Getting the spliff to your ashtray (From Times Series)

Getting the spliff to your ashtray

6:34pm Thursday 20th November 2008 in

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The vice-president of Columbia has attempted to instill a sense of social conscience in the middle-class, casual users of cocaine, a drug which has torn parts of his country to shreds.

“Every time you consume one gram of cocaine you are destroying 4.4 square metres of Colombian rainforest,” he said in a speech at a drugs conference this week. "This is the message we need to get across.”

This is just the start of a long trail of damaging effects of the cocaine trade, which takes in indigenous tribes and Communist terrorists in South America, drug mules from Africa and ends its destructive path on the streets of the UK.

The cannabis trade, by contrast, has apparently become something of a cottage industry in the UK and certainly in Barnet - where 16 cannabis “factories” have already been closed down this year.

The story of Olivia de Cordova this week shows that this sector of the business is far from victimless.

Olivia, whose fully furnished house was gutted and wrecked by her cannabis-farming tennats, was able to retain a sense of humour about the whole affair - remarking that her mortgage had been paid for by the proceeds of drugs - but she is still facing a £5,500 repair bill.

Then there are the people that run the factories. Very often the people that profit from them have very little, if any, contact with the houses.

The joy of living in a darkened, gutted house with dangerous wiring and caring for the crops day-in-day-out often falls on the shoulders of Vietnamese peasants trafficked into the country on the promise of work.

I saw one such wretched individual jailed at Harrow Crown Court after explaining, through an interpreter, how he had effectively been trapped in the house by his traffickers, who insisted he worked at the house to pay off the cost of his transit from Vietnam.

His reward, on top of his meagre ‘salary’ - which ended up in the pockets of traffickers - was a bag of rice delivered to the door ever now and again.

Some argue that part of the problem is the criminalisation of drug production and that legalisation could go some way to regulating the trade, as well as preventing the estimated 7.5 million crimes a year committed by drug users.

That may or may not be the case. In the meantime it's worth sparing a thought for the people that help get the spliff to your ashtray.