It will not be an easy decade as the western world continues to lose the battle against drugs. Many people mistakenly see combating drugs as being confined to questions of addiction and questions of the crime and the violence which result from drug abuse. But the problem is much more encompassing. Drug money, which runs into billions of dollars, is beginning to play a major role in international finance and politics.

The profits from the sale of drugs are creating a new group of robber barons, operating outside the law and right beyond imagination which gives them enormous power to corrupt.

"Drug Lords'' are now playing a major part in politics and the manipulation of politicians and are rich enough to buy anyone who can be bought. Whole countries and their governments are threatened by the overwhelming power of drug money.

In our part of the world alone drug related crime has had a major impact on the now defeated Pindling Government in the Bahamas. There are clearly criminal dealings at the highest levels in Antigua. Once sleepy St. Kitts has seen drug related murders. In Trinidad, Scotland Yard officers revealed a corrupt Police Force.

In Bermuda, in order to have the strength to combat drugs and violence, the next decade will have to be about families, and individuals without family support, negotiating life under more and more difficult conditions. People and families need help to stand up to drugs. We need to strengthen the role of the family in society, no matter what the unit that constitutes a family might be.

There is a strength in families and in extended families which we should never underestimate. Families can provide the guidance and the morality for their individual members to be strong.

The temptations of addiction are great and the temptations to make huge sums of money are greater. The people, especially young people, need the hope that comes from good examples. Some politicians do not set good examples.

Politicians are sending messages that they are not tough on drugs. We have seen that in Bermuda in the failure of the Progressive Labour Party to help Dr. David Archibald with his drugs study and in the PLP's failure to produce its own promised drugs report. The message to anyone who wanted to receive it was clear, the PLP is permissive where drugs are concerned. The message is that the PLP does not really mind and might mind less in the future.

That message has been reinforced recently by statements by Dr. Ewart Brown about the arrested footballers, by Ms Renee Webb's excuses about the drugs authority, and by the PLP's refusal to co-operate, once again, with the National Drugs Commission.

The next decade is going to be about providing help to recreate the family and the community as strong units. The help is not as simple as the help we must provide in terms of such things as child care and care for the elderly. It is not as simple as looking after the multiple social and health needs of the people.

The only way we have any hope of combating the power of drugs is through education and economic opportunity. Only the sense of duty and sense of accomplishment which comes with those two things will help us prevent drug abuse and drug profiteering.

Through families we need to mobilise the community because this is not a job which can be done by groups acting alone or by individuals or a few neighbourhoods. We need to become a society which cares and we will have to understand that it will often take cash to operate that care.

Families need to say, not in our house. Communities need to say, not in our neighbourhood. All Bermuda needs to say, not in our Country.