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The Governor's "Letters to Hong Kong"
Following is the full text of Governor the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's broadcast on RTHK's "Letter to Hong Kong" today (Sunday):
It's obviously much better to be wise after the event than not wise at all. Stupid after as well as before doesn't score many brownie points.
But best of all, as a Greek philosopher argued, is being wise before things happen. Foresight is one of the great virtues even though its fruits tend to earn criticism at the time, and rarely get the applause they deserve later on.
Well, we've got a chance these days in Hong Kong to show we're smart. Not by investing in the stock market. Or buying a piece of fancy real estate. Or spotting a niche in the market. Or salting away a good racing tip for next season. The chance I'm talking about is different. Different but very, very important. We should seize it with both hands.
All those of us who come from Europe, or come from North America, have seen at least some of the consequences of one of the most awful evils of so-called civilised life in the last decades of the 20th Century. And it's been a curse in parts of Asia and the rest of the world. Drugs. Drugs soft, hard, killing. Broken lives on street comers. Young hopes in the gutter.
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I've seen all that in London, in Australia, in Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in L.A., and so on and on. I don't want to see it in Hong Kong. And we don't have to see it or to be strictly accurate - see it getting worse in our own city.
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The wreckage among families.
The distraught parents. The haunted young. The crime often violent to pay for the murderous habit. The extra burden on the police and social workers. The costs of fighting the menace: the cost of coping with
it.
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So far, as I've said, things aren't as horrendous here as they are elsewhere. But the lights are starting to flash warnings, if we only look. Last week I was in one of our new towns, mostly built in the last twenty years. The District Officer there showed me where the dealers hang out in the evenings. Where the youngsters drift from apathy to drug abuse. He showed me the staircase in the public flats where heroin is sold most nights. The openings in the wall where the money is left and the drugs are picked up. That's Hong Kong. Every night, despite the best efforts of our excellent police, that's the story somewhere in this city.