The ketamine hit1 home about ten minutes down the path on the way to the main stage at Glastonbury. Lucy and her friends – James, Paul and Pete – had each snorted a thick line of the hallucinogenic anaesthetic drug in their tent before heading out into the night.
As they walked arm in arm, Lucy’s feet started feeling heavy, as if someone had poured cement into her boots. Her legs began to slow. Then the visuals kicked in. She began to see in a kind of tunnel vision, darkness surrounding the dimly lit path, with hundreds of faces coming towards her and passing by. Who was that man and why did he look like a skull with a wig on? What was that granny doing with her boobs out? And who was that mad-eyed hippy frothing at the mouth?
Three cowgirls came up to them with a tray of vodka jelly. ‘Look what we made for you,’ they said, popping a cup of shimmering scarlet into their hands.
Lucy wasn’t even sure if she knew where her mouth was. She turned to Paul and saw that his eyes were wobbling from side to side, his mouth tightly clenched. They looked at each other and crumpled in hysterics, bent over double, tears streaming from their eyes. They couldn’t speak.
After a while, they continued their journey, stumbling into oncomers every few paces, but no one seemed to mind. More people streamed past. Who was that dressed up as the Queen Mum? And what were all those girls in tutus doing in that tree? Lucy had forgotten she had taken drugs: the world around her had gone mad – all she could do was laugh at it.
The next morning, sitting in the sunshine, they were piecing together the night before. ‘Did we see Gorillaz?’ said Paul. ‘I don’t know – did we?’ said Lucy. ‘I don’t think we got to the main stage,’ said James. ‘I don’t even think we got to the end of that path.’
Lucy and her friends are all in their thirties. One works for BP, another runs a flooring company, the third is a personal assistant and the fourth is an artist.
They had bought what Lucy called a ‘well-planned package of drugs’, alongside the usual camping supplies. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of festival-goers each year, they saw a few days listening to music in a giant field in British summertime as the ideal situation in which to get ‘out of it’.
Two powerful human drives – to get high and to make easy money – have been constantly reshaping and reinventing the drug trade since the first global anti-drug laws were set in place over 100 years ago. And, despite a century of law enforcement, the trade has mushroomed to become not only the biggest earner for international organised-crime groups but also larger, globally speaking, than most legitimate industries.
In 1998 Britain added its support to a landmark UN declaration2 on global drug control with the slogan: ‘A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It’. The stated aim was to rid the world of illicit drugs in ten years. But twelve years later, in 2010, the UN had changed its tune3. It now acknowledged the existence of a drug world that had changed for ever. It not only admitted the defeat of its 1998 aim but said that the online proliferation of new synthetic drugs such as mephedrone had moved the goalposts. So what role does the drug trade play in Britain today?
Your view of the drugs trade will probably depend on where you sit within, or in relation to it. For dealers it is a way of making easy money, for consumers a route to a good night out. For those outside the trade its creeping presence may well be a reminder of everything that is wrong with modern society. But is Britain really a nation, as some national newspapers would have us believe, of dope fiends? Perhaps the drug trade has Britain hooked in a more subtle, yet pernicious, way. How does an illicit billion-pound industry operate beyond the reach of law enforcers? Where does the money go? And why does the mention of drugs scare our politicians into silence?
Drugs are perhaps Britain’s last taboo. A heady haze of morality swirls around this world of hard cash, criminality and intoxication. While great strides have been made in dealing with other Victorian-era bugbears like women’s rights, racism, slavery, sex and homosexuality, the attitude of those in power to the business of drug selling and narcotic intoxication remains stuck in a world of evil street peddlers preying, like dope-dealing vampires, on helpless young drug fiends.
The cloud of moral panic and disinformation that shrouds the drug trade in Britain is nothing new. When a Canadian soldier4 stationed in Folkestone in the 1920s was arrested for selling cocaine, or ‘snow’ as it was then called, the press came up with some familiar headlines: ‘London in the Grip of Drug Craze’ and ‘Cocaine Driving Hundreds Mad’. Britain exists in a perpetual state of moral intoxication on the issue of drugs: a marijuana-type inertia befuddled further by a trance-like reliance on purely symbolic policies, gift-wrapped as ‘pragmatism’. It is a condition we call ‘narcomania’ and you will encounter countless examples of it throughout this book.
The term was5 first used by the eminent Victorian addiction specialist Dr Norman Kerr in 1865 to refer to a pathological craving for drugs. He saw addiction as a disease that ‘infected’ unfortunates in Britain’s underclasses, as well as a more privileged set who devoted their lives to ‘pleasure-seeking’.
But, as far as this book is concerned, the term characterises the deeply confused way in which drugs, drug users and the drug trade are seen by the state, the media and the wider society in Britain. It is a symptom of a century-old disease. It is a malady caused by the conflict of two irreconcilable forces: the drive for illicit intoxication and the drive to deny it. In the past four decades, while governments have sought ever-stricter regimes to prohibit the trade, the agents of globalisation and social change have combined to undermine their efforts. Today the two forces continue to clash in a never-ending, Treasury-sapping game of cat and mouse.
In this book, we step into the collective mind of drug Britain by stripping away the cartoon drug world created by the media and politicians, the distorted vision of substances invading people’s minds, and indeed entire towns and cities, like some kind of alien horde, or of dealers selling drugs to eight-year-olds outside the school gates. Our intention is to reveal the real trade behind the line of cocaine snorted off a toilet cistern, the spliff burning in the ashtray and the wrap of heroin smoking on a piece of tinfoil.
In 1967, US drug pioneer and guru Timothy Leary delivered the mantra of ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ to his followers. But what motivates today’s British drug user? What is the buzz that keeps them coming back for more?
And what do we really know of the industry? Each year around twenty tonnes of heroin,6 thirty-five tonnes of cocaine (supplying the powder and crack-cocaine market), four hundred and twelve tonnes of cannabis and around sixty million ecstasy tablets enter the country in boats, planes, trains and automobiles. Beyond these statistics there has been little research into how Britain’s modern drug industry works, from port to street, and how it cloaks itself from detection.
Our journey begins on the front line of the drugs trade: the street, where the exposed interface of the trade in crack and heroin exists in a blizzard of unseen cash-and-wrap transactions. We explore how Britain’s Class A drug market, originally based on the pavements around Piccadilly Circus in the 1960s, spread to every corner of the country.
Transactions have been transformed by crack, a young, professionalised workforce, the mobile phone and the Internet. It is now an industry with tens of thousands of street vendors working for a distribution network with better coverage than Vodafone. It sells an array of products – on a plate, as it were – to an ever-widening, and younger, polydrug-using population. But who are the drug dealers, what is the job’s allure, and, once sucked in, how easy is it to get out? Or move up?
Above the street-level trade sits Britain’s burgeoning middle market, where the real money is and where the drug trade, as it has to in order to survive, has been increasingly blending into mainstream society. And it is a very different beast from the traditional world of Mr Bigs portrayed in popular media. We investigate how drugs changed the crime world to create pools of illicit wealth previously beyond the reach of the average British drug dealer, as well as a new ecosystem of small-time importers and kingpin moneymen. We examine the inside workings of the trade that has become a one-stop shop for a new generation of entrepreneurs and specialist operators – and that has turned Britain into a drug-producing nation.
Where the Internet put the world of adult entertainment into the living rooms and offices of the nation, and revitalised bingo and poker in the online gambling boom, it has also created an invisible but highly active ‘virtual’ drug market. The Web and people’s seemingly insatiable desire to get high mean that with a click of a mouse a shopper in Croydon can order cannabis from Canada, ketamine from India and the latest legal high from China and have their purchases delivered to their front door within days.
Where does law enforcement figure in all this? Globalisation, domestic cannabis cultivation and the rise of the Internet have left police with another new set of problems to solve. We speak to police from the front line to the top brass, from those who chase the money and those who go deep undercover on the trail of the suppliers in this ever-changing game of cat and mouse.
Despite all the Victorian-era rhetoric about foreign drug peddlers, it was Britain that was in fact the world’s first drug dealer when it pushed opium to China, backed with the threat of its fleet of gunboats. Indeed, many of our financial institutions and largest companies have their origins in the drug trade. We look at whether those organisations have managed to distance themselves from drugs since then. In the wake of the 100 year war on drugs and the recent credit crash, we explore how banks, businesses, manufacturers, retailers and consumers appear to be as susceptible to the appeal of the drug dollar as any young dealer setting out to sell their first stash.
Parliament has been in a muddle over how to deal with all this for decades. And this muddle has resulted in a virtual vow of silence as far as any kind of adult debate is concerned. Drugs is a subject MPs ought to talk about but rarely do, for fear of treading on a political landmine. What is the reason for this odd form of omertà that grips our politicians when it comes to anything drug-related? We talk to those in the know to find out.
Narcomania is a disease suffered – and fostered – by society as a whole. The drug trade’s illegality, its sex-like aura of forbidden, salacious pleasure and its links to organised crime have made it a key player in modern culture.
The trade is never far from the headlines or from people’s lives. It’s on TV, in films and inside music. Whether it is a story about the death of a teenager at a party, a major drug bust or a celebrity caught snorting cocaine, psychoactive substances are always in the news. Are we a nation obsessed by drug porn? And what drives the propaganda, myths and lies?
By the time you have finished your journey with us we hope to have provided you with a 360-degree view of Britain’s most taboo economy – and to have created a fresh gateway to a debate free from the stereotypes, myths and misinformation that form the backdrop for the public rhetoric about Britain’s war on drugs. Enter Narcomania …