CHAPTER FIVE

Britain

‘They’re [Washington] making the rules, and we’re [Britain] the children doing as we’re told. For a country which has spent hundreds of years developing an empire, we should have realised that we’d be sleepwalking into moral imperialism. The collective and political judgement which is our drug policy is not British at all. It’s a successful invasion by American thoughts and ideals. That special relationship is not equal.’

FORMER BRITISH UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN NEIL WOODS1

Donna Marie had lived her entire life in the same council estate in Newcastle in north-east Britain. Centred around a grassy square, four-storey flats had been her surroundings as a child and adult. Her parents lived a few doors down from her own place. Her son, Grayson, had been taken away by social services due to her drug use. She had a few more months to prove that she was free from drugs; otherwise, he would be placed in permanent foster care.

Donna, 31 years old and wearing fluffy white slippers, black jeans, and a black top, was jittery when I met her in her apartment, and the conversation quickly turned to matters of life and death.

‘I stabbed a man in the face under the influence of alcohol, Valium, and [psychoactive drug] benzos’, she told me. He survived, and soon after her release from prison in 2014 she fell pregnant after a brief affair. She had thought she was infertile due to sexual abuse as a child, and had initially planned to have an abortion, but her parents convinced her to keep the baby. ‘This may be the one chance you’ll ever get’, they said. Grayson was born in July 2015.

Donna’s apartment was spotless, with photos of her son and father displayed prominently. With chipped red paint on her entry steps, and a tidy green lawn outside her flat, Donna gave the impression that she was trying to manage her chaotic life. While sitting down, walking around, and constantly licking and playing with her lips, Donna was clearly anxious, and cried when imagining losing her child.

She explained the abuse that she had suffered as a child from her father, mother, and sister. Her father was a football hooligan who viciously beat her mother, and her brother followed in his father’s footsteps. She was sexually assaulted in a flat in the council estate when a drug- and drink-addled man brutally used a hammer to attack her, injuring her vagina and anus. She said that these reasons were probably why she started using heroin. Her life was defined by struggle, boredom, and drugs.

She stayed off drugs during the bulk of her pregnancy. ‘I ate healthy’, she said. ‘The only thing I didn’t do was stop smoking cigarettes. I decorated my full house, everything. I was doing absolutely brilliant. It was the best time of my life. Then I hit eight months pregnant, I started getting in with the wrong crowd, and this other girl was pregnant. She was only six months pregnant and I was eight, she was taking heroin, and I ended up taking some Valium again and benzos.’

Donna’s probation officer suspected that she was taking drugs again, so Donna admitted everything. She was ashamed that she hadn’t remained drug-free. Her friend lost her baby after she had placental abruption due to excessive drug taking. ‘I blame myself for that because I knew my friend was using during her pregnancy’, Donna said. Both women were on a methadone program during pregnancy, and her friend needed clean urine for court dates. Donna gave her own urine, but after using Valium again, her urine was no longer viable. It was a messy situation, and Donna severed ties with the woman.

Donna had a history of drug taking. She started smoking cannabis at the age of 13, and when she hit high school she was using ecstasy and heroin, and sniffing glue. ‘I took Valium and mixed alcohol’, she said. ‘I was a walking charge sheet. If I was to take benzos and alcohol, there was a 90 per cent chance I was going to end up killing somebody, somebody killing me, or getting arrested. Before I went to prison I was injecting, my God, up to 50 pounds of heroin. That shit will last people a week. I think the most I ever did was 60 pounds of heroin in one session. How I never killed myself I’ll never, ever know.’

Donna loved being a mother, proudly telling me that she had a maternal instinct, but social workers never trusted her around Grayson. At one point, her parents took her son because they thought, due to her weight loss, that she was using drugs again. Her sister took custody of her son at one stage. When I met Donna, she was being allowed supervised visits with Grayson while he lived at her parents’ house. She knew that this was her last chance to finally get free from drugs for good, or forever lose her son to foster care.

Throughout my time in Britain and Australia, I often heard criticisms of methadone, the substitute drug given to people with a heroin addiction, on the grounds that addicts simply became conditioned to methadone. Donna was scathing about the drug, and wanted the government to ban it. She preferred Subutex, a drug used to treat withdrawal symptoms for addiction to narcotics. Donna knew of many people who ‘wanted the methadone because they couldn’t afford the heroin for that day, and methadone was there as a substitute. It’s the best thing I ever could have done, getting on Subutex. If anything, I feel like I’ve wasted eight years of my life going on methadone, heroin, methadone, heroin, methadone and heroin.’

The counsellors with whom I visited Donna said that a caring government response to her situation would be to provide at least temporary accommodation and support in another part of Newcastle where she would finally see a different reality away from the over-familiar red-brick council estate. They believed that she would need constant encouragement to survive, but it would be an improvement on her current circumstances; as things stood, it almost felt like her life wasn’t seen as important to authorities.

Donna’s story was tragic but sadly familiar in Newcastle. The north-east of the country had the highest rates of death from drug use in Britain, rising 90 per cent from 2007 to 2017, with pure cocaine, heroin, the synthetic cannabinoid spice, and crack being the main culprits. Drug use caused 532 deaths in the area between 2014 and 2016, compared to 283 deaths between 2004 and 2006.

The three-hour train trip from London was flat, through green farmland and endless mist. The image of Northern England is often grim, but picturesque Durham with its ancient buildings and winding roads dispelled that stereotype. Nevertheless, parts of Newcastle, with their boarded-up shops and endless frozen-food supermarkets, conformed to my expectations of a deindustrialised city. While the centre of Newcastle looked like a healthy, vibrant place, not far away were small towns whose main streets were nearly empty at 11.00am. Industry had largely died in the area, killed by prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and nothing had replaced it. Economic deprivation was endemic, ignored by most politicians in Westminster. There were now lost generations of youth who had no jobs or prospects. In these circumstances, drug use was unsurprising.

Newcastle felt like a city falling apart. I visited a high-rise council building on the outskirts of town. A shopping centre was on the ground floor, and yet virtually every shop was desolate. A restaurant had empty tables. It was eerily quiet, with nobody around in the middle of the day. Urine sat in small puddles in the elevator, the smell overwhelming. On the third floor was a dirty window that overlooked the city in the distance. It was an apt image, this filthy window through which people saw their city.

Every major city had grim council estates, but more than half of children in some areas of Newcastle were growing up in poverty, according to a report by End Child Poverty Coalition in 2018. The city council was struggling to cope with the number of children at risk of harm from homelessness, drug abuse, or domestic violence. Years of extreme austerity, designed by the conservative party in Westminster, had caused a huge social crisis across the country. The biggest food bank in Britain was in Newcastle, and it often ran low on essential supplies. It was the working poor, not the homeless, who often used it. The use of anti-depressants soared across the country during the austerity period, and in 2018 alone there were more than 70 million prescriptions written for the drugs, according to the National Health Service. This was nearly double the amount of a decade earlier.

I met a Greek woman, Despina, in her third-floor apartment. Her daughter, Natalie, had been using heroin for at least two decades. Despina told me a desperately sad story of her child, who lived in misery, addiction, and secrecy. Despina was dedicated to caring for her 38-year-old daughter. Despina had seen things a mother should never have to: Natalie bloodied with puncture marks on her neck. Despina felt helpless. At times during our conversation, she cried, stood up to fetch water, and took a breather. Despina knew who to blame for the nation’s economic woes. ‘That Thatcher woman, she destroyed England totally’, she said. ‘She sold everything we had.’

Sadness permeated the Newcastle landscape. Jamie Bell, 38 years old, lived in a modest house, and a large but friendly dog roamed the halls. When we met, Jamie was Helen, and later told me that they’d always felt uncomfortable with traditional female identity. Non-binary orientation gave comfort (and I was asked to use non-binary pronouns to describe them).

Jamie drank from a mug with ‘Drama Queen’ written on it. Their rooms were full of children’s toys. Friendly and constantly smiling, their life had been marked by sexual abuse from a young age by their mother, father, and sister. At the age of five, they burned themselves with hot water in the bath, which soon developed into putting out matches on their skin. Eating disorders began. They were groomed at 14 by older men for sex. They lost their virginity while being raped. ‘I put myself in vulnerable situations’, they said. ‘I didn’t have self-care or boundaries.’ They reported their abuse at the hands of their family to authorities when they were 27. ‘I couldn’t catch a break from the people who were meant to support me’, they lamented.

Raped multiple times as a young adult and assaulted by their ex-female partner, who was their support worker for ten years and faced few legal ramifications for the abuse, they had two young girls conceived with a sperm donor. I had rarely heard a story of such depravity, and yet they spoke with relative confidence.

For Jamie, alcohol and cocaine were their ‘saviour’. They said that because ‘control and power were taken away from me from such a young age, I needed to get that back in some way’. They started taking speed at 15, and by the time they went to university they were spending £200 (US$263) on marijuana every week (ironically, they used money from their abusive parents). They took ecstasy, ketamine, and cocaine.

Months before we met, Jamie had decided to try to turn their life around, because they needed healthy relationships. ‘I wanted a relationship with myself’, they said, ‘and I didn’t have that. I’d existed and existed and existed, but I’d never actually been able to feel because of PTSD.’

Jamie put on a brave face. Articulate, considered, and recently free from drugs, they were determined. They said that they often judged character badly — their life experiences gave them few skills to know how to build trust with people — but they were trying. They recounted the horrors of their life with calmness. They wanted to start an NGO for women who’d been abused by women to better explain this largely hidden crime to law enforcement.

Jamie was a damaged person. Their parents had provided financial support in the past, but they’d recently established strict boundaries with Jamie, and didn’t want to see them. Jamie volunteered overnight with a suicide-prevention hotline. Their positive demeanour was disarming considering their life’s experiences, and it was more impressive because of it.

Many cities contained people like Jamie, but Newcastle had greater problems than most. According to figures released in 2016, the city and its surrounding areas had one of the highest rates of drug-related crimes in the country. Public Health England found that the Newcastle region had the highest rates of youth drinking and alcohol-related hospital admissions in the nation.

What this meant for young people on the ground in Newcastle was explained in visceral detail by Mark Tunney, the co-founder of Jigsaw Recovery Project, a group that helped young people transitioning to the outside world after being in foster care. They may have suffered sexual or violent abuse or drug addiction. Tunney explained that the community spirit that used to exist in his area was dead. ‘Nothing’s replaced it’, he said.

People were scared of drugs, gangs, and violence. Young people with guns worked for local families and controlled the drug-trade. ‘It does my fucking head in’, he said. ‘Especially because it’s the area I live in. I know all the families; I used to sell drugs to their families. And now it’s the kids. It breaks my heart.’

Having grown up in Newcastle, in a poor part of the city, he said that the situation had never been worse. The government and social services didn’t even ‘scratch the surface’ of the huge drug-abuse problem. He said he’d called ambulances on multiple occasions after finding men overdosed on fentanyl outside his office building. Many in positions of authority in the area either denied there was a major drug problem, or refused to invest in enough services to help the growing numbers of people suffering from alcohol and drug abuse. The number of young Britons who drank heavily or to excess had fallen since the early 2000s — 25 per cent of 16–24-year-olds in a 2018 study classified themselves as non-drinkers — although overall numbers for some older populations continued to increase.

Governments and local councils had slashed their budgets in recent years. According to the BBC, £162 million had been cut from treatment budgets since 2013–2014. The UK Addiction Treatment Centres said that these cuts were killing people, because long-term residential facilities were being replaced with cheaper community-based services. The BBC found that councils that had reduced support for drug and alcohol treatment experienced a rise in drug-related deaths.2 Nearly 60 per cent of local authorities slashed budgets for alcohol-related services in 2018 and 2019 due to government cuts. Release, Britain’s only charity that provides a free legal and advice service to drug users, released figures in 2019 showing that local authorities in the country had only supplied take-home naloxone to 34 per cent of opioid users in 2017 and 2018. (Naloxone can reverse a deadly opioid overdose.) The other 66 per cent’s lives were deemed expendable.

Austerity policies led to a massive slashing of public services, with devastating effects. The British Medical Journal assessed in 2017 that severe cuts since 2010 had led to 120,000 excess deaths, mostly in the over-sixties and home-care communities, largely due to reductions in nursing numbers. By 2019, life expectancy for men and women had dropped by six months in England and Wales. The United Nations special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, released a report in 2018 that found austerity had entrenched ‘high levels of poverty’ and inflicted ‘unnecessary misery in one of the richest countries in the world’.

Mark Tunney had a colourful past himself, and a tough look, with tattoos on both arms, and a crew cut. He had taken and dealt drugs from a young age. At the time, he wore it as a badge of honour — ‘because of the environment I was living in, which was quite a deprived area, it was very much an ego boost. I’m one of the guys now, I’ve got a criminal record’ — but the effect on his life had been horrific. He had been unable to get any work that wasn’t connected to the field of recovery because of a long charge sheet that included drug dealing, assault, and shoplifting. ‘Every single crime I ever did was related to drugs’, he told me. He was now 48 years old, and his last 13 years had been free of any drugs or alcohol. From the age of 13 until he was 34, he had taken anything he could get his hands on.

In Jigsaw’s common room, open every day of the week, at-risk youth relaxed, received lessons in finding work by applying on the internet-connected computer (where only porn was blocked), played computer games, and hung out in a safe space. On the whiteboard was a piece of paper headed ‘King Baby’, explaining a common personality type that included people who sought ‘approval of others and sacrificed their own identity’.

Tunney was overwhelmed with the problems his city faced, but he knew who to blame. ‘I think the biggest problem we have in this country at the moment, and they’ve had it for a very long time, is that we punish people who use drugs’, he said. He argued that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 should be abolished, because it had led to the needless arresting and stigmatising of generations of people for possessing or using drugs. ‘It’s really killing people’, Tunney said. ‘Out of the seven people I grew up using with, I’m the only one that’s still left alive.’ The rest had died from heroin overdoses.

He despaired at the way in which British society spoke to young people about illicit substances, sending mixed messages to them. ‘We don’t tell our young people to stop using drugs’, he said. ‘You’re going to need to be able to work and have a relationship. You’re going to need to be able to cook your kids a meal. Instead of making drugs your life, make drugs part of your life.’

The most confronting stories I heard were from two sex workers, Jill and Patricia, both in their thirties, who worked in the industry to fund their serious heroin use. Although they received support from local authorities, the economic crisis in the area worsened both their personal situations and their need for drugs. The meeting was organised by Nicola Quarnby, Durham police’s ‘dedicated liaison officer’ in adult sexual exploitation.

Every city and town had sex workers — it wasn’t unique to Newcastle — but the north-east of Britain was especially positioned to suffer because of a dramatic decline in support services to it over the last years. In this way, the drug war found new victims whose backgrounds, poor families, and economic positions increased the likelihood of them suffering trauma from drug abuse. The area was also hit with a major sex-grooming network that operated between 2007 and 2015, where 700 girls and women were abused and raped. The gang targeted the most deprived areas of Newcastle.

Jill used heroin daily, wore heavy make-up and a black Nike tracksuit, and told me how her son had been taken away from her many years before. He lived with her mother, although she saw him weekly. She said she couldn’t give up heroin, though it didn’t produce the buzz it used to years ago, as it got her through the day. She slept with many men, but didn’t want to; she had to get money to score from dealers, who were often violent. She had recently overdosed, had aneurysms on her back, and said that she ‘nearly lost limbs’ due to her drug taking. Both women were likely high when we met — they said they used heroin multiple times daily — but we had a cogent conversation.

Jill had been using heroin for ten years; her child’s father had got her hooked, but she thought that her male clients didn’t know that she was a drug user. ‘I think if they found out that they were funding my drug use, it would absolutely stop’, she said. ‘Because I’m using that much, I’ve got such a high tolerance to it now. What it’s really doing is just stopping me from feeling unwell rather than making us high. I would have to take an awful lot now for it to get the effect I ever had when I first took it.’

Jill’s view of men was unsurprisingly negative — ‘A lot of them treat women like the olden days, like second-class citizens’ — and she said that she was uninterested in having a boyfriend and believed that no man would accept her work. She was a qualified dental nurse, but told me that after being sexually abused when working in that profession many years before, she quit and started dancing in a club. Sex work came later. The financial realities of living near Newcastle meant that she could dance on the weekend and triple the money she made working a nine-to-five job during the week. For her, the decision was easy.

The day after we met, Nicola, the local police officer, messaged to give me more details about Jill and Patricia, and filled in what they had left out:

What I am sure of, as we were talking and laughing and they hid it well, is that they actually hate what they do and hate themselves for doing it. I have seen in particular Jill take calls from clients be really nice on the phone and then break down, loathing that she does this to feed her addiction. The only way I can describe it is that they take calls from people whom they do not know, make the appointment, mostly have unprotected sex as ‘bareback’ is preferred and they can get more money, then move onto the next appointment.

Can you imagine having some stranger inside you who you don’t fancy, or like, 8–15 times a day? It is brutal. Equally when we were discussing the victim’s side of the drugs, some of the girls steal from elderly clients. Knowing that this is a hidden subject, most of the sex workers are victims of serious physical rapes and beatings and do not report this to police. I can say that most of the people I work with all have elements of trauma, mental health, and addiction.

~

Britain eventually fell victim to the prohibitionist mindset that devoured so many other allies of Washington. In the 19th century, drugs had been widely available and used with little controversy. Opium, cocaine, and arsenic were available at pharmacies, and beer in pubs could be laced with opium to protect customers against malaria. Queen Victoria liked opium, and used cocaine gum with a young Winston Churchill. Opium dens existed in London — although they were more often the creation of imaginative writers — and while the Pharmacy Act of 1868 attempted to restrict opium, it had little effect on its use.3

The rigid class system was never far away from public attitudes towards mind-altering substances. Marek Kohn, author of Dope Girls: the birth of the British drug underground, explained that opium became known as a ‘downer’ drug, but cocaine was an ‘upper’, explaining why the Sherlock Holmes character injected cocaine. This, Kohn wrote, was because, at the time, cocaine was for ‘brainy, highly strung people’ who required constant stimulation.4 Implicit in such stories were ideas around the kind of people who took and could afford the drug.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that serious attempts were made to control and stigmatise drug users and the drugs themselves. Cocaine and opium were still legal in Britain when World War I began, but soon after its end, the country introduced the Dangerous Drugs Act 1920. Alcohol, widely consumed by the population from all classes, was viewed as harmful, and restrictions were placed on it (although it arguably did little to change the nation’s drinking culture).

The media started introducing a moralising tone to its coverage of drugs, akin to what was happening in the US and Australia in the same period. This began a long campaign of constantly evolving panics over drugs and what they were doing to the minds and bodies of the young, especially white women. As in Australia, the Chinese were blamed for entrapping young women and forcing them to take cocaine. Once again, in the public imagination, white women were given no agency and supposedly had no ability to resist.

This was a convenient myth about ethnic minorities, and helped propel a dangerous stereotype that lasted into the 21st century. The police watchdog, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, released a report in 2017 that black people were less likely to be found with drugs on them than white people, though were more than eight times more likely to be stopped and searched.5

Although there was never really a drug scene in Britain until the 1960s — it was largely used by a select few in London — the media and politicians created an impression of degenerate celebrities divorced from reality and shunning the proper morals of the day. The 1960s changed the equation entirely, with masses of young people using cannabis, LSD, cocaine, and heroin. Washington pressured Britain to try to restrict the exploding drug scene and forced Westminster to enact the Drugs (Regulation of Misuse) Act 1964, which soon gave police the power to search people for illicit drugs and to make them subject to criminal sentences.

The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 was ‘the stupidest and most ineffective ever passed by Parliament’, wrote British journalist Simon Jenkins in 2013. The act criminalised heroin and ‘handed the queue and Britain’s entire drugs trade over to the world’s racketeers, crooks, and desperadoes. It was the greatest-ever act of denationalisation. The drugs market soared, and untold human misery with it.’6

The law remains in place, despite the overwhelming evidence of its failure to control the flow and use of drugs. But that was never the real intention. The act split drugs into three categories, and designated penalties for possessing or supplying various drugs from heroin to cannabis. Following Washington’s lead, Britain wanted to find ways to control society — largely the underclass, the economically vulnerable, and minorities — under the guise of keeping the population safe. Using that flawed definition, Britain could claim success.

A 1973 cover story in the Observer magazine aimed to reveal the reality of drugs, explaining to its readers that the bulk of users, who took cannabis, heroin, methadone, and morphine, were ‘mainly young, mainly male, mainly white, mainly working-class’. It went on using words that could have been written today: ‘For the lonely or inadequate, another basis of addiction is the need to belong … In their moments of truth, 99 per cent of dependents would admit they want to be part of our world, not stuck with their own.’7

By the 1980s, heroin use had soared, as had HIV infections. Needle-exchange programs became widespread and helped stop a major epidemic. This was the decade when Britain’s party culture went mainstream, with ecstasy becoming the drug of choice in the country’s burgeoning club scene. Governments of both major stripes, Labour and the Conservatives, pursued politics that talked about increased treatment of problem drug users. Funding did increase from the 1990s to the late 2000s, but the language of law enforcement was ubiquitous in seeking to crack down on what officials claimed was an epidemic of drug-related crime related to the party scene. The tabloid media happily played along, despite many of their own readers (and journalists) consuming illegal substances. Hypocrisy was never an impediment to front-page outrage.

Britain fought its drug war with a combination of aggression and caution. While it was no longer an imperial power, despite the wishes of politicians and activists who longed for a supposedly golden age of benevolent empire, both major parties, when in power, largely accepted the view that a war had to be fought on the most vulnerable drug users at home. London often supported Washington’s drug-war rhetoric and policies — particularly evidenced by prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of US president Ronald Reagan during the 1980s and his war against Central America — but Britain mainly caused damage to its domestic population.

And yet none of this was sustainable. Many police officers, politicians, and conservative media-commentators continued to demonise drugs and the citizens who took them, but as Mixmag, Britain’s clubbing magazine bible, wrote in 2014, the world was no longer in the grip of a 1960s-style moral panic over drugs. ‘When the daughters of police, politicians, and journalists started to take ecstasy’, it explained, ‘drug users began to be seen in an entirely new light by those in authority; they were not drug fiends, they were just teenagers having fun.’8

During the years that Labour was in power, from 1996 until 2010 under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Britain continued to fight the drug war with a variety of justifications. Arrests soared, and young people were stigmatised regardless of whether they used cannabis or heroin — two drugs with vastly different effects. In 1997, Blair announced that he wanted to ‘breathe new life into the battle against drugs. We will hit hard on drugs and the drugs trade.’ By 2004, his rhetoric had increased, and he announced a new policy that promised harsher sentences for anybody who dealt drugs near schools. To show how serious he was, Blair took a drug test for cocaine and heroin at a police station in Slough. It was negative.

Blair took a conventional view on drugs — any leniency sent a ‘wrong message’ to young people who might be considering using them — and ramped up the threats. Yet his government knew it was all for show. A secret report leaked in 2005 found that police needed to seize 60–80 per cent of drugs in the country for there to be any tangible effect on drug flows, and yet they’d never achieved a seizure rate higher than 20 per cent.9

Blair understood the power of tabloid scares. In 2004, after consulting with police and experts, his government reclassified marijuana from a Class B to a Class C drug, rendering it akin to anabolic steroids and prescription antibiotics. But then his government threatened to de-reclassify it as a Class B drug, despite the scientific community and the government’s own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) warning this was a bad idea that was likely to increase the use of cannabis. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, ignored the advice and changed the classification in 2008; his home secretary, Jacqui Smith, claimed it was to ‘protect the public’. Jail sentences for possessing the drug rose from two to five years.

The most insightful person on this period is David Nutt, a leading British neuro-psychopharmacologist with vast experience in researching drugs and how they affect the mind. After having been appointed in 2008 as chairman of the ACMD, he was fired by Labour the next year for daring to suggest that ecstasy use was just as safe as horse riding, and for advocating a more sensible classification of drugs. ‘It turns out that horse riding, particularly if you jump, is more dangerous than taking ecstasy’, Nutt told me. ‘The government went hysterical because I was challenging one of the prime pillars of the British establishment, that horse riding is a good thing.’

He showed with scientific research that alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous than cannabis, ecstasy, and LSD, and therefore argued that all drugs should be treated legally in order of the harm they did. He said that ‘the obscenity of hunting down low-level cannabis users to protect them is beyond absurd’, and argued that the reclassification of cannabis to a Class B drug was politically motivated. His honesty was greeted with dismissal.

In a 2011 blog post, Nutt condemned Blair for having classified magic mushrooms as one of the most dangerous drugs in 2005 — before then, the drug was legal — despite not consulting with the ACMD. ‘By no metric are mushrooms as harmful as the real Class A drugs such as crack cocaine and heroin’, he wrote.10 Nutt had become one of Britain’s most outspoken and informed critics of the drug war, arguing that harsh laws that targeted users didn’t reduce harm and, if anything, ‘it may be actually aggravating harm from alcohol’.11

During a long conversation I had with Nutt where he now worked as a professor at Imperial College London, he told me that, ever since the 2000s, Blair and Brown had ‘decided that they had to get the right-wing press onside, so they started becoming hard on cannabis’. Nutt said that a key reason why Brown reclassified cannabis was a secret deal he’d struck with the conservative Daily Mail newspaper. The Mail had supported Hitler, Mussolini, and British fascists in the 1930s.

Nutt alleged that the-then editor of the Mail, Paul Dacre, told Brown that he would back him if he reduced the top rate of income tax from 50 per cent to 45 per cent and put a cap on immigration. Brown, desperate to win the 2010 election, agreed — but still lost to the Tories, led by David Cameron. Brown regularly hammered cannabis in the public debate, Nutt said. ‘Then they started really attacking cannabis users. That’s where it all changed. Since then, it’s all been politics. Harm reduction is out the window.’

I can’t independently verify Nutt’s claim — there’s little on the public record about this secret meeting, with no notes taken between Dacre and Brown — but he’s a respected figure with a history of telling unpopular truths.

‘When you go into British politics’, Nutt explained, ‘the first thing every department does every morning is see what the Mail has said about them. It’s hugely powerful.’ The Mail continues to push an anti-drug agenda, despite the harms associated with it. A front-page story in 2019 was headlined, ‘Cannabis Surrender: police chief [from the West Midlands] admits his officers won’t even warn users’.

Nutt was leading the research on Alcosynth, a synthetic alcohol that didn’t produce any of the side effects of traditional alcohol. The drink would still provide a buzz, but without leading to hangovers or contributing to failing health.

The Daily Mail isn’t the only relevant paper in Britain. Rupert Murdoch’s The Times editorialised in 2016 that all drugs in Britain should be decriminalised as a first step towards legalisation and regulation.12 It was a rare position for a major newspaper to take. The last similar media initiative was The Independent on Sunday in 1997 pushing for the decriminalisation of cannabis (although ten years later it reversed its position, saying that the strength of skunk marijuana and its connections to mental-health problems justified the change of heart). The self-described liberal Guardian was also cautious, only supporting cannabis decriminalisation in 2016.13 But in 2019, after Mexican drug lord El Chapo was found guilty in a New York court, the newspaper called for a continuation of the war on drugs and for there to be no ‘surrender’ in fighting it. Because ‘cocaine, like alcohol, and unlike heroin or marijuana, has no recognised therapeutic role’, the Guardian pushed for a kinder, gentler drug war along unspecified lines. ‘The war on drugs must be fought’, it concluded.14

Britain doesn’t suffer from American levels of drug-related incarceration, but huge numbers of people still languish in the criminal-justice system. Those in prison for drug offences are overwhelmingly there for having supplied illegal substances. In 2016, 102,000 people were cautioned, sentenced, given a penalty notice, or warned about using cannabis or khat (a plant with stimulating properties). Nine thousand of them were sent to jail. Nonetheless, in some parts of the country and for some groups — though often not minorities — police had unofficially decriminalised cannabis.

In recent times, the highest figure for drug-related offences were recorded in 2008–2009, with over 213,000 offences; in 2017–2018, the number dropped significantly to just over 109,000.15 The total population of the country was around 67 million. This showed a steady change in how the police approached drugs, even though the laws remained stuck in a different era. Despite these improvements, however, Britain and Wales had the highest incarceration rates in western Europe, many of which were drug-related.16

The Conservatives have maintained high levels of financial support for law enforcement and its war against drugs since taking office in 2010. Despite the Tories spending £1.6 billion annually on a drug strategy, an assessment of the government’s policies by Transform Drug Policy Foundation in 2017 found that it was ‘squandering’ any chance of success because the level of societal drug use had not reduced since the war began in 2010 when Theresa May was home secretary. Transform said that the policy hadn’t affected the availability of drugs, and was instead ‘harming the young and vulnerable through criminalising them’.

It concluded: ‘And for what? Drug use hasn’t fallen for eight years. More importantly, drug deaths have hit record levels for four years in a row. This document [a government audit showing that illegal drugs remain available] proves the ongoing commitment to drug war enforcement is not about new evidence — it is serving other political and ideological interests. It’s truly scandalous that the poor and vulnerable are dying as a result. The Government are responsible, and must be called to account.’17

One of the Tories’ ideas for tackling drug use was the introduction in 2016 of the Psychoactive Substances Act, which was sold as battling the new generation of dangerous drugs, including the previously legal synthetic cannabinoid, spice. Although such drugs could cause harm — deaths from spice in British prisons continued to rise — David Nutt blamed drug laws, because ‘these illegal drugs [spice] were created to get around prohibition of cannabis’. There was also a real risk that such drugs would be pushed underground.

Nutt said that the Psychoactive Substances Act had been lobbied for by ultra-conservative, puritanical, prohibitionist-style American activists who infiltrated British policy groups — such as the organisation co-founded by the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, called The Centre for Social Justice. ‘They would like to abolish all drugs, including alcohol’, Nutt said. ‘Obviously, they aren’t going to take on alcohol, and their attitude is that drugs are morally reprehensible.’

Duncan Smith’s vision for Britain was directly inspired by the darkest aspect of Washington’s drug war, and his views were respected in the Conservative government. His group released a report in 2018 that pushed for increased stop-and-search powers for police to tackle London crime. It advocated police stopping people without suspicion in areas that were deemed problematic. Unsurprisingly, this meant suburbs where minorities lived and worked.18

This US zero-tolerance style appealed to politicians and media commentators who talked about being ‘tough on crime and drugs’, but the overwhelming evidence from around the world was that such policies didn’t work. For example, a US justice department report on Baltimore in 2016 found that zero tolerance was a failure because it both shattered the relationship between police and the community, and African-Americans were disproportionately targeted to rack up statistics.

Amidst the daily political clamouring to fight a drug war that was guaranteed to fail, a rare voice of reason emerged in 2018. A former lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, who had known Tony Blair for decades and had served in senior roles in his government — including running the justice department between 2003 and 2007 — publicly apologised for his role in the war on drugs. His admitted that it had been a ‘tragic disaster’ for the poor in Britain and globally, and that the drug laws were ‘disproportionately enforced against black people’, and urged profound change:

‘We need to accept there are alternatives to policies that have failed so many working-class communities. We need to admit that we abandoned whole generations to the scourge of drug addiction. We need to confront our political failures and listen to those police chiefs pushing for saner policies.

‘Above all, we need to take back control of drug supply from the most violent gangsters. And it needs to be done sooner rather than later.’

Falconer wanted the Labour Party under ‘radical’ leader Jeremy Corbyn to ‘call for an end to the drug war and commit to the legal regulation of drug production and supply in its next manifesto … For much too long, the Labour Party has failed to engage with these issues and ended up following a stale consensus driven by right-wing Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.’19

~

Neil Woods worked as an undercover policeman between 1993 and 2007, and estimated that his work had contributed to drug criminals being put in prison for a combined total of 1,000 years. ‘Everything I did while undercover was a waste of time,’ he told Vice in 2014. ‘All I did was make the lives of the vulnerable more unbearable.’20

When Woods was growing up, he told me, his beliefs about drug and alcohol users were negative. With his views inspired by his parents and tabloid media, he believed that ‘people should only have so many chances’.

Now in his late forties, Woods explained that he gradually changed his views about his job, eventually seeing that he was contributing to the drug war getting worse and more futile.

Every morning, he would leave his wife and three young children, put on shabby clothes, and arrive in a new area such as Leicestershire, acting as a drug taker. He’d befriend dealers and gangsters with the sole aim of infiltrating, understanding, and eventually arresting them.

‘I justified what I was doing manipulating these people because I saw the end justified the means’, he said. ‘Their lives are going to be made worse by coming into contact with me. I gradually felt increasingly more guilty of that, but I always justified that position because at the end of the operation six months later I’d be capturing the local nastiest gangster.’

But after many years, Woods recognised one startling fact: ‘I was perpetually seeing organised crime getting more violent and it was literally down to the police tactics that were being used’, he told me. As he explained to The Guardian: ‘Every year the police get better at catching drug gangs, and the gangsters’ most effective way of fighting back is upping the use of fear and intimidation against potential informants. The most efficient way to stop people grassing them up is to be terrifying. In other words, organised-crime groups were getting nastier and nastier as a direct result of what I was doing.’21

This led to phenomena such as county lines being set up across the nation, where children, some as young as 11, were sent to provincial areas by gangs to sell Class A drugs. The National Crime Agency estimated in 2018 that there were more than 1,000 lines across Britain. The profits accruing from them for criminal gangs were estimated at £500 million annually.

What Woods described was the side of the drug war that its most passionate supporters didn’t discuss or acknowledge, preferring to trade in platitudes about fighting back against drug-traffickers. Woods shared his insights with his colleagues, especially after he left undercover work, but they were generally unresponsive. ‘They just basically fell back on, “Well, what can we do about it? All we can do is keep going. You’ve just got to keep locking them up.” None of them were willing to talk or to even consider any other way of doing things.’

Unsurprisingly, Woods developed PTSD. ‘I was haunted by the memories, really intense memories, of people who I had manipulated, and people whose lives had been made distinctly worse as a result of contact with me.’

After writing a memoir in 2016 about his work as an undercover policeman, Good Cop, Bad Cop, he was initially shunned by many former colleagues, but said that in recent years more police were accepting his way of thinking about the pointlessness of the drug war. He became deeply involved in an organisation called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which had been started in the US but was growing internationally, of former and serving police, military, and intelligence officers who opposed the war on drugs because they’d seen the damage it caused.

Like many police with whom I spoke for this book, Woods had clear views about how Britain should regulate drugs. He opposed the ‘capitalist free-for-all’ taking place across the US as a result of marijuana being legalised (many UK cannabis investors wanted to follow suit, however, and they told me so). He preferred the model in Uruguay, where the key aim was to remove the black market and institute a health-based approach.

Woods wanted his country to follow Switzerland, where heroin was prescribed for problem addiction, but he would encourage authorities to be ‘far, far more liberal’ than that European nation. ‘If someone has a problem with it [heroin], remove them from the exploitation of organised crime and provide them with the heroin in a completely non-judgemental way … There isn’t a drug out there that wouldn’t be made safer by regulation.’

Even the British Medical Journal agreed, editorialising in 2018 that it now supported ‘efforts to legalise, regulate, and tax the sale of drugs for recreational and medicinal use’.22

Woods was an optimist, and thought that British drug laws would inevitably liberalise, because a growing number of politicians, police, and the general public were demanding it — ranging from establishing drug-consumption rooms to unofficially decriminalising the possession of small quantities of drugs.

This was the position of campaigning police chief Mike Barton, who headed the Durham police force in north-eastern England. He exploded into national consciousness after the Observer newspaper led its front page in 2013 with a story headlined: ‘Time to end the war on drugs, says top UK police chief’. Barton said that all Class A drugs should be decriminalised and that the National Health Service (NHS) should allow those with drug dependency to access them.

‘In my force area, we have 43 organised-crime groups on our radar’, he wrote. ‘Most have their primary source of income in illicit drug supply, all of them are involved in some way. These criminals are often local heroes and role models for young people who covet their wealth. Decriminalising their commodity will immediately cut off their income stream and destroy their power.’

The-then Conservative prime minister David Cameron, who before his time as leader had spoken critically about the drug war, condemned its futility, and voted to consider the legalisation and regulation of drugs, came out against Barton’s suggestion. ‘Drug policy has been failing for decades’, Cameron said in 2005 before he became prime minister. Back in the day, Cameron was far more sensible, and would have seen the benefit of Barton’s thinking.

Barton said that Cameron’s change of heart was because he was a ‘coward’ and ‘scared of the Daily Mail’. He admitted that his own views, while increasingly shared by his colleagues, were still rare in the police force.23 In June 2018, Barton called for the legalisation of cannabis and said his force would not arrest people in his area who grew marijuana plants for their personal use.

During an interview at Durham police headquarters, Barton told me that his philosophy, which he acknowledged was paternalistic, was that ‘we target the bad and not the sad’. With over 1,700 registered heroin consumers in the Durham area and around 1,200 police officers, he said that, ‘I don’t even have as many cops as registered drug addicts in the county. Even if they just man-to-man mapped the registered heroin addicts who are popping up, they couldn’t do any other work. It’s just futile for people to think that law enforcement can prevent drug addiction.’ Barton instructed his force not to prosecute drug users who sold heroin to fellow users.

Barton spoke with the authority of a man who had spent his professional life around law enforcement. He peppered our conversation with humour, but his ideas were deadly serious. ‘I’ve been involved in policing now since 1980, and drugs are cheaper, stronger, more freely available, and more dangerous than they ever have been. And I’ve been throwing the kitchen sink at this for 38 years. Any sane individual would say, “I wonder if I might have to have a rethink of our approach here.”’

I asked Barton if he’d ever taken illicit drugs — I asked Neil Woods the same question, and he had, because it was an unavoidable part of being an undercover policeman when working against the drug-trade — and he said that he had not. ‘I’m curious about cocaine’, he said, ‘but I’ll never take it because I’m sort of hardwired to behave.’

There were few public critics of Barton’s moves, although Peter Hitchens, a columnist for the Daily Mail, was one of them. He didn’t mention Durham or Barton by name, but regularly railed against society’s growing liberal attitudes towards drugs. In a 2017 column, he wrote that, ‘In secondary schools, illegal drug abuse is now more common than cigarette-smoking. Could this have something to do with the fact that the police (busy painting their nails) long ago stopped enforcing the law against drug possession?’24

Sometimes the police and authorities tried to pierce the bubble of middle-class drug takers, but in the process overlooked wider realities. The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, condemned cocaine users in 2018 for ignoring the gross abuses required in getting cocaine to them. ‘There is this challenge that there are a whole group of middle-class — or whatever you want to call them — people who will sit round … happily think about global warming and fair trade, and environmental protection and all sorts of things, organic food, but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine’, she said. ‘Well, there is; there’s misery throughout the supply chain.’ London mayor Sadiq Khan argued similarly that ‘middle-class parties’ where cocaine was bought and consumed fuelled violence in the city.

Unfortunately, they both ignored the wider supply chain in South America and Africa — the source and transport routes of the drug — where the trade inflicted its greatest damage. The wrong response came from Conservative home secretary Sajid Javid, who announced in 2018 that his government would crack down on ‘middle-class’ drug users, thereby once again criminalising sellers and buyers. The problem with these responses from politicians was that it should be possible to argue both that drug users created victims and that legalising and regulating drugs would hugely reduce the number of victims. It was also wrong to suggest that it was only the middle class using cocaine: the rich, poor, and many in-between snorted the drug. Cocaine was now more popular in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, and hospital admissions for cocaine abuse in Britain had never been higher. The Albanian mafia controlled the £5 billion annual cocaine trade, and ran much of Europe’s drug industry. One Western diplomat claimed that the country had become a narco-state, the ‘Colombia of Europe’.25

With 875,000 people between the ages of 16 and 59 taking powdered cocaine in 2017 and 2018, according to Home Office figures, Britons rarely thought about where their drugs came from. It was a damning indictment that it needed activists to remind them. A rare article about the supply chain, in the London Telegraph, brutally explained how ‘the lives of the farmers [in Colombia] are a near-constant misery, in ways the average cocaine user in Britain couldn’t fathom’. The journalist interviewed a London cocaine user, and she had no idea about any of it. ‘I had never really put too much thought into how it got here, just how I can get it’, she said.26

Despite public opinion shifting quickly in favour of drug reform, Mike Barton was still an outlier in his profession for being so public about his views. However, the former Metropolitan police chief Bernard Hogan-Howe, a long-time critic of marijuana, suggested a government review of cannabis prohibition in 2018, and said it was likely that legalisation would come. Nonetheless, Barton wasn’t alone. From 2019, the National Police Chiefs’ Council allowed individual chief constables to decide whether to arrest a person with cannabis, warn them, or just release them. Increasingly, the aim was to urge treatment, rather than prosecution, for young people. By 2019, police in a number of areas across the country no longer arrested and charged users with personal amounts of controlled substances, but instead directed them towards education and treatment. Vince O’Brien, the head of operations for drugs, firearms, and other commodities for the National Crime Agency, publicly admitted that the availability of illegal drugs would remain high, perhaps even rise, because demand was so strong.

I asked Arfon Jones, the Police and Crime Commissioner for North Wales Police, a man with 30 years’ experience as a police officer until 2008, and an increasingly prominent voice on drug reform, why so few heads of police were more outspoken. ‘Chief Constables feel uncomfortable about allowing people to break the law’, he said. ‘To which I say, “You should be feeling uncomfortable about the high numbers of people who are dying because of the state’s inaction.”’ An ITV/YouGov poll in 2018 found that 75 per cent of Welsh respondents believed that the drug war had failed to reduce drug use.

Jones took an evidence-based approach to societal drug use, and knew that more than 90 per cent of people who took illegal drugs were recreational users and caused no harm to others. He wanted the criminal-justice system to target individuals who hurt other people. He supported the cannabis groups that dotted the country, and had visited the Teesside Cannabis Club that fell under the jurisdiction of the Durham police force — and said it was safe, because only marijuana was consumed (though members had to bring their own drugs). He wanted more set up across the nation.

As a result, Jones advocated selling cannabis in licensed premises, akin to alcohol, giving problematic users the ability to access their drug of choice on prescription, and enabling recreational users of heroin and cocaine to purchase their drugs from highly regulated pharmacies. He told me that organised crime wouldn’t suddenly disappear if his vision were implemented, but the aim was to reduce the power and reach of the black market.

~

Crispin Blunt is a conservative politician who was head of prisons and probations at the Ministry of Justice from 2010 until 2012 in David Cameron’s government. He’s one of Britain’s most outspoken politicians advocating drug-law reform. He served in the army between 1979 and 1990, and entered parliament in 1997 representing Surrey.

In a remarkable speech given in 2016 to neo-liberal think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, Blunt admitted that he had been discouraged during his time in government from asking critical questions about the government’s drug policy:

It always had occurred to me that drugs misuse was obviously a major driver of demand in the criminal justice system. When I then asked the department to tell me just how much did drugs cost the criminal justice system, remarkably, answer came there none. In a ministerial discussion, I was told that it might be singularly unpolitic to pose this question because it might unpick the Government’s entire drugs strategy and any suggestion that the criminalisation in the UK should be challenged would then begin an exercise of unpicking drugs law and sending the wrong message.27

Blunt expanded on these insights during an interview with me, and said that he sensed at the time that the Home Office didn’t seem capable of or interested in doing any robust analysis on what the end of prohibition in Britain would look like. As result, the status quo remained. ‘One of the saddest things I would see in my time as prisons minister — I visited 70 prisons — would be the queue of emaciated men queuing up to get their methadone’, he said. ‘With the nurse making sure that they swallowed it in front of them so they couldn’t trade it in the prison.’

The Home Office acknowledged in a 2014 report that it knew prohibition was futile, and yet it would do nothing to change the law: ‘We did not in our fact-finding [in Portugal] observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession and levels of drug use in that country.’

The former deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg said that there had been an ‘endless wrangle’ between his party and the Tories about what part of the 2014 report would be made publicly available. He said that the then prime minister Theresa May and her colleagues wouldn’t budge.

‘I think part of the problem is that for some of them [he named former prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne] when you say drugs to them, they think of Notting Hill dinner parties’, he said. ‘They think it is all a slightly naughty recreational secret. They don’t think of whole countries, like Colombia, that has been brought to its knees. They don’t think of some very unscrupulous criminal gangs who are preying on people who we should be protecting rather than chucking in jail.’28

Clegg was articulating the class nature of the drug debate. This was too rarely discussed in Britain, where certain drugs — including ecstasy, cocaine, and LSD (for middle-class people wanting to expand their minds) — were increasingly tolerated, and even accepted, in some circles, while others — such as heroin, crack, and spice — were frowned upon. This was the whispered and unofficial argument: party drugs were fun and medicinal in the 21st century, especially if the user was white, but hard drugs were hurting poor people and turned them into criminals that the state had to control.

Nonetheless, although illegal raves in London were soaring, and clubs and pubs were ill-equipped to deal with rising deaths related to ecstasy and cocaine, the government still did little to address the crisis; for them, closing down ‘problematic’ venues was the solution. It was a head in-the-sand policy. It took groups such as The Loop, dedicated to harm reduction, to provide pill testing at music festivals and to launch pop-up drug-testing sites in major British cities. Growing numbers of universities were also providing easy access to pill-testing kits. Even the Home Office finally agreed in 2019 to license its first drug-checking service in Somerset, where users could check their illegal substances without fear of arrest.

Blunt had described his party’s position on drugs as having ‘ceased to be based on the evidence’. He opposed the 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act, claiming it was ‘fantastically stupid’, and admitted to using alkyl nitrites, also known as poppers. ‘I was astonished to find that it’s proposed they be banned and, frankly, so were very many gay men’, he said.

Blunt used cannabis for the first time in 2018, eating ten milligrams of THC pills and walking around San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum with his partner. He didn’t enjoy it. ‘I didn’t like it very much because everything slowed down’, he told The Strangler. ‘For a politician to feel a loss of control is rather alarming,’ Blunt said. ‘So I don’t quite get what all the fuss is about.’29 But this experience had no impact on his belief that drugs should be widely available through a regulatory system.

I asked Blunt how he squared his views with those of the wider Conservative Party, where such public talk was incredibly rare. Blunt argued that his political party used to be more open, and he thought it could be again. ‘The party I joined had the flag of freedom, the torch of freedom, as its logo’, he said. ‘Personal responsibility, personal freedom, and taking responsibility for those decisions is central to what I would see as the politics of the centre-right. I would certainly describe myself as a small “l” liberal conservative. Socially liberal, fiscally liberal, and protecting and enhancing the nation’s institutions are central to my outlook, not least as a product of one of those institutions being the army.’

He admitted that the then prime minister, Theresa May, wasn’t going to change the drug laws. She was a strong supporter of DrugFAM, set up by one of her constituents, Elizabeth Burton-Phillips, who had lost one of her identical-twin sons to heroin. May shared her views on continuing to fight the drug war, and the party struggled to tackle the issue sensibly. Drugs minister Victoria Atkins, who opposed cannabis, had a husband who managed a company, British Sugar, that grew non-psychoactive cannabis. The hypocrisy of the Conservative Party was laid bare when frontbencher Michael Gove admitted in 2019 that he’d used cocaine in the 1990s and yet his own party backed harsh penalties for that very behaviour.

However, former Tory leader William Hague disagreed, pushing for cannabis legalisation in 2018, and said that trying to stop people smoking marijuana was ‘about as up to date and relevant as asking the army to recover the empire’.

Blunt said that the 2017 election, in which May barely scraped back into power, was a ‘clusterfuck’ because the Tories arrogantly believed that ‘the electorate weren’t going to be so stupid as to do anything other than give [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn an enormous political bath’.

Blunt claimed that his party was looking to better appeal to young people. ‘It might be an idea to actually have a policy that protects them rather better from the health implications of their inevitable drug use, as they want to go to music festivals, go clubbing, and use drugs like ecstasy and the rest. If we’re killing a regular number of them because they don’t know what they’re buying and it’s criminally supplied, then I think that’s an argument we ought to be able to make as to why we’re going to make them safer.’ Blunt was one of the British parliament’s most vocal backers of medical marijuana.

Despite the country’s draconian views on cannabis for its own citizens, the UN found in 2018 that Britain was the world’s biggest producer of the drug for export for medical and scientific purposes. After a number of high-profile cases in 2018, when parents couldn’t get access to medical marijuana for their epileptic children, the Conservative government relented and allowed doctors to prescribe the drug. This change had a profound effect on public opinion towards cannabis. In May 2018, only 43 per cent supported legalisation, according to a Populus poll; by October 2018, two-thirds of Britons backed it.

Blunt looked at the experiences of Portugal, where drug decriminalisation occurred in 2001, and favoured Britain examining going down the same route. ‘Even if you get halfway in terms of decriminalisation, you don’t even go the whole way in terms of ending prohibition and getting to a proper licence-regulated place’, he said. ‘Consumption drops, and the public-health consequences get better. This would appear to be a win-win on a rather impressive scale, and you take a half-a-trillion-dollar business out of the hands of organised crime, you put it into the legal environment, and you tax it.’ Development group Health Poverty Action released a report in 2018 that advocated legalising cannabis because it would provide extra tax revenue in the billions of pounds annually to the under-funded National Health Service.

Blunt wanted a royal commission to help build an evidence-based approach to examining prohibition globally and in Britain, so that politicians wouldn’t simply mouth the usual platitudes that ‘drugs are bad and they are banned’. He was relentless in his commitment to the issue. In 2019, after the NHS reported a large increase in under-19s being admitted to hospital in 2018 with severe disorders caused by cannabis, he called for the legalisation of the drug to reduce the influence of criminal gangs and to regulate the potency of marijuana products on the market. King’s College London released the biggest study of its kind in 2019, which found that constant pot-smoking and high-potency varieties caused increased mental-health problems, including psychosis in some users.

No politicians I spoke to mentioned the central role that London financial institutions played in laundering drug money. Europe’s biggest bank, HSBC, paid a US$1.9 billion fine in 2012 after it was found to have allowed Mexican drug cartels to launder hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the world’s experts in the field of drug-trafficking, Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, said that, ‘Mexico is its heart, and London is its head.’ Little action was ever taken politically because, Saviano argued, much of the laundered money was used for election campaigns in Britain.30

Blunt was part of an unofficial grouping in the British parliament that was pushing for changes in the country’s drug war. Labour MP Paul Flynn was another long-time outspoken advocate, especially on the subject of cannabis. He told me that he’d never personally taken drugs, but the current laws were an ‘astonishingly stupid, wasteful policy which kills people and ruins lives’.

In a 2015 column for The Mirror newspaper, advocating the legalisation of cannabis, Flynn wrote that a ‘50-year experiment in drug prohibition has been a disaster and is crumbling worldwide. In 1971, the UK had fewer than a 1,000 heroin and cocaine users. After 45 years of the harshest drugs policies in Europe we have 320,000.’31

Flynn, elected in 1987 to represent Newport West in Wales, urged people to ‘break the law’, to smoke cannabis in parliament and to see how the government reacted. He was advocating the legalisation of medical marijuana at the time, and admitted to having made a cup of cannabis tea on the House of Commons terrace years before for a woman who was a multiple sclerosis sufferer and died in 2011. Flynn despaired that his own party had ‘not got a policy’ on drugs that satisfied him. He didn’t see much courage within Labour ranks to seriously tackle drug-policy reform, although a colleague, Labour MP David Lammy, had criticised the failure of British politicians to address drug laws that perpetuated the status quo.32 Flynn died in 2019.

Fellow Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire entered parliament in 2015 for Bristol West. She urged policy-makers to consider allowing the sale of ecstasy, cannabis, and other drugs over the counter in a regulated manner, and wanted far more labelling on alcoholic beverages because of its potential danger to society.

Debbonaire’s thinking about drugs was partly influenced by what she saw in her own constituency. She told me that drug use was destroying the public’s ability to enjoy their lives, because heroin was being injected in apartment buildings, used syringes were being left in parks, and drug takers were defecating and having sex in public. One of the main reasons she backed the trialling of drug-consumption rooms was to help people use the drugs in clinically supervised situations and get them ‘off my constituents’ stairwells’. ‘I hate drug dealers, they put misery in my constituency’, she said. ‘I want to bust their business model.’

Debbonaire took a novel approach to fighting substance abuse by going after liquor companies. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, she returned to work healthy, but in 2016 she discovered the dangerous connections between alcohol and cancer of the breast, liver, colon, rectum, oropharynx, larynx, and oesophagus. A survey by Cancer Research UK in 2018 found that only one in ten Britons knew the cancer risks of drinking alcohol, although a majority of respondents supported placing a cancer warning on the labels of alcoholic beverages.33 Debbonaire stopped drinking after having fallen victim to cancer and wanting to reduce her risk of getting the disease again.

She saw far greater dangers in drinking than drugs, simply due to the sheer number of people who consumed the former compared with the latter (although she stressed to me how dangerous many drugs could be for society). ‘The two most dangerous drugs — alcohol and tobacco — are both entirely legal,’ she told The Guardian. She didn’t want to be seen as a nanny-state ideologue, but condemned how normal drinking was in the halls of parliament. ‘I’m concerned that alcohol is built into the parliamentary way of working.’34

Debbonaire told me that the powerful alcohol lobby, which feared their product becoming as politically toxic as tobacco, with rates of consumption dropping, opposed any moves to have labels on drinks listing calories, ingredients, suggested limits, and cancer risks. She said that they had emailed her and contacted her on social media to send research that, they said, proved alcohol didn’t cause cancer. She had refused to meet their representatives.

In June 2018, Debbonaire partnered with fellow Labour MP Jeff Smith to launch the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform, a grouping established to draft forward-looking Labour drug-policy. Smith was a public backer of legalising cannabis. The duo wrote that the time was long overdue to have a ‘grown-up debate that focuses on how to tackle the organised-crime networks profiting from the drugs trade, how to ease the strain on our stretched public services, and how to reduce the risk to those who are suffering from addiction’.35

I asked Debbonaire if she had asked her Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, about his views on drug reform, and she said she ‘genuinely had no idea’ what he thought. She had long criticised Corbyn’s leadership. The Labour leadership was overly cautious historically, if not antagonistic, on the subject of drug-law reform; the party had condemned the Liberal Democrats during the 2015 election for being ‘soft on crime, drugs and thugs’ and advocating that imprisonment wasn’t suitable for drug users. In my view, it was a shameful position to take.

Labour under Corbyn remained unfocused on drugs, although there were more people in the party pushing for change than in the Conservatives. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said in 2018 that the drug war was a failure, but legalising cannabis for recreational use wasn’t on the agenda. Instead, she backed more treatment facilities for troubled drug takers — an important step, but hardly a satisfactory one.

~

I spent an afternoon with Wayne, a homeless man outside the King’s Cross station in central London. He lived with his dog, Tyson. He was 42 years old with a blond beard, puffy blue jacket, blue jeans and beanie, and black trainers. Wayne told me that most people who passed him every day didn’t want to even look at him. A friend in Newcastle, the drug-reform campaigner Fiona Gilbertson, connected us because she said I should meet Wayne to understand how police abused their powers and how it could nearly destroy a man.

Wayne was insightful, and a qualified drain installer. He had been homeless for five years, the result of his marriage collapsing after his ex-wife came out as gay. He admitted assaulting her, but said he was responding to her physical abuse. There was no justification for any assault by either Wayne or his ex-wife.

He discovered an old friend dead in his home after the man had killed his wife and two children and then committed suicide. These traumatic events led him to the streets in London, Brighton, and elsewhere in Britain. ‘I’m a polite, trustworthy, and honest person who loves his dog’, Wayne said.

He said that today he feared being inside, unsure how he’d cope with living in a house again under a roof. He had two children: an eight-year-old daughter whom he hadn’t seen in years because his mother looked after her and they didn’t get along, and an 18-year-old boy whom he saw a few times a year and with whom he had a decent relationship.

He had been offered some long-term accommodation during the harsh winter; but, apart from a few days when he was able to stay in a hotel, paid for by the Dogs on the Streets charity, he preferred to sleep in a car he had got the year before we met. He slept in it nightly, parked in King’s Cross, even though it was unregistered and covered daily in tickets that he’d never be able to pay. He feared it would be towed away.

The car provided at least a modicum of protection during the cold nights. In the depths of winters, though, Wayne said that the condensation dropped from the roof of the car onto his sleeping bag, often leaving it wet and impossible to dry. When it was cold, a number of local cafés would offer him free tea, and strangers sometimes gave him McDonald’s vouchers for food or coffee. Some even bought him a coffee.

He bought two grams of the synthetic cannabinoid spice every day. He found the money from begging. The drug cost around £5 for one gram, and his dealer was in Camden. Wayne smoked to ease his boredom, to pass the time, to feel a buzz, and to cope with his tough life. He was introduced to the drug when it was legal, before the 2016 Psychoactive Substances Act, but he soon realised he couldn’t stop.

He said everybody on the streets that he knew was on a substance: spice, marijuana, alcohol, or heroin. It was the only way, he said, that he could cope with life. When I asked why drugs were ubiquitous, he responded: ‘Try sitting in a yard from seven in the morning to nine in the evening. If you sat in one spot, not moving, just to go the toilet, and then come back with that question.’

‘It’s my comfort’, he said. ‘It’s my escape. It takes away any boredom, any shit feeling. Like weed does, or a pint of beer. You get stressed out, you go for a pint and chill out. When I get bored and pissed off being stuck here, I’ll have a [spice] joint, and I’m alright.’ He rolled and smoked a spice joint during some of our conversation, and remained lucid.

Wayne was battling a drug charge that he said had resulted from a set-up by the police, who were looking to meet their monthly arrest target. There was a real chance that he’d be sent to jail — a futile act for a man who had nothing left to lose. He said that he would smoke spice in prison to tackle the tedium. The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman said that synthetic drugs in prison were ‘completely out of control’. He was scared of being jailed, surrounded by four walls every day and night, and predicted that his mental health would deteriorate. Wayne hated the hypocrisy of police and judges abusing alcohol, drinking excessively, or drinking and driving, and yet arresting homeless people for alcohol abuse.

Spice looked like marijuana, but he said it was ten times stronger. (Research suggests that it’s up to 100 times stronger.) When he started smoking it a few years before, after using cannabis from the age of 11, he sometimes smoked too much, which risked him overdosing. He rarely drank alcohol. He was asked multiple times daily by passers-by if he had drug-dealer phone numbers. ‘They think just because you’re homeless, you’re on heroin or crack’, he said.

He carried his life around with him. His large backpack contained some food, a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, dog food, and a dog bowl. His life mostly involved watching people outside King’s Cross station, and he said that he noticed most people walking past looked miserable. He thought he seemed more content with his life, even though he had nothing and everybody else had so much more.

‘London, you’re miserable bastards’, Wayne told me. ‘Fucking hell. You work in London, you’re earning good money, the majority of jobs, yeah? Fucking cheer up. You’re doing better than most. I sit there smiling, looking at the miserable, rich people walking past, who’ve supposedly got everything that people ever wanted. I’ve got nothing, and I’m happier than them.’

Wayne appreciated the few people who stopped to talk to him despite the stigma attached to homeless people. In 2017, at least 440 homeless people died across Britain, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Government figures indicated that more than 4,751 people slept rough every night that year, a number that many charities claimed was a gross underestimate (although even this conservative figure had doubled since 2010). The charity Lifeshare said that 95 per cent of homeless people in Manchester used spice.

‘I never chose this life, I never chose to become homeless’, Wayne said. ‘I know 80 per cent of the others out here didn’t choose to become homeless. Don’t judge a book by its cover. You’ve got to read it first to understand. That’s what I like about some of the people that stop and actually talk to me and ask me. Because any real true people, they want to know.’

He explained to me the difference between different kinds of people on the streets. Anybody who carried a large backpack with them was likely to be legitimately homeless. Wayne said that the homeless people around King’s Cross were predominantly men. The ones who sat around asking for money with just a sleeping bag could be trying to get money for heroin, and they’d go back to a hostel to use it.

Wayne said that very few people survived on the streets beyond the age of 45. The conditions were brutal, particularly in winter, and he told me that he couldn’t imagine being outside for another winter. He hoped to get a job driving long distances. If he stopped smoking spice, he said he could get this kind of work.

I spent five hours with Wayne. We talked about life, drugs, relationships, the tabloid media, Britain, and his best friend, his dog, Tyson. Wayne was articulate, but in a dangerous cycle that was worsened by drug taking. Speaking to him also brought a silent acknowledgement from me; I wasn’t going to judge him for smoking spice or for how he lived his life. Begging for money to spend on spice made sense if I put myself in his shoes. He wanted an escape from the grim reality of his life, and spice provided that. Spice wasn’t a solution, but it gave him comfort.

~

Britain was facing a drug epidemic of epic proportions. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper, a publication with a history of demonising drug takers, seemed shocked in 2018 when new figures revealed that Britain had ‘more drug deaths per head than any other country in Europe’. The number was, on average, four times more than other European nations such as Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. The Office for National Statistics found that legal and illegal drugs killed 3,756 people in England and Wales in 2017 — the highest number since records began in 1993.

The Sun’s editorial encouraged ‘change’ because ‘it is clear that our current laws and programmes are not working … It may even be worth a look at experimenting with decriminalisation.’36 The paper had already paved the way for this stance in 2014 when it released the result of a reader poll that found seven out of ten respondents believed the drug war would never be won. ‘That means we can’t just carry on with the status quo’, it wrote.37

Despite these startling mortality results, the conservative government was uninterested in taking action. It was left to activists, drug-support networks, and former users to help those whom official society wanted to ignore.38 I met a range of such individuals across Britain, and they all told me how the system was deliberately failing people with drug problems and those caught in a cycle of drugs, poverty, and dependency.

Demonising the vulnerable was an effective silencing tool, said Fiona Gilbertson, co-founder of Recovering Justice, a group dedicated to removing the stigma around drug use, because ‘it worked. It crushes poor people. It criminalises them. It puts them in prison. It shames them. It gets them to self-regulate communities, and it’s destroying communities.’

Spending time with Gilbertson in Newcastle — she used to take heroin herself, and has become an active and connected member of the movement to change Britain’s drug laws — showed me what was possible with few resources and boundless energy. Born in Edinburgh, Gilbertson told me that she ‘wanted to be dead before I was 21 … I had a thing for Sid Vicious.’ She was attracted to heroin by the age of 17, and felt it was ‘like meeting God’. She saw violence committed by police and gangs. She contracted HIV from a dirty needle when using heroin, but thankfully received treatment. ‘I’d been brought up by people who didn’t know how to create resilient adults’, Gilbertson said.

Now 48 years old and drug-free for many years, she had created an organisation in the deprived north-east of Britain to help former users. Gilbertson likened Westminster’s war on the region to the country’s colonial heritage: a nation that used to invade and occupy other states, impose rules on them, and silence them had turned inwards. ‘When we could no longer export it to the rest of the world, we brought it back here’, she explained.

Recovering Justice had built a bridge between the recovery movement and drug-policy reform. Gilbertson worked to divert people from the criminal-justice system to healthy outcomes. ‘We thought it was going to be difficult to sell to people in recovery — that we should legalise and regulate all drugs — and it hasn’t been’, she said. ‘When you talk to most people that have had problematic substance use, they know that 90 per cent of people that use drugs won’t use problematically, but they get that because they’re the 10 per cent that have ended up in the criminal-justice system.’

Gilbertson was particularly active in Glasgow, Scotland, where an HIV outbreak had emerged since 2016, the worst in the United Kingdom since the 1980s. Despite this, the Home Office refused to allow a safe injecting centre. Glasgow Central MP Alison Thewliss condemned it as ‘despicable to put party-political dogma ahead of people’s lives … Glasgow already has drug-consumption rooms — they’re in back lanes in the city centre, they’re in abandoned waste ground, in dangerous, derelict buildings, and in bushes and boardings near to my constituency office.’39

Gilbertson said that authorities knew that homelessness was a major driver of drug use, and yet appropriate resources weren’t being spent on adequately reducing the problem. ‘When we talk about the unintended consequences of the war on drugs, I think we need to stop doing that’, she said. ‘This is intended. Fundamentally intended. And Theresa May knows it. All of the Tories know it. It’s a policy that is killing poor people.’

This grim reality requires on-the-ground assistance. Release is Britain’s only charity that provides a free legal and drugs-advice service. Founded in 1967, its head, Niamh Eastwood, told me that the organisation saw around 1,200 clients per year. The majority were male from the age of 30 upwards. The helpline operated for 20 hours per week, took around 5,000 calls per year, and was principally for people who had charges of low-level possession with intent to supply drugs. ‘The guys who are higher up the food chain don’t need a free legal helpline’, she said. Release provided drugs-expert witnesses to help individuals fighting cases in court.

Release was critical of the transformation, which had started under a Labour government 15 years before, to privatise drug-treatment services and harm-reduction options. The result had been devastating for countless Britons who needed adequate support. A 2017 report by the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of social care and health in Britain, found that the vast majority of detoxification facilities it had visited failed in at least one aspect of care. This was due to the Conservative government cutting tens of millions of pounds from drug and alcohol assistance in the last years. This meant that whichever provider offered the cheapest option was likely to get the contract.

Release advocated for the decriminalisation of drug-possession offences. Legalisation of all drugs could come later. Eastwood didn’t want a legal cannabis market that just ‘benefited rich, white men while taking away, albeit an illicit income, from poor communities. That’s not an answer.’

Perhaps the most influential drug-reform campaigner in the country is Danny Kushlick, director of Transform, founded in 1996 to push for a global, regulated drug market. He has worked with senior politicians, journalists, and editors for decades to steer the debate away from prohibition. During my research in Britain his name came up again and again, talking about the need to change drug laws.

Like so many other experts in the field, Kushlick feared the crass commercialisation of drugs, and talked about regulation, not legalisation. He wanted the government to be deeply involved in the process, to ensure that corporations didn’t make a financial killing from the process. The state had to stop ‘the worst tendencies of capital to exploit consumers’, he said.

‘Legalising drugs is not radical’, Kushlick told me. ‘Prohibition is incredibly radical.’ He believed that the only way for the world to treat drugs seriously and responsibly was to ‘switch to the idea that the normative position is that we regulate adult risk-taking behaviours’.

~

One-quarter of London residents who took the Global Drug Survey (GDS) in 2018 — the world’s biggest survey of recreational drug takers, with 130,000 people responding to questions across more than 40 countries — said that it was quicker to get cocaine delivered than pizza. Nearly 37 per cent in Glasgow said so; 30 per cent globally answered in the affirmative.

‘It compounds the addictive potential of a drug like coke,’ said the survey founder and consultant addiction psychiatrist, Dr Adam Winstock, to Vice. ‘Good-quality drugs delivered to a place of your convenience in record time is a bad combination if you’re looking to control drug use.’40 One of the questions on the 2019 GDS was whether users would pay more for cocaine produced under fair-trade and ethically sourced standards. Over 70 per cent of participants who had recently used cocaine said that they wanted a safe and regulated market to help local producers. Eighty-five per cent said they were willing to pay around 25 per cent more for this type of cocaine. Some drug dealers in Birmingham were already keeping in touch with their buyer’s ethical concerns by offering re-usable plastic vials for cocaine.

The Global Drug Survey was started in 2012. From that year, alcohol has remained the number-one consumed drug, the one most likely to send people to hospital, and yet the majority of respondents have no idea of their country’s drinking guidelines. By 2018, little had changed in the survey’s results on this issue, although many said that labels on alcoholic beverages would make them consider drinking less and inform them of the links between cancer and alcohol.

Winstock said that he started the survey because he wanted to understand ‘happy and functional’ drug users, the majority of people who took substances. Vast parts of the world were absent from the study — including China, India, much of Africa, and Russia — and Winstock was working to address this.

‘No one pays any attention to them until they [drug users] mess up’, he told me. Winstock aimed to create a reliable sample of global drug use that could be used to spot trends. For example, if the quality of MDMA/ecstasy tablets was poor, there was a market waiting to try something more effective, often available through online drug stores, all free of government funding or oversight.

Winstock came from a position of accepting that drug use would remain ubiquitous, so how could society and the GDS help make it as safe as possible? One of Winstock’s first revelations — something that should be considered if and when Britain legalises cannabis — was that marijuana was a gateway drug to tobacco. The majority of people mixed the two drugs. ‘It’s the great hidden public-health harm’, he said.

Winstock supported the government-led initiatives in Australia and Britain to reduce smoking rates, but worried that the US had regulated cannabis without providing any national guidelines or details about harm reduction, cannabis withdrawal, or dependence. ‘I just worry the cannabis industry will become evil like the alcohol industry, and that was the government’s fault. They had an opportunity to regulate it differently, and they didn’t.’ He blamed the cannabis lobby for not honestly addressing related problems, such as the use of cannabis by young people having detrimental effects; instead, the lobby merely praised the health benefits of the drug.

In the 2017 GDS, 10 per cent of British cannabis takers revealed that they smoked a joint within an hour of waking up, and 31 per cent of them said that they wanted to use it less. The vast majority said the government should introduce guidelines for safe consumption, similar to alcohol, though most respondents didn’t know what these safe levels were, and most alcoholic beverages currently provided too little useful information for them. Sadly, the British government has given no indication of doing so for marijuana before the drug is legal, but it has a unique opportunity, on the cusp of a legal and regulated market, to implement these sensible ideas.

According to the 2018 GDS, Britons were the highest users of online drug stores in the English-speaking world — 25 per cent of people accessed them via the dark web —purchasing ecstasy, cannabis, LSD, and novel drugs. Forty-eight per cent of English respondents had used ecstasy in the previous 12 months (compared to 28.5 per cent globally), and 43 per cent had used cocaine (compared to 17 per cent globally). Cocaine is now widely available in Britain, with Uber cars being used by street distributors. High-level dealers can even contact a call centre in Belgium, France, the Balkans, and Spain with an encrypted number, and large amounts of cocaine will be quickly dispatched by courier to them.41

The country was awash with synthetic cannabinoids, and Winstock said he worked in prisons and saw the rapid uptake of spice because it often didn’t show up in urine tests. ‘You’ve got a captive, deprived, vulnerable audience who become dependent on the drug really quickly’, he said, worsened by the British government making it illegal in 2016.

Winstock’s experiences with a range of unregulated drugs, from LSD to psilocybin mushrooms, convinced him that there was a need for the public and governments to discuss how much to take safely. I asked if he believed in a legal and regulated drug market, and he was cautious. ‘For the potential benefits of a legalised drug market, you need to have an adult population and an adult government that is happy to have honest conversations that accept that there are risks’, he said. ‘The UK does not have honest conversations with its population, and neither do the Australian or US governments.’ He wanted governments to have open discussions with their populations about how prohibition had failed and how a pilot program could be introduced to test a regulated market.

Winstock wasn’t a utopian believer in a legal drug regime, and I shared his caution. He worried about the effects on the poor, who suffered the most from the drug war, and could in the future. It was a lesson for Britain and any other nation that believed flicking a switch from ‘illegal’ to ‘legal’ solved all the problems. ‘Unfortunately with transgenerational marginalised, vulnerable populations in Australia, the UK, and America increasing, that functional underclass aren’t going be liberated by non-criminalised drugs’, Winstock argued. ‘They’ll still be left unemployed and forgotten. For those people, you need to reduce inequality. You need to invest in early-childhood programs. You need to secure housing. That’s the thing that would make the difference.’

~

Reporting across Britain revealed a sad reality about the country’s attitudes to drugs. It was a similar feeling I experienced in Australia. Drug use and harm was soaring, but neither country wanted to lead on drug reform. There was inertia, ignorance, and little desire to spend political capital on a problem that seemed too hard and unwieldy to manage. Those most affected by illicit drugs were seen as bringing the problem on themselves. Britain wasn’t a leader — it was a follower of Washington — and the result was a deadly carelessness towards the most vulnerable people in society, who were literally dying because the authorities didn’t have an effective policy to stop the carnage. Change will come to Britain — legalising or decriminalising cannabis will be the first step — but the voices of those most affected by prohibition must have a central role in whatever comes next.