Your editorial on county lines states, rightly, that “there is no point in pretending that there is any quick fix” (Police will not be able to cut off the county lines drug dealers on their own, 17 September). However, all the solutions put forward in relation to the phenomenon – better funding of youth services, placing youth services on a statutory footing etc – evade the fundamental point: this is a business model that works.
For those higher up the chain it is low-risk and lucrative. For users, it makes drugs more easily accessible, more cheaply. For the street dealers, we have to ask whether, in an economy predicated on low-paid, precarious employment, any other option is available that can put £250 a day into their hands.
The focus on the exploitative element of county lines recruitment assumes this is the norm. More usually, young dealers have seen people from their estates start out at the same level and quickly succeed and move upwards. Unless and until we can conceive of changes to social and economic structures able to match the economic opportunities offered by the drug economy (and legalisation has to form part of that change), we are applying sticking plasters to a gaping, gangrenous wound. If we cannot think beyond tinkering at the edges of an economy rooted in precarity, then county lines will continue to be seen as part of a way out of poverty.
Nick Moss
London
• Your editorial on county lines rightly advocates prevention by boosting youth services. However, the 2017 Lammy review into the treatment of and outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals in the criminal justice system, noting that children as young as 12 were being recruited by gang leaders to sell drugs, urged the Crown Prosecution Service to review its role in protecting vulnerable individuals who were coerced into gang activities by powerful adults. The police should target those adults.
Chris Hughes
Leicester
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