AGAINST a long background of official helplessness and frustrated hand-wringing that has only seen the drug abuse problem fester and grow, the war against it being launched this week by Home Secretary Jack Straw is as encouraging as it is necessary.

For the national explosion of heroin-related crime has now reached the stage where one in five people arrested has been using the drug.

Addicts are responsible for £1billion-worth of property crime a year - equal to a loss of £60 per household.

How vital it is, then, to snap the link between addiction and the junkies' habit-funding crime.

Mr Straw's plan is to force burglars, and other convicted criminals suspected of being drug users, to undergo treatment for addiction.

During it, they would face random mandatory tests to show whether or not they were kicking the habit.

Those who do not face jail.

Certainly, this scheme will be expensive.

But evidence from the United States, where this kind of approach has been shown to work, is that the payback for taxpayers in terms of reduced crime is seven-fold.

For the serial burglar junkies it offers the prospect of release from the slough of dependency and criminality.

But for society it offers freedom from the predations of the drug-dependent thousands.

It is high time the tide was turned.

This initiative by the government is a welcome departure from the previous outlook that war against drugs was one of containment.

Now it has switched to the offensive - and deserves to work.

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