The UK drug market is a hybrid beast – shaped by myriad factors, including the availability and popularity of the product, demand and local policing tactics – that now stretches countrywide. While no two local drug markets are the same, they do share characteristics. Drug markets have traditionally evolved where the number of users and lines of supply converge: in the melting pots of Britain’s inner cities and in the long-neglected estates of northern cities. Most develop in communities that bear the hallmarks of urban decay, spiralling unemployment and urban deprivation, and where the numbers of users and local dealers dwarf national averages. But there is an average …
Whether you like or hate drugs, the industry’s culture and cash is now washing through society, a giant but hidden edifice that is all around us.
In a well-heeled county in the cradle of Middle England, a short drive from the Cotswolds and the official prime ministerial country residence, Chequers, lies a sedate market town. Bordered by picturesque villages, it is a popular destination for professionals and young families who have opted to escape the noise, grime and chaos of London for a more peaceful life. But the veneer of rural harmony is thin. Beneath the top-class grammar school system, the food fairs, festivals and quaint architecture, all is not what it seems.
‘If you sit415 up there by that window,’ says Dave, pointing to a coffee shop overlooking the town’s historic cobbled square, ‘you can spot the deals being done by the clock tower.’ An ebullient, bear-like ex-cop, Dave has worked for the town’s young person’s drug project for the last decade. He’s able to see things most local residents would prefer to ignore.
As with much of Middle England, crime has been on the rise in the town for decades. A leaflet published by the town’s Residents’ Society in the mid-1970s warned of a coming crisis, prompted by rising levels of vandalism, crime and an overstretched police force. By the mid-1990s the leaflet’s warnings had seemingly come to pass, with newspaper reports of a wave of crime hitting Middle England. Guns, gangsters and drugs had proliferated.
The story of this town is the story of drugs in the UK – an example of the growing pervasiveness and proximity of the drug trade, and how drugs have become embedded in Britain’s heartlands.
‘The big change is that ten years ago, being a drug dealer was a negative thing for the young people in this town – and now it’s almost a badge of honour,’ says Dave.
While the number of young people using illegal drugs has plateaued, the same cannot be said of their involvement in selling them. For some teenagers living amidst respectable modern Britain, the drug trade is not only part of their local scene, but a viable, and sometimes natural, career option.
Now nineteen, with a world-weary attitude and a three-year-old son, there is nothing average about Amber416. She is an intelligent girl whose attractive looks wouldn’t be out of place on a dance video for her favourite singer, Beyoncé. At twelve, four years before she was legally allowed to buy cigarettes, she was earning £300 a week selling cocaine and cannabis on the streets of the town.
She started selling, she says, in order to earn enough cash to keep her mother, a severe alcoholic, in drink. Her friends, cousins, aunts and uncles either used drugs or sold them. Her older sister is a long-term heroin addict. Her father, a career criminal and crack addict, spent much of Amber’s childhood locked up for armed robbery. By the age of fifteen she had been expelled from school, taken into care and spent three months incarcerated in a children’s secure unit.
‘Dealing drugs was the only thing that made me happy,’ says Amber. ‘I wanted to make money and fit in, get high, be a gangster like my dad.’
Amber, described by Dave as ‘a lovely girl considering the childhood she had’, says she learnt from her father. ‘I wanted to be like him – make a little bit of money, play the game.’ And she was a success. While many of her deals were done with local addicts, she was able to attract a more lucrative stream of revenue from well-off middle-class professionals who would pay her to deliver deals to their homes in the town and its outlying villages. Unsurprisingly for a teenage dealer in regular contact with large quantities of cash, Amber treated it like Monopoly money. She chose to spend it on instant fun: drugs, alcohol, clothes and partying. But her own dealing almost ended in disaster when she ended up owing one supplier £1,000. It was then that she met Riz, a charming twenty-three-year-old well known in the town’s drug scene.
Riz drove her around town in his expensive car and agreed to pay off her debt. Flattered by the valiant gesture, and impressed by his flash lifestyle and his age, Amber was thrilled when they became girlfriend and boyfriend. When he asked her to sell crack and heroin for him, she was proud to step up to the mark.
Amber returned to street hustling, but on a more extreme scale: selling deals on street corners and from park benches from 9 a.m. until late in the evening, pulling deals from a well-stocked mesh-and-string washing-powder bag hooked to her tracksuit. She made between £700 and £800 a day from her pool of 120 customers. As she became known to the local police, she brought in her friends, and local children she knew to run drugs.
Although she describes herself as ‘gobby’ and someone who looked way older than she was, she carried a knife for protection, Amber admits she survived on her wits and was protected in part by her dad’s reputation. Her network of clients spread, and she occasionally became involved higher up the chain, shifting drugs from Liverpool and Slough into the town – but she describes dealing with the northern suppliers as scary, and said they constantly had to change supply routes in case police caught on. What was her goal? ‘I didn’t have one. It was the only thing I had and it was making me happy.’
When Amber and Riz were stopped by the police in possession of a large quantity of heroin, her valiant boyfriend tried to pin it on her. Luckily for Amber the courts believed her story, and it was the ‘boyfriend’ who had groomed her who ended up with the prison sentence.
‘I was a slow learner at school but I was clever at selling drugs. But in reality I couldn’t handle myself, I was a runner, I was just a “little girl”.’ She finds it hard to accept, but for all her street talk and tough exterior, Amber has spent most of her drug-selling career being cultivated or ‘groomed’ by various older men in the town to sell drugs for them. ‘Drug culture is on your doorstep these days. Most of my friends still sell drugs. Communities grow up around drugs. Dealing is always an option.’
Amber, who has retreated from the drug trade since having her child, still gets hassled for heroin and crack from her old regulars when she is pushing her buggy down the high street. A three-month stint as a secretary, where for the first time in her life she ‘got dressed up and felt important, like a lady instead of a tramp’ before getting fired for unreliability, is the only straight job she has had. Now she would love to be a nurse or a midwife. Yet, reflecting on the path her life has already taken, she says: ‘But that’s it, I’ve ruined it, I don’t think I will have a job ever again.’
To watch Amber walking off with her young child you would never imagine her other life, nor the spider’s web of an economy that has ensnared the community.
Like most towns of its size in Britain, this one has a hard core of around 500 of what are known to the authorities as ‘problem drug users’. Most will be heroin or crack addicts, visiting the local drug treatment service, a needle exchange for clean syringes and a network of chemists to pick up their prescription of methadone. Many of them will be living in a mix of sheltered accommodation, hostels and council flats. Some will be user-dealers, some rough sleepers and some sex workers, and around three-quarters will be receiving some sort of welfare benefit. And apart from the occasional story in the local paper about an arrest for possession, to the average resident they will go largely unnoticed. They are certainly less visible than the group of leather-skinned town-centre drunks who congregate on benches with their dogs.
With an adult population of around 80,000, most of the town’s 4,500 regular drug users will be taking drugs such as cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine, getting high in the privacy of their own home, in the town’s pubs and clubs or in the local park. It is the park spaces where much of the crack and heroin drug dealing takes place, with dealers situated at well-sighted vantage points which enable them to keep an eye on any approaching police officers. Cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis secretly change hands in more guarded locations, either within people’s homes or in local shops and pubs.
Pizza Express, O2, Clintons, Waterstones, Body Shop, Thorntons and Caffè Nero. The identikit shops found in every market town in Britain. And like in every market town in Middle England, the drug trade is woven into the fabric of everyday life. In the most deprived ward of the town, with high crime, birth rates and unemployment, street drug dealing is noticeable to the trained eye, while in other parts of the town, the drug trade takes cover, in nail bars, pubs, bookmakers’, taxi firms, beauty parlours and gyms.
The town’s local newspaper archive is peppered with reports of illicit drug activity over the last couple of years. A thirty-eight-year-old owner of the local car wash was jailed for seven years after being caught using his business as a convenient vehicle for a cocaine-dealing enterprise. A teenage boy dealing ecstasy from a town-centre pub was jailed for two years after police sniffer dogs found a bag of pills behind a toilet in the Gents. And police, responding to concerns from residents that a bookmaker’s on the high street was being used to deal drugs, arrested three men after finding bags of cannabis and some scales in a backpack dumped in the shop. The owner of a health store in the town’s shopping centre was jailed for running an illegal trade in banned steroids and black-market valium.
The local police have their suspicions about three other businesses in the town. There is intelligence that one of the county’s cab firms is doubling up as a highly mobile drug dealing operation, in particularly targeting students at the nearby public school, but as yet they have no evidence. Two other businesses have managed to survive the recession with admirable resilience, despite hosting an average of two customers a day between them. They are suspected of being money-laundering centres.
A Vietnamese man from London is caught growing 800 cannabis plants, while sniffer dogs deployed at the local station manage to catch out an unfortunate pair of students with their weekend stash of skunk.
Knocking on the door of a luxury country pile in one of the scenic villages not far from the market town, the police arrest one of the drug trade’s elusive money men.
This is a composite picture of how the drug trade exists side by side with everyday public life in an average Middle England market town.
During the writing of this book we have spoken to dozens of players in Britain’s drug economy, from clubbers, teenage runners and beat officers to undercover detectives, traffickers and senior organised-crime officers. All the people you have met in this book are real. Some of the drug dealers we spoke to are greedy and violent, some of the drug detectives blinkered, and some of the drug users self-obsessed, yet our journey through the drug trade provided us with a new perspective: that this is an economy entirely different from how it is perceived and presented.
‘Narcomania’, the defunct Victorian term to which we have given new meaning – the confused and irrational state of mind affecting individuals and institutions when confronted by the issue of drugs – thrives in modern Britain. It is a disease that means teenagers are thrown in a cell for buying the narcotic equivalent of a round of drinks for their friends; where laws are as likely to be based on urban myths or tabloid hysteria as on evidence. It’s a collective state of mind where age-old myths continue to be peddled and where everything that society is railing against is, in reality, of its own creation.
It is a trade that has caught a ride on the coat-tails of enterprise, modern culture and the explosion in global trade. While Britain is not a land overflowing with wide-eyed schoolyard junkies, as some in the media would have it, it is a leading global consumer417 of illegal drugs. Despite recent falls in the use of traditional drugs such as cannabis and heroin, which have been counterbalanced by a rise in poly-drug use and the taking of legal highs, Britain consistently hovers around the top three418 in the European all-round drug-use leagues. It is one of the biggest per-head cocaine419 consumers on the planet. In the same way that we can grab a Chilean wine and a Brazilian papaya from the shelves of the local supermarket, so can drug users now pick and choose from a low-cost, expansive and exotic drug menu.
On the street, the stereotype of the evil foreign dealer preying on the weak and vulnerable is no more: the trade is dominated by teenagers seeking a future in inner cities where public- and private-sector institutions have withdrawn. For many, the relatively small sums of money made at the bottom of the drug ‘food chain’ merely allow runners and low-level dealers to participate in Britain’s pay-as-you-go economy – buying the designer clothes, topping up smart phones and covering a weekend’s clubbing, which for some has become their only link to mainstream society. As such, they have become ‘uber consumers’, willing to break the law to attain the symbols of success and a taste of the good life. Many of them come from socially deprived areas where selling drugs has become one of only a few ways of making your mark.
It is not all about greed. Some see it as a route to becoming popular or as a way of gaining respect, others as a way of impressing the opposite sex or as a route to freedom. In a society which promotes consumerism and instant celebrity culture and where roped-off Ferraris sit gleaming in shopping centres in some of the county’s poorest areas, it should come as no shock that people who perceive that they are ‘locked out’ of the system, for whatever reason, choose to take a short cut. And it should be no surprise either that eventually, as was made plain during the 2010 London riots, they will return to bite the system on the arse.
As it has become elevated from the streets by the vast profits available, like a chameleon crime has sought cover in the licit world. Where once there were easily identifiable criminal profiles, such as the old-school family crime syndicate, the ever-increasing access of UK-based dealers to cheaper and higher-quality bulk consignments of drugs has spawned a new generation of Mr Middles for whom the drug industry has become a cash cow. Today your local drug kingpin is as likely to be a local businessman or entrepreneur as a career criminal flitting from villa to villa in Malaga.
Britain’s ability to defend its sovereign borders from unwanted goods disappeared along with the Spitfire. Geopolitical change, the opening of borders between European states to allow the free flow of people, services and products, plus the arrival of mass immigration, tourism and cheap travel, has left Britain porous. Law enforcers have always known, despite the occasional well-trumpeted success, that attempts to stem the steady flow of narcotics by sea, rail, road and air into Britain is a needle-in-haystack exercise.
Moreover, apart from a spate of LSD-making in the 1970s, Britain was never previously a drug-producing nation. The blossoming of the cannabis cultivation industry, at a suburban loft near you, has effectively put paid to that.
And while police struggle to manage the traditional drug markets, the ease with which people can buy a vast array of legal and illegal substances via the expanding online drug trade makes their job virtually impossible. Police have admitted to us that monitoring the postal system and the World Wide Web for small drug packages is perhaps a challenge too far for law enforcement, barring the establishment of serious restrictions on people’s civil rights.
Enforcement can only shape the drug trade, not end it. Ultimately, in terms of financial resources and expertise, it is an incredibly uneven battle. As sellers adopt new and varied tactics to deter and avoid detection, with gangs relying on an endless supply of new recruits to sell their product, the police’s already Sisyphean task is made harder still by cash-sapping austerity measures. No wonder, then, that many police forces have gone back to basics in their drugs operations, responding to calls from the public about nuisance dealers while leaving those less visible, but more lucrative, enterprises, to get on with business as usual.
And the police look increasingly isolated as businesses small and large have – intentionally or not – disengaged themselves from the national anti-drug drive by pocketing drug money in the wake of the financial crash. This grey economy is buffered by a new generation of middle-class professionals – lawyers, solicitors and financial intermediaries – for whom the promise of easy money appears even more addictive than the drugs themselves.
But at the eye of the storm of Narcomania sit Britain’s politicians, scared of talking honestly about drugs for fear of losing the support of the centre ground as defined by Middle England. With little overview of the reality of the drug world, policy is far too easily swayed by colourful and emotive accounts of personal experience and the endless noise of tabloid propaganda. Few areas of government policy are so influenced by the media. This is made possible because of the huge vacuum left in any democratic discussion within Parliament about drugs. As soon as politicians gain a position of power in government, any previously radical views on drugs that they might have held appear to vanish. As if by magic, this omertà is lifted when they return to the back benches and are strangely able once again to speak their mind on the issue.
With a ticker tape of conflicting messages about the drug trade from politicians, the police and newspapers running on a loop through our multimedia world, the British public can’t be blamed for being a bit confused about the subject. Genuine public warnings over the dangers of drug use are now undermined by drug policies that are kick-started and championed by a braying media and contradicted by a culture of celebrity that appears to condone the substances that others claim are corroding society from within.
But perhaps the greatest misconception is that the laws intended to protect hard-working people and Middle England from the dangers of drugs are fit for purpose.
The original edition of Narcomania (published in October 2012) gained the rare accolade of being used as evidence in a House of Commons report420 in December 2012. Drugs: Breaking the Cycle, the result of a year-long inquiry into drug policy conducted by the influential Home Affairs Select Committee, quoted extensively from our book. It used our interviews and research to make key points about the difficulty of monitoring the drug trade on the streets, online and within the banking system.
The influential cross-party group of MPs concluded that, after taking evidence from all sides of the drug debate, ‘now, more than ever’ there was a case for a fundamental review of all UK drug policy. The report said that the prime minister should urgently set up a royal commission to consider all the alternatives to Britain’s current drug laws, including decriminalisation and legalisation. However, David Cameron dismissed this out of hand, on the risible grounds that the government’s current approach ‘is working’.
Back in the real world, the drug trade thrives on prohibition – the tougher the enforcement, the higher the risk. The higher the risk, the bigger the mark-up. The bigger the mark-up, the more profit that can be made. Indeed, in a report published in The Wall Street Journal421 in January 2013, Nobel prize-winner Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy, professors in economics at the University of Chicago, wrote: ‘The paradox of the war on drugs is that the harder governments push the fight, the higher drug prices become to compensate for the greater risks. That leads to larger profits for traffickers who avoid being punished.
‘This is why larger drug gangs often benefit from a tougher war on drugs, especially if the war mainly targets small-fry dealers and not the major drug gangs. Moreover, to the extent that a more aggressive war on drugs leads dealers to respond with higher levels of violence and corruption, an increase in enforcement can exacerbate the costs imposed on society.’
And while fuelling crime, the laws have no impact on use. Research shows that people who abstain from using422 drugs do not make this choice because they are illegal, but because it is a lifestyle-and-health choice. Of those who do use drugs, the classification of a drug is of little relevance: apart from cannabis, two Class A drugs, ecstasy and cocaine, are the most commonly taken substances in Britain.
The allure of the illicit has created mirror economies in the worlds of entertainment and fashion, while entire business sectors, from financial services to hydroponics, have found themselves co-opted by a UK Drug PLC that approaches the world with open arms.
Whether you take or hate drugs the situation is pernicious. The collateral damage of the drug trade comes in many forms: disease, addiction, crime, death – and huge amounts of hard cash. The cost of the drug trade has been estimated as at least £16.7 billion423 a year in crime and disease, while the cost of chasing down Britain’s drug-money-fuelled organised-crime gangs is up to £40 billion a year424. Drug users are estimated to commit a third of all acquisitive crime,425 such as shoplifting, vehicle crime, and commercial and domestic burglary and robbery. It is estimated that addicted heroin and crack users need to raise426 between £20,000 and £50,000 a year to fund their habits. In Britain six people every day427 die as a result of drugs, more than those who die on the roads, while injecting drugs spreads hepatitis C and HIV.
Paradoxically, it is a war which is increasingly being fought against our own people. The punitive approach to solving the drug problem is merely creating a pool of criminalised young men and women. But there are other, less obvious ways in which society pays. The routine use of sniffer dogs at transport hubs, the satellite heat-mapping of entire cities to scan for cannabis farms, the use of drug testing and sniffer dogs in schools, drug testing in the workplace and police drug-swab tests on people entering pubs and bars represent high levels of surveillance that sail close to the wind when it comes to human rights.
One of the problems faced by those seeking to regulate drugs, is that the desire to use drugs is part of the human condition. The ‘fourth drive’428 to intoxication identified by Dr Ronald K. Siegel is a powerful force that has been keeping humans searching for new highs since prehistoric times. While there are signs that drug use in Britain is falling slightly after escalating for decades, it appears this is a reflection of a tipping point in the nature of the substances that people are using to get high, a move away from more traditional plant-based drugs such as heroin and cannabis and on to an alphabet soup of chemicals. Much like the sex urge, the ‘fourth drive’ is too powerful a force to be dealt with by laws alone. So is the temptation of the huge profits that can be made from smuggling and selling drugs.
Just as drug dealers are not drug pushers, the drug trade is not some sort of spectre descending on society to dispense its wares. It is an economy fuelled by public demand. Our drug trade is a product of modern British society and is therefore a reflection of its problems, passions and peccadillos.
A significant chunk of the population feels the need to buy their thrills off the shelf and by doing so complement their downtime or bury their boredom and frustration. Alcohol has for centuries been the drug of choice for this. Illegal drugs are just a more varied way of doing it. But the drug trade is also a symptom of one of the greatest ills of society: inequality.
For those addicted to drugs, they offer a desperate but alternative existence, and, for however brief a moment, they provide comfort and an escape from past and present horrors and dismal lives. And those living in deprived communities are more likely to become addicted to drugs – whether they be heroin, cocaine, speed, Valium or alcohol – than better-off drug users.
Inequality not only breeds addiction, it breeds drug dealers. Most of the tens of thousands of people employed to sell crack and heroin on the streets come from poverty. The drug trade merely offers a way out. And because they are grafting at the sharp end of the trade, they are more likely to get beaten, convicted and jailed than those operating above them, those who are earning the kind of money that is worth laundering in the financial system or in some local business.
However, the gritty reality of the drug trade at street level is largely ignored. Where society’s views on sexuality, alcohol and gambling have been translated into relaxed legislation that chimes with the times, drugs have become a symbolic line in the sand for the moral majority who are also the gatekeepers of change. The overriding political narrative around drugs has become frozen in time, detached from the world around us. There is a black hole in intelligent debate; the complex issues that drugs pose for society are liquidised by politicians and the media and spoon-fed to the public in simple, yet highly misleading, doses.
The drug trade has continued to be one of the great unsolvable moral, social and legal issues of our time because it’s a problem with no quick or easy solution. But this is no excuse for resorting to using drug addiction or low-level drug crimes as sticks to beat people with, or devising piecemeal policies and failing to experiment with bolder ones.
The way in which society looks at drugs has changed during the hundred-year drug war: what was originally defined as a moral problem has since been diagnosed as a disease and then reincarnated as a crime. Yet the majority of those participating in the UK drug market are not immoral, sick or criminally minded.
Yet today, politicians and the voting public alike appear to be in a state of narcomania, drunk on the rhetoric of the war on drugs and beguiled by stereotypes of yesteryear, they have become convinced that a drug free world is possible despite irreversible change.
Whether we like it or not, for a short period of time before the banks fell, it is highly possible dirty money propped up Britain’s ailing financial institutions. These illicit chemicals grease the wheels of society. The drug trade is the hidden mixer in Britain’s booming night-time economy, a major employer of the disenfranchised and a cultural touchstone for an increasing percentage of the population and a ‘hook’ for advertisers.
And who is the key driver of the new British drug economy? The middle classes, who have become the most vociferous customers of the new drug menu and who are taking advantage of the sanitized ways of buying them. The drug trade has become so embedded, into the very sinews of a nation, it is now impossible to extract without causing irreparable damage. The clock cannot be turned back, but it continues to tick.
The fact is, as we dither, our ability to exercise any significant authority over a business that is weighted to win is disappearing. The parameters of the prohibition debate are changing and fluctuating as never before. Change, whether we like it or not, will be inevitable. Britain is in the midst of a demographic tipping point in drug use – and drug dealing. Rising numbers of drug users in their thirties, forties, fifties and sixties puts paid to the myth that illegal highs are purely a rite of passage or rebellion of youth.
Relying on the status quo means taking a gamble that with heroin and crack, the world has seen the worst of the most troublesome drugs. But there is a very real fear that with falling heroin and crack use, a new substance with ten times their appeal and with the distribution network of mephedrone could be waiting on the sidelines. And in the age of the Internet and legal highs, law enforcers are finding it hard to draft a law that encompasses the sheer variety of drugs available.
So this raises the question: what should we do about all this? It’s certainly a classic school or TV debate – ‘how do we end the war on drugs?’ Most documentary makers, journalists, authors, academics and economists who probe the drug world say that the answer is legalisation. Opposing them are the zero-tolerance brigade. The former group is more often driven by hard science, and the latter by an acute sense of morality. The debate, depressingly in Britain, is highly polarised and therefore set in stone. There are countless intellectual ‘battles’ between these opposing groups every year, in academic institutions, conferences and in Parliament. But all that happens is that the middle ground shrinks and the argument becomes more about ideology than real-world solutions.
But do these ding-dong, TV-friendly debates between amateur analysts half-blinded by their own agendas ever get us anywhere? As the country continues to exist in a state of narcomania, we think that this kind of polarised, agenda-led debate is a red herring.
Despite a growing global movement for more liberal policies and the increased involvement of Transform in public discourse concerning the matter it would take a monumental shift in political will and public attitudes to take this huge step. Particularly for a government that took nearly a decade of hand-wringing, reports and meetings to decide that tinfoil could be legally handed out to heroin users in a bid to switch them from the risks of injecting. Or whether naloxone, a life-saving antidote to heroin overdoses, should be made widely available to front-line drug services. There is little political gain in reducing the impact of the drug war because most of those adversely affected by it are the poor and relatively disenfranchised.
If a government was brave enough to go for legalisation – and many think that the only party capable of achieving it, on the ‘Nixon goes to China’ principle, is the Tory Party – there are major doubts about how drugs such as crack would be made available to the public, concerns over the inevitable undercutting of government drug prices by illicit drug sellers, and understandable fears about the inevitable involvement of Big Pharma in running the new regime. And not everyone would want to live in a Brave New World where performance-enhancing drugs would see the British workforce revitalised.
A hard-line approach would have to ensure that the extra resources spent on monitoring, catching and punishing drug offenders – and the impact this would have on civil liberties – would be effective enough to warrant them. Yet this is unlikely. In prisons, where most inmates are locked up for twenty-two hours a day, routinely searched, drug tested and, surrounded by high security, and where visitors are searched by prison guards and sniffer dogs, drugs are rife. In China and Iran, where drug users and traffickers are often executed, drug use is rocketing.
It seems that the only options are the status quo under Big Gangster, legalisation under Big Pharma or a hard-line approach under Big Brother.
Because the drugs problem is such a moral issue, the government is likely to follow the will of the people. And there are no strong signs yet that the public is ready for legalised heroin and crack. However, Britain is in a very different place when it comes to the use and supply of ‘softer’ recreational drugs.
As traditional social bonds such as religion and lifelong employment have grown weaker, counter-culture has moved centre stage – and in many cases passed into legitimacy. The stamp of approval is less and less in the hands of the traditional Establishment and increasingly in the hands of all of us as consumers. The drug and sex trades are huge economies, with their legitimacy given the nod by consumers, not by moral leaders.
As drug use and drug selling become increasingly normalised, the reactions to it will become less ignorant and confused. In a decade or two, the Daily Mail – whose vociferous antipathy has had the clear effect of muzzling any rational debate on drugs – will be required to change its tune and appeal to a new, younger, more drug-savvy audience who are less likely to be hoodwinked and scared on these matters.
Our immediate solution is to take the focus away from the somewhat ivory-tower debate on legalisation, however promising this policy sounds, and to concentrate on the immediate future, on what can be done to help those that suffer the most as a result of the war on drugs. We need to make sure that the symptoms of this problem – drug addiction and criminalisation – are tackled.
People should not go to jail for drug possession. Drugs should not be used as a convenient excuse to lock up people who have been failed and rejected by society. Such individuals are often seen as legitimate casualties in the war on drugs – chavs, scum, junkies. The criminalisation of large numbers of people far outweighs the problems caused by the drugs themselves.
Successive governments have agonised in public about how the main victims of the drug trade are children – the schoolchildren smoking skunk and the children in care lured into prostitution through crack cocaine. But in fact, the government has done very little to educate our kids about the dangers of drugs, let alone the drug trade. The statutory amount429 of time that the average 16-year-old will have spent on drug education amounts to about one hour for their entire school life. This is a scandal that needs to be addressed. Until it is, expressions of distress by government about teenage drug use just appear hypocritical.
People who have severe drug problems must have access to the best treatment, and those who are the most socially excluded need proper support to get their lives together. On a larger scale, the more resources that are channelled towards decreasing social exclusion, the fewer future problem drug users and street dealers there will be. The same can be said of global drug production.
Ultimately, drug use must be seen by society for what it is: a vice, rather than a crime. As a first step to cutting the Gordian knot woven by successive governments, this simple shift in emphasis would do more to break the link between drugs and crime than any national enforcement initiative.
The British public must rid themselves of their own wilful blindness, look beyond their own personal experience of drugs and ask whether future generations deserve to inherit this moral maze, or can afford to maintain it. The parents of a drug-addicted son cannot expect help for their child while opposing, nimby-style, the setting up of a new drug-rehab unit in their town. If communities have problems with heroin buyers and sellers in their neighbourhood, they should be campaigning for better services, not blaming the symptoms of a neglected society.
The arguments about the future of drugs in Britain no longer sits at the sidelines of public discourse, it should be raging across the dinner tables of Middle England. Driving the market is the middle-class recreational drug user, perhaps the most hidden player in Britain’s drugscape because they remain largely unknown to the police and health services, and is paying twice for his or her illicit entertainment. Not only is their £50 for a weekend gram of cocaine driving up the profits of the drug trade, but they are also picking up the bill for enforcement and imprisonment of those people who supply them.
As in all wars, the collateral damage mounts daily. But this war is no longer being fought against an exterior enemy: it is being waged against ourselves.