IT started in March with a few wooden pallets and some sheets of plastic as residents of Tallaght in Dublin, erected makeshift huts around their estates. By the end of the year, it included 500 extra gardai on the streets, Criminal Assets Bureau, new prisons and a plethora of new laws aimed at drug dealers.
When it came to combatting the illicit drug trade, 1996 was a year when the people led and the authorities followed.
As the year began, the drug business had reached the almost epidemic proportions not seen since the crisis of the early 1980s. It had been allowed to grow partly due to official neglect and ignorance (one Government TD would even admit in July that few in the Dail knew much about the problem). The "drug barons" - ordinary gangsters; making extraordinary amounts of money - had a grip on deprived urban areas and were spreading their tentacles into rural Ireland through modern easy-to-take drugs like ecstasy.
In Tallaght, this meant children could not cross the green spaces on housing estates without being offered drugs. Strange cars crawled through the streets at night, clusters of drug pushers gathered at corners. Tallaght parents began to mount patrols and build huts so that they could keep a 24-hour watch on the dealers' activity and report car registration numbers to the Garda, who they considered only occasional visitors to their estates.
The idea spread to other parts of west Dublin and through the inner city, where an anti-drug movement was already at work, trying to increase treatment facilities for addicts.
By the middle of the year, there were regular marches throughout Dublin - as autumn approached there was one almost every night in some part of the city. Most would attract several hundred people, and in the city centre as many as 1,000 might show up, protesting outside dealers' homes and trying to attract official attention to their crimes.
For the most part, these were ordinary people, acting on fear for their children's futures. But there has also been a large number of Sinn Fein figures appearing as leaders of local organising groups, particularly in the west of the city and the south inner suburbs. They say they are not promoting any republican agenda and that their presence has become obvious only through the absence of other political parties. And apart from TDs Mr Joe Costello, of Labour, Mr Tony Gregory, the independent, and Sinn Fein's Cllr Christy Burke, politicians have tended to keep a distance from the anti-drug movement.
By autumn, there were two separate elements to the movement. The new player was COCAD - the Coalition of Communities Against Drugs - which ran marches in Clondalkin and Tallaght and other parts of "the suburbs, as well as some in the south" inner city. Sinn Fein members tended to" feature more prominently at its meetings. The more established organisation, ICON - the Inner Cities Organisations Network - concentrated on the heroin crisis in Dublin's north inner city.
In many ways the anti-drug campaign, mirrored the Concerned Parents movement of the 1980s, only this time there was more effort devoted to increasing treatment facilities for addicts. Again it was the public which led the way, with residents' groups setting up small treatment centres and then seeking funding from the Eastern Health Board and other agencies. By contrast the EHB, with a £9 million budget for drug services, often met resistance from residents' groups where it tried to open new clinics on its own initiative.
There has also been a darker side to the way people affected by the drugs trade have responded. There have been up to 40 beatings, a number of evictions and one killing during the year, that of Josie Dwyer, an addict and small-time drug peddlar.
MEMBERS of the IRA have been blamed for some of the most serious incidents, including an attack on a youth in Cabra during which part of his ear was severed. There is no doubt that without the threat of violence, many dealers who have left their homes in inner city would not have done so.
The murder of Veronica Guerin in June finally brought home to a wider audience the ruthlessness and confidence of the criminals which the anti-drug campaigners had tried to tackle.
The Government responded within days with a £50 million anti-crime package. It included many initiatives previously deemed impossible - or too expensive - such as extra recruitment of gardai, more prison spaces, and a Criminal Assets Bureau from which revenue officials, social welfare officers and gardai now work to deprive criminals of their ill-gotten gains. So far it has issued tax bills of more than £4 million.
Meanwhile, gardai in Dublin launched Operation Dochas, extra street patrols to act as a deterrent against open drug dealing. About 500 gardai who had been on other duties were drafted in to man the scheme.
More effective was the Lucan-based investigation into the Guerin murder. Initially, detectives thought they were concentrating on a small group of people but they soon found themselves breaking up what turned out to be the largest drug gang in the State.
In September, COCAD arranged a march through Dublin city centre which brought 3,000 people onto the streets, the largest popular protest in the city for years. The organisation saw the march as a "recruiting drive" for its campaign but appears to have lost some of its momentum since then.
ICON, in the north inner city, has continued its steadier effort, resulting in many of its ideas being adopted by a Government task force aimed at reducing demand for drugs.
The task force had £14 million to spend on 11 areas of Dublin and Cork. It is to distribute the money through local area groups and the current debate among anti-drug campaigners is over who should head these groups. The EHB has advertised positions for local area co-ordinators but community organisations fear this means the new groups will become simply another part of the State bureaucracy, rather than bodies built "from the ground up".
The EHB also introduced a "mobile clinic" in Dublin, better known as the "methadone bus". The EHB promises that in 1997, the notorious waiting lists - hundreds of addicts are unable to find spaces on treatment courses - will be eliminated.
The popular anti-drug movement, along with Guerin's work and murder, have pushed the State into putting more resources into law enforcement and drug treatment. As the New Year approaches, drugs are harder to find in parts of Dublin and in many areas open dealing no longer takes place.
The organisers of the anti-drug movement know that its followers cannot march and patrol forever. In addition, some of the extra policing has been on an ad hoc basis, a response to a problem which reached a crisis. More than most criminal networks, the drug business has a huge capacity to survive - the demand for drugs is such that an evicted, jailed or murdered dealer is quickly replaced.
There are two central questions as the New Year approaches. Will the initiatives launched in 1996 be consolidated so that the pressure on the drug dealers' empires can be maintained? And what is to be done about ecstasy, spreading almost unseen through rural areas?
The numbers taking ecstasy in the State could now be in the hundreds of thousands - there is too little research to allow a decent estimate. But unlike the parents of heroin users, the parents of young people who take ecstasy do not engage in public protest. Nor do ecstasy users have the same tendency towards crime. So there is little political imperative to tackle the problem of this and other potentially lethal "designer drugs".
Getting to grips with the threat posed by these seemingly innocuous tablets will be the challenge of 1997.