Drug abuse: Now a legitimate reason to claim benefits

That giant sucking sound you hear is the noise of money being vacuumed from the wages of productive workers into the pockets of dubious welfare claimants.

How can it be right for taxes to be used to subsidise alcoholics and drug abusers, in the guise of a questionable, inadequately monitored payment called 'Disability Living Allowance', which can be obtained without a doctor's letter?

All of us are happy to help look after the victims of genuine misfortune. But we expect the authorities to make sure that such assistance is given only to those who need it.

They are failing in this duty. Spending on DLA is growing at an extraordinary pace, which seems to have more to do with the number of people finding out about it than with the number of genuinely disabled people in this country.

Information obtained by The Mail on Sunday under freedom of information laws shows amazing increases in the numbers claiming DLA for 'drug and alcohol abuse' and among those claiming for 'learning difficulties'.

Sufferers of unspecified back pain and 'psychosis' - in many cases, the result of illegal cannabis smoking - also lined up in growing thousands to collect our cash.

We do not know how much of Britain's enormous £169billion annual welfare bill is well or badly spent.

We do know that it is almost a quarter of the national budget, and consumes every penny of the £160billion paid in income tax by the working population.

This leaves all other Government spending to be met from borrowing, VAT, excise duties, National Insurance, council and corporation taxes.

The least we can ask is that these colossal sums are not distributed until proper objective tests have been made, and that people who have made themselves unemployable through illegal or antisocial habits should not qualify for help meant for the genuinely distressed.

We have been haunted too long by outdated images of the harsh dole system of 70 years ago, when so many were truly destitute. We have now swung much too far in the other direction.

A civic disgrace

George Bernard Shaw once urged: 'Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.' He was right. There is always a danger that people will get used to bad things, which then become normal - making even worse things possible.

We seem to be accustoming ourselves to living in physical and moral squalor, when we ought to be fighting hard against it.

The Local Government Association should be ashamed of itself for its new posters supposedly explaining the role of local government.

Of course, town halls do an important job by clearing up the pools of vomit left by drunks and the excrement deposited by dogs with irresponsible owners.

But hasn't it occurred to them that we pay them to do these things because we don't want to view such sights?

So the last thing we wish to see plastered on billboards are large photographic studies of puking drinkers and mounds of dog droppings.

This material is childish, coarse and wrong. It will encourage the things it portrays. It should be withdrawn.