Connect:It's buying drugs as much as selling sex that has led to the murders of five women in Ipswich. A battle for control of this country's drugs trade has resulted in four murders in six days here. Clearly, Irish and British policies regarding illegal drugs - though they still cause society much less damage than legal alcohol - are not working. In fact, they are long overdue an overhaul.
Certainly, there is a link between cocaine users in Foxrock and the murders in Dublin's homes and streets. There is, however, also an undeniable link between government policy and those same murders. Presumably Foxrock's or any other area's drug users do not want to see people killed in order to supply them with their drug of choice. Government policy is likewise but is ineffective.
It's often said, though seldom publicly, that so long as drugs gangs kill other dealers - apprentice plumber Anthony Campbell was a conspicuous exception this week - let them at it. It's often said, too, that women who become prostitutes are seeking trouble. Both arguments contain sniffy attitudes towards drug dealers and women who work in what's euphemistically called "the sex industry".
Perhaps this is understandable. There are nasty types out there. Yet personal responsibility - ideally, without the sniffy attitude - is more easily achieved through a stable childhood than through a chaotic one. Of course, there are exceptions - well-nurtured children still become addicts and those with chaotic backgrounds may prosper legally - but such deviations are not the norm.
The norm in Ipswich was that the murdered women were using heroin and/or crack cocaine. Whether they started on Class A drugs and then took to the streets to feed their habits or began using drugs to numb themselves from the vile nature of their "work", the end result was the same. Prostitution and drugs go hand in hand.
British television estimates that 95 per cent of prostitutes use hard drugs and most are addicted. So powerful are many addictions that some women in Ipswich were this week prepared to risk their lives in order to get money to buy a fix. That is slavery to a substance and it's total. It's estimated that at least 90 prostitutes have been murdered in Britain in the last 12 years.
Few people care, however, that prostitute murders have the lowest detection rates of any type of homicide. It's largely accepted that women who sell their bodies on the streets are, in ways, complicit in their own demise. So we get "deserving" and "not-so-deserving" victims.
But it's arbitrary. Who should decide whether a victim is "deserving" or not? It really is a mess. It also contradicts Tanáiste and Minister for Justice Michael McDowell's championing of the supply and demand market. Clearly there is a demand for drugs - in the cases of prostitutes such demand is stimulated early by pimps and dealers - and that demand will be supplied because of potentially huge financial profits.
But does it have to be criminal? Or does all of it have to be criminal? Could the State not even consider licensing brothels, Amsterdam-type coffee shops and places where registered addicts could go to get hard drugs and treatment? This might, for some people, amount to an admission of defeat but it would, at least, take a great deal of criminality - and murder - out of prostitution and the drugs racket.
It might, of course, encourage more people to sample drugs and the sex industry. Given State sanction, such activities might become normalised. It's unlikely, though. If they did and led to increased societal problems, the policy could be reviewed. If, in fact, such a policy were disastrous, it could easily be scrapped. At least, a radical attempt would have been made to prevent murder.
Prostitution - particularly female prostitution - and drug use have been around since time began. In 1888, most of the known victims of the world's alleged first serial killer, Jack the Ripper, were addicted to alcohol in London's Whitechapel. The Ipswich women may have been using harder drugs than alcohol but the result is the same: all were murdered.
It's telling that police have not advised men not to go out to buy sex in Ipswich. Presumably, not many will have attempted to this week anyway, but it should, nonetheless, have been said.
The Government is always quick to remind people of the link between, say, cocaine users in Foxrock and murders on the streets of Dublin. The same is true of prostitution: without demand there will not be a supply.
It's unlikely anything will be changed, however. Drug dealers and prostitutes are frequently believed to have forfeited some of their humanity. The fact that virtually all prostitutes suffer from low self-esteem - many hate themselves - doesn't save them either.
On this run-in to Christmas the recent deaths in Dublin and Ipswich have, perhaps rightly, dominated headlines and led news bulletins. Yet drunkenness, including of course, drunk driving, will have accounted for far more deaths and agony this year. Our drug laws need an overhaul almost as badly as our drink laws. It's time to bite the bullet.