the best .
    On a second conviction ie finding of drugs in the blood , the
addict would be put in jail , cold turkey , and keep him there until
he tells the name of the supplier and until that supplier gets jailed
.
Soon all the dealers would be in jail and the menace would end , and
these jailed dealers would be outsourced to a third world country
where they know how to treat those who want to destroy our society.

excerpt observer.co.uk

Cocaine now cheaper than a cappuccino

Mark Townsend and Vanessa Thorpe
Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer

The failure of the government's policy to stem drug imports is
revealed today by research which shows that Britain is awash with
cheap drugs, with a line of cocaine now costing less than a
cappuccino.
The price of ecstasy, heroin, crack, cocaine and cannabis has tumbled
to a record low in the last year, as dealers pumped ever greater
quantities onto the market, encouraging hundreds of thousands of
people to become regular users.

The failure by customs and police to smash trafficking gangs and cut
off supplies to the streets is an embarrassment for Tony Blair.

He recently announced longer sentences for dealers and stronger powers
for the courts, the latest in a string of attempts to control the
burgeoning trade.

Yet despite such efforts, the price of ecstasy has plummeted by 70 per
cent over the last decade to ?3.50 a pill, according to figures
compiled by the Independent Drugs Monitoring Unit.

In certain areas, users - some of whom have become so hardened to the
chemicals that they take up to 20 tablets a night - are being offered
the drug for just ?2.

During last year the cost of a rock of crack fell by more than a fifth
to ?10, its largest annual fall since the drug reached Britain during
the Eighties. Rocks, each about the size of a white, waxy pea, are
effectively cocaine in smokeable form and typically give users one or
two hits.

The statistics reveal the changing profile of drug- taking in Britain.
Typical of the new breed of users are those who split a gram of
cocaine with friends most weekends while experts also warn of clubbers
who are increasingly spurning ecstasy in favour of crack.

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The monitoring unit is the UK's leading authority on the street value
of narcotics and their consumption. It surveyed 2,056 people at music
festivals and gigs last year, with the results for 2004 collated in
recent days.

Researchers found there were regional disparities in the cost of
drugs. Cocaine, for example, is dearest in East Anglia, at ?47 a gram,
and cheapest in the north-east, at ?39. Increasingly, users are paying
under ?40. Users can eke out up to 20 lines - each one giving a
feeling of self-confidence and alertness for around 20 minutes - from
one gram. This equates to about ?2.25 a line, cheaper than a
cappuccino in many cafes. Addicts, however, often split a gram into
just five lines.

'Traditionally we have a much higher rate of drug use than other
countries. We are starting at a higher rate and that has gone up even
more,' said Matthew Atha, who compiled the report. 'The industry
appears to be booming, although there are signs it may be bottoming
out.'

For example, the price of an eighth of resin, enough to make around 20
joints of the brown-coloured, often low-grade cannabis, fell only
marginally last year, yet is almost 50 per cent cheaper than 1995. The
price of heroin has fallen considerably, and it is more than a third
lower than in the mid-Nineties.

However, Atha said that an unusually cheap batch of the opiate last
year - selling at just ?12 a gram - may have skewed the figure
downwards. His report attempted to quantify the number of regular drug
users in the UK, those who take illicit substances at least once a
month. Cannabis remains most widely used, with almost 600,000 frequent
users feeding a market worth ?978m. Half of the supply is now grown in
the UK.

Cocaine remains the second most popular drug. It has 237,000 frequent
users, slightly fewer than the number of crack and heroin addicts
combined. Ecstasy has just over 76,000 regular users, considerably
fewer than suspected. One theory behind ecstasy's rapidly dwindling
street value is that dealers have been trying to reinvigorate demand
as the drug fades from fashion. However, when the numbers of people
who took an illegal substance during 2004 are examined, the totals
soar to more than 400,000 for ecstasy, 2.3 million for cannabis and
580,000 for cocaine.

Despite the falling costs, the amount spent by UK users remains
sizeable. For instance, in an 'average month' a regular cocaine user
will spend almost ?170 on the drug. Crack and heroin addicts part with
more than ?440.