No aspect of crime has been covered in the press more hysterically and inaccurately than drugs. It merits particular scrutiny because it has been so spectacularly misunderstood and misreported. While journalists knew exactly what murder, robbery, kidnap and rape involved and could thus examine methods and motives, drugs often remained a mystery. In particular, the role of the ‘other’ – the foreigner, the bohemian, the addict – played a major part in the coverage until the end of the twentieth century.
Drugs first entered the national discourse in a major way towards the end of the First World War. Until then, they had enjoyed an ambiguous status. During the war, The Times even carried advertisements for the Mayfair chemists Savory & Moore, for sheets impregnated with cocaine and morphine which were promoted as ‘a useful present for friends at the front’ where they were known to the troops as ‘fear-banishers’. But by the end of the war and in the wake of the passage of the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act, the first signs of what would become nearly a century of often fanciful and frequently invented reporting on drugs had already started.
‘You will find the dope fiend in Chelsea, in Mayfair and Maida Vale,’ the Daily Express warned its readers in 1918. ‘An obscure traffic is pursued in certain doubtful teashops. The sale of certain beauty products is only a mask for the illicit traffic of certain drugs.’ The story unfolds: ‘A young and attractive girl deeply interested in social conditions and political economy made the acquaintance of another woman through a mutual friend. Within months she had become a confirmed haunter of a certain notorious cafe. She had lost her looks and health. Before she closed her miserable existence a bare nine months later she had introduced at least four other decent girls to her practice of vice; and for the last two months of her existence she was acting as a decoy for a notorious gambling hell.’ The Daily Mail warned its readers: ‘Men do not as a rule take to drugs unless there is a hereditary influence, but women are more temperamentally attracted.’
One of the reasons for the outlandish coverage was the great ignorance of the subject. As with many other crimes, before and since, the chief danger often seemed to lie in the influence of the sinister foreigner. Initially, the menace arrived most spectacularly in the form of the ‘Yellow Peril’. The Chinese opium supplier was made flesh in the shape of a man known in the press as ‘the Brilliant Chang’ (his real name was Chan Nan) who had come to England as a marine contractor and had opened one of the capital’s earliest Chinese restaurants, in Regent Street. There, according to a report by a ‘special commissioner’ of the World Pictorial News, he ‘dispensed Chinese delicacies and the drugs and vices of the Orient’. His ‘obsession’ with white women led to him demanding, the paper claimed, that he be paid in kind. When the women acquiesced to his demands, ‘the flame of evil passion burned more brightly within and he hugged himself with unholy glee.’ Some women were made of sterner stuff and retained ‘sufficient decency and pride of race’ to turn down Chang, who could be identified, according to the reporter, by his ‘lips thin and cruel, tightly drawn across even yellow teeth’.
The News of the World gave the full treatment to the coroner’s inquest into Billie Carleton, the twenty-two-year-old show-girl who died of a cocaine overdose in 1919 just after returning from the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall: ‘the coroner’s inquiry has revealed a state of things almost unbelievable . . . In the West End of London, in the quiet seclusion of luxury flats the “most disgusting” orgies take place. Men and women, the former in pyjamas, the latter in chiffon nightdresses, recline in a circle of soft cushions, and pass from hand to hand and mouth to mouth the opium pipe.’ Mrs Lo Ping You, ‘the Scottish wife of a Chinaman of Limehouse Causeway, described as “high priestess of these unholy rites” was jailed for five years.’
There was no telling how this fiendish traffic might spread. In 1922, the Empire News warned that ‘mothers would be well advised to keep their daughters as far away as they can from Chinese laundries and other places where the yellow men congregate.’ The Daily Express took its readers to a ‘dancing den’ where the clientele were ‘the same old sickening crowd of under-sized aliens, blue about the chin and greasy, the same predominating type of girl, young, thin, underdressed, perpetually seized of hysterical laughter, ogling, foolish’. Then enter the dealer: ‘He was not the Chink of popular fiction, a cringing yellow man hiding his clasped hands in the wide sleeves of his embroidered gown.’ He greets the room with ‘that fixed Oriental smile which seems devoid of warmth and humanity . . . who are these smiling yellow men?’ In 1920, the Daily Express ran an exposé entitled, ‘The Yellow Peril in London – Vast Syndicate of Vice with its Criminal Master’.
After Chang was arrested in 1924, he was told during his trial by the Recorder of London that ‘It is you and men like you who are corrupting the womanhood of this country.’ The Daily Express celebrated his demise: ‘The yellow king of the “dope runners” has been caught at last in the web of British justice.’ He had, it was suggested, used only women as his runners, one even transporting the drugs from Paris in her bloomers. Arthur Tietjen of the Daily Mail wrote: ‘Chang possesses a strangely macabre – some said hypnotic – power to persuade women to sniff cocaine. It may well have been that he did so as a member of the yellow race to degrade white women.’ Deported, Chang was last heard of, according to the Daily Telegraph’s report, in reassuringly pathetic circumstances in Shanghai: ‘A strange Nemesis overtook him. He went blind and ended his days not in luxury and rich silks but as a sightless worker in a little kitchen garden.’
The other notorious dealer of the period was Eddie Manning, a Jamaican who supposedly had a silver-topped cane packed with drugs. Once again, race became a predominant aspect of the coverage. The News of the World hailed his arrest in 1923 with the headline ‘Evil Negro Caught’. After being picked up once more for possession of goods stolen from Lady Diana Cooper’s car, he was described by the arresting officer as ‘the worst man in London’. He died in Parkhurst prison hospital in 1931.
There was never a shortage of outlandish tales on the subject and in the interwar years they tended to the exotic. The News of the World reported how ‘Sapper’, the pen name used by H. C. McNeile, the creator of gentleman adventurer Bulldog Drummond, had inspired the creation of a ‘black gang’ consisting of ‘young men of energy’. They were apparently ‘disgusted by the degenerate parasites of the West End against whom the police were powerless’ and had pounced on ‘dope peddlers and other crooks’ and taken them to a garage off the Great West Road, where they were supposedly flogged with dog-whips until they agreed to mend their ways. The paper also reported on the broken engagement of a young officer whose fiancée had become addicted to marijuana: ‘she has been going to these cigarette orgies. It will be years before she is well.’ The Times was anxious to make sure its readers knew the risks posed by drug users: ‘Most cocainomaniacs carry revolvers to protect themselves from imaginary enemies.’ In his excellent and entertaining book, Dope Girls: the Birth of the British Drug Underground, Marek Kohn analyses and uncovers much of the wonderfully purple prose of the 1920s and 30s and catalogues the ways in which drugs were described in the most exotic of terms.
In response to this fearmongering, Edgar Wallace was moved to write an article to readers of the Daily Mail in February 1928 explaining: ‘Why We Have No Gangsters’. Clearly not including the Glasgow razor gangs in his thesis, he wrote that, ‘The existence of gang warfare in any country depends not so much on the methods employed to deal with it as upon its cause; and the cause is inevitably dope. Our own criminals do not dope; that ghastly practice is left to a comparatively few degenerate weaklings.’
The drugs panic in the press eased and the outbreak of the Second World War meant that everyone had clearer threats to civilisation to concern them. By the end of the forties, the Telegraph’s Stanley Firmin suggested that Scotland Yard had subsequently solved the drugs problem. ‘A force of detectives was given the job of rooting out the dope traffickers and putting an end to their nefarious activities once and for all,’ he wrote in 1950. ‘Today dope trafficking has practically ceased to exist. Now and again one comes across the case of a foreign seaman smuggling in cocaine or opium.’
But even as Firmin was writing the obituary of the drugs menace, his competitors in the tabloid press were alerting their readers to a fresh threat, this time brought to British shores supposedly from the west rather than the east.
‘Coloured men who peddle reefers can meet susceptible teenagers at jazz clubs,’ Chapman Pincher informed Daily Express readers. ‘Reefers and rhythm seem to be directly connected with the minute electric “waves” continually generated by the brain surface. When the rhythm of the music synchronises with the rhythm of the brainwaves, the jazz fan experiences an almost compulsive urge to move their bodies in sympathy. Dope may help the brain “tune in” to the rhythm more sharply, thereby heightening the ecstasy of the dance.’
Arthur Tietjen, who had handled press communications at the Nuremberg and Belsen trials, was the crime correspondent of the Daily Mail. Writing in 1952 in his book Soho: London’s Vicious Circle, Tietjen clearly found the world of drugs fascinating. He describes hearing, through the basement grille in the pavement, the sound of the blues, and how, ‘A little group of West African negroes in light grey fedoras and bright blue suits talked together in their strange clipped tongue, white teeth shining in the darkness. With them was a portly blonde, balanced unsteadily on her high-heeled platform shoes. Perhaps they were peddling reefers, or merely discussing the benefits of National relief or the Queen’s visit to Nigeria. It is part of the spicy charm of Soho that its denizens can be just as bad or as good as one’s imagination decrees.’ This was perhaps the key to much of the reporting on drugs at the time: reporters felt that their imaginations could be allowed free rein.
The Times in 1957 developed this theme, informing its readers that ‘white girls who become friendly with West Indians are from time to time enticed to hemp smoking . . . this is an aspect of the hemp problem – the possibility of its spreading among irresponsible white people – that causes greatest concern to the authorities.’ The paper suggested that the main reason for ‘the coloured man’ to smoke hemp was to stimulate sexual desire. Indeed, the corruption of white British womanhood by the Chinese and West Indians through drugs was a theme in the British press from the twenties through to the seventies.
But the complacent attitude shared by the police and the mainstream press was already starting to change. John Weeks, who covered crime for the Daily Telegraph at the time, recalled that on his first day on the paper in 1964 he was introduced at Scotland Yard to a detective sergeant, ‘Benny’ Lynch, then thought to be the only person in the drug squad. ‘He said to me, “Are you the new boy? Come with me.”’ Weeks was taken to his office and shown a large brown suitcase full of drugs. ‘He said, “This is heroin, this is cocaine, cannabis oil, cannabis resin. You are going to come across a lot of this in the future.”’
Even when drugs became a key part of the counter-culture in the sixties and seventies, there was little in the way of accurate coverage in the national press. If one wanted to find out the true price, potency, risks, availability and provenance of drugs then being consumed – mainly cannabis from Morocco, Lebanon and Afghanistan – one had to turn to the so-called underground press, such as the International Times whose journalists, unlike most of those in the national press at the time, had not only seen the drugs being consumed but consumed them regularly themselves.
Newspapers printed as gospel the estimates of a drugs seizure’s worth given to them by either Customs and Excise or the police. This sloppiness suited both the law enforcement agencies and the reporter covering the story, in that it made the bust that much more significant and newsworthy.
In early 1967, the News of the World produced a series of articles entitled ‘Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts that Will Shock You’. This led to police raids on the homes of Keith Richards and Brian Jones and the arrest at different times of Richards, Jones and Mick Jagger, the last of whom was convicted of possession of four amphetamine tablets and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. William Rees-Mogg, then editor of The Times, wrote a brave editorial in his paper, taking its headline from Alexander Pope: ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’
Rees-Mogg pointed out that Jagger had been charged with being in possession of four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methyl amphetamine hydrochloride which had been bought, quite legally, in Italy, and were not regarded as highly dangerous drugs. He hinted that the real reason for a jail sentence rather than probation was that people felt that Jagger had ‘got what was coming to him’ because they resented the anarchic aspects of the Rolling Stones and their music and suspected them of ‘decadence, a word used by Miss Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail’. The editorial in The Times seemed to have the desired effect on the establishment: Jagger’s sentence was reduced on appeal and the press could claim to have played its part, both in fuelling and in calming the panic.
It was not until 1968 that an organisation emerged to challenge some of the nonsense being written. Release, founded by Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris, and based in the heart of doper country in west London, was created to give advice to those being arrested at the time. They were able, if reporters were so inclined as to ask, to give context to some of the more ridiculous claims. One of their early researchers and legal advisers, Don Aitken, became recognised as an expert on the actual monetary value of many of the drugs, and gave evidence in many trials, explaining that the actual value of the drugs was a fraction of that claimed by the prosecution. Aitken would patiently tell reporters how much a seizure would actually have made when sold in the streets, and gradually a clearer picture of the drugs market emerged.
Since then, such organisations have grown in number. Transform, the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependency, the Standing Conference on Drug Abuse, the Legalise Cannabis Campaign, all arrived on the scene, some proving more resilient than others. It meant that reporters could contact a body other than one connected to law enforcement to check rumours or claims. Former senior police officers appear regularly in the media now calling for the decriminalisation of drugs and are accorded a polite hearing.
The dealer, usually foreign and swarthy, remained a sinister figure, at least in the world of the mainstream press, throughout the sixties and most of the seventies. So when a bright and charming young Welshman called Howard Marks, a graduate of Balliol college, Oxford, and a bunch of his savvy and well-educated compadres appeared at the Old Bailey in 1981, there was some puzzlement even if, at that stage, it could not have been predicted how influential the case would be in changing the perception of the drug dealer in the media. ‘Eggheads Ran £20 million Drug Ring’ was how the Sun described the case while the Mail reported that ‘an Oxford graduate was the mastermind in a brainy gang’.
When the police first caught up with him, Marks went on the run, so the initial trial in which he should have been involved, in 1974, started without him. Little did the reporters know that he would one day become a best-selling author and be writing regularly for the press himself. The Daily Mirror wondered where he was and described him as an MI6 agent who had been kidnapped, beaten up and persuaded to become an IRA sympathiser. The Daily Mail suggested that the police were exploring the possibility that he had been executed by the IRA. Marks’s lawyer, the genial Bernie Simons, alerted the press to say that Marks had been in touch with him and was not being held against his will, but this made little difference to the coverage.
In April 1975, the Daily Mirror ran a front-page picture of Marks in a glasses-and-moustache disguise under the headline, ‘The Face of a Fugitive’. By now he was said to have ‘worked for three separate bosses: the Mafia, the IRA and British secret service’. It asserted that Marks had turned up in Padua, Italy where the Mafia had agreed to protect him in exchange for his silence. The Daily Mirror also splashed with ‘THE INFORMER’, suggesting that the Mafia had taken Marks in, in order to dissuade him from informing on their drug dealing during the Old Bailey trial.
When his eventual trial started, years later, the role of the press became crucial to his defence – that he had been secretly working for Mexican and British intelligence and carrying on the cannabis smuggling activities to keep his cover story intact. ‘Lord Hutchinson [his defence counsel] managed to get all the newspapers read by an enthralled and sympathetic jury,’ Marks wrote in Mr Nice, his memoir, which noted how press coverage inadvertently helped him by linking him to the secret service and the IRA. Amazingly, he was acquitted.
Neil Darbyshire covered the trial for the Evening Standard. ‘It was a fantastic case. A more guilty man you couldn’t possibly imagine yet he was acquitted and – it sounds sexist – but there were seven women on the jury and they were all charmed by him.’ He got two years for having false passports but had already served the time on remand and so he was released, and moved to Mallorca.
But the tale was not over. The United States drugs enforcement administration (DEA) became interested in Marks, their Madrid-based agent, Craig Lovato, having read about him in David Leigh’s book High Time. The DEA became obsessed with a desire to catch him. They launched Operation Eclectic, working with the Spanish and British police, and persuaded one of his contacts in Manila, the late and louche Lord Tony Moynihan, to set him up. Marks and his wife, Judy, were arrested. While in custody in Mallorca, he was interviewed by the press: ‘I spent three hours being rudely interrogated by the Daily Mirror, gently questioned by Paris-Match and heavily sympathised with by El Pais. The Paris-Match lady said that in France I was already a hero.’
This led to a Mirror splash: ‘Behind Bars – Drug King of the World’ in which he supposedly spoke exclusively to the Mirror from a hell-hole of a Spanish jail that smelled of stale sweat. Inside the paper, friends of Marks’s attested to his normality, with a local expat restaurateur explaining that his favourite meal there was a couple of Welsh rarebits and a piece of cod. In the Daily Mirror on 26 July 1988, it was claimed that ‘English toff’s power rivalled Mafia barons’, which was a bit hard as Marks was neither English nor, as a grammar school boy and son of a merchant sailor and a teacher, a toff. He supposedly had a ruthless organisation matching anything operated by the Mafia or the feared Colombians. To the Daily Express he was now ‘the epitome of the cheeky chappie, the mischievous boyo from the Valleys’.
According to the DEA, Marks was ‘the Marco Polo of drug trafficking’ and the Express and the Mirror suggested that he ran a £200 million cannabis empire using ‘undersea hollows and hideaways marked by oceanographic buoys’. One of these hideaways had supposedly been found to contain a ‘huge hashish supermarket’ with 15 tons of Lebanese hash, fast boats and machine guns. No suggestion was too outlandish. He also supposedly owned a fleet of freighters and finance houses.
In West Palm Beach, on 13 July 1990, Marks pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiracy to racketeer and was eventually jailed for twenty years. During his time inside, the Daily Telegraph made reference to the suggestion that he had salted away £50 million and he wrote a letter to the editor: ‘It was such a wonderful and much needed Christmas surprise to read in your columns that I am the owner of £50 million concealed in the Caribbean and/or Eastern bloc bank accounts. I was totally unaware I had this loot. All they say about the damaging effects of cannabis on the memory must be true.’
Marks then offered to transfer all the money to wherever the Telegraph wanted in exchange for them settling his fine, paying his wife’s mortgage and his children’s school fees and keeping his family from starving. The letter was published but the offer not taken up. The Mail on Sunday suggested that he had lived with the American president Bill Clinton in his Oxford days, although he had no recollection of him: ‘I never met anyone who smoked joints without inhaling.’
I went to interview him when he was serving his sentence in Terre Haute federal penitentiary in Indiana. ‘Ah, you’ve come to see Marco Polo?’ chuckled the prison officers who had read the press reports of his case; guards are not immune to a prisoner’s media reputation. After his release in 1995, he was approached by the publicist, Max Clifford – himself later to end up in jail for sexual offences – who brokered a £10,000 fee from the News of the World for his story. He has often been in the media since, writing for the Guardian, the Observer and the Oldie, promoting his fiction and non-fiction works and his popular one-man shows. In the 1997 general election campaign, he was approached by the Sunday Times who wanted him to give £2,000 to the Labour Party so that they could write a story that Labour was accepting backing from a convicted drug dealer.
There have also been plenty of other ‘eggheads’ in the dock in the wake of Operation Julie. This was the name given to the busting of the largest LSD manufacturing outfit in Britain which led to raids involving more than 800 police officers in March 1977. It was a further example of the addictive quality of drugs stories for the press, producing a mixture of fascination and puzzlement. One of the accused, Leaf Fielding, in his later account of the bust, To Live Outside the Law, recalls being told by a policeman: ‘You’re all famous now. The BBC extended the news by fifteen minutes last night for you lot. Operation Julie – that’s what they’re calling it.’
John May, writing at the time in NME, quoted one of the defence lawyers as saying that ‘never in the history of British crime has the police public relations been so effective and so exaggerated. It has been accepted blindly and blithely by all concerned.’As he put it: ‘The police offered the press their version of an exciting story, and they took it hook, line and sinker.’
The press certainly tripped out on the case. The Mirror went for a fanciful suggestion that the accused had been planning to put acid in the water supplies ‘to blow a million minds simultaneously by pouring LSD into the reservoirs serving Birmingham’. The Guardian suggested that ‘the flower of British post-war education were in the dock’ and described them as a mixture of ‘evangelists, middle-aged Americans and get-rich-quick merchants, many of them Cambridge-educated’. Their story, it was said, ‘sounded like the history of enterprising businessmen, too busy making their venture succeed to worry about a few social casualties’. In the Evening Standard an article headlined ‘Exploding The Myth of Pop Festivals’ suggested that the idea that free pop festivals were innocent happenings had been finally exposed. It went on to claim that open-air festivals were financed from LSD profits to attract hardcore drug takers and enough ‘innocent fans’ to cover up the drug-dealing.
Nonsense about drugs continued in the media long after the generation who had only ‘experimented’ with drugs had taken on senior positions in the newspaper industry, parliament and the police. Hypocrisy ruled. One tabloid reporter in the 1980s was himself a heroin addict, partly financing his habit by ratting on and exposing in the press those with whom his addiction brought him into contact.
When I worked at Time Out magazine in the 1970s, we were curious about the decision by Rizla, the cigarette-paper manufacturers, to produce longer rolling papers – very popular with people making joints – and asked them why they were doing so. They explained that they were for long-distance lorry-drivers so that their roll-ups would last longer when they were at the wheel. When we ran a jokey story about this, a member of the advertising department came through to the newsroom to announce that Rizla were planning to withdraw their advertising.
Drugs continued to be a main source of stories and sometimes it was not even necessary for a real person to be involved. The former News of the World reporter Graham Johnson recounts in his very entertaining memoir, Hack, how one of his journalistic coups was the exposé of a far-right fanatic, Mark Nodder, who sold ecstasy tablets to finance his support for the neo-fascist group Combat 18. The story was that ‘Britain’s most evil racist thug has found a new way to discriminate against blacks – through the killer drug he peddles to raise cash for his Nazi-style hate campaign.’ The story was illustrated with a slightly indistinct photo of the evil thug and concluded with the reassuring information that ‘our dossier has been passed to Scotland Yard’. The only problem was that not only was there no dossier but no Nodder either. He was an invention and the blurred photo was of one of Johnson’s obliging friends who had had his hair dyed blond for the occasion and was wearing sunglasses. Another NoW spoof of the time, also fictitious, was that ‘guerilla gardeners’ were using Princess Diana’s Kensington garden to grow weed – ‘Dopes Grow Cannabis in Di’s Back Garden’. This sort of invention was much more widespread than it is today; information is much more readily available now, particularly on the internet, and so the risk of getting caught out is much higher.
By the turn of the century, most stories involving drugs had to involve a ‘celebrity’, who would either be the victim of a sting or an unreliable ‘friend’. An example of the former came in 2013 in the Sun on Sunday’s story, ‘Tulisa’s Cocaine Deal Shame’, about the singer and talent show judge, Tulisa Contostavlos. It led to a historic court case. Contostavlos claimed successfully that she had been entrapped by Mazher Mahmood, the reporter known as the ‘fake sheikh’ because of the disguise he had often used in stings for the now defunct News of the World. The case against Contostavlos collapsed in dramatic fashion at Southwark Crown Court in 2014 and the trial judge, Alistair McCreath, described the reporter as ‘someone who appears to have gone to considerable lengths to get Ms Contostavlos to agree to involve herself in criminal conduct’.
Times have certainly tempered drugs coverage. In 2012, a couple in their sixties, Michael Foster and Susan Cooper, were jailed at Lincoln Crown Court for selling large quantities of marijuana which they had grown on their farm. It transpired during their trial that they had given away much of their profits to a hospital and a school in an impoverished part of Kenya. They were treated by the media as fairly harmless eccentrics, the sort of people you would be happy to have as neighbours, and far from the dangerous creatures of a century earlier who preyed on the weaknesses of young white women. However, they were still sentenced to three years, and had an appeal turned down.
The official position of most newspapers remains anti-legalisation although many now carry articles calling for, at least, decriminalisation of cannabis, sometimes penned by former police officers or lawyers. Some attitudes remain. Richard Peppiatt, the former Daily Star reporter, is quoted in the book Narcomania as saying: ‘If a scientist announces their research has found ecstasy to be safer than alcohol, my job as a tabloid reporter is to portray this man as a quack.’ While drugs were providing a new source of material, murder remained an enduring topic and by the middle of the twentieth century the previously anonymous reporters were to find themselves in the spotlight.