OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE

'Has It Made A Difference Taking Out The Key Players? Not Even Remotely'.
Part One Of Two Of An Observer Special Investigation Into The Class A Drug
Epidemic And The Policies Which Have Failed To Stem It.

For the first time since its inception several decades ago, Britain's war
on Class A drugs has a battlefront: a visible line in the sand by which to
measure progress or its absence. In the words of a senior Customs officer,
its present position is evidence of staggering, longterm defeat: 'We've
been working our socks off for years, seizing more and more hard drugs;
bringing more and more people to court. But we have to face the reality
that all this effort has had absolutely no effect on drug availability.
We've got to be honest about the fact that we've been failing for the last
25 years.'

The line derives from a computer model, the work of a special Home Office
research project set up last year. Its goal was to answer a deceptively
simple question: how much cocaine and heroin are sold and consumed in
Britain each year? A wide variety of data were fed in: global estimates,
based on satellite imagery, of poppy and coca production; the relative size
of different Western markets; amounts of drugs seized; numbers of arrests;
street and wholesale prices.

These were the results: that the annual consumption of pure heroin in
Britain is running at between 28,000 kilos and 36,000kg, and that of
cocaine between 35,000kg and 41,000 kg figures which dwarf all previous
projections. The law enforcement agencies are nowhere near catching up. In
1999, the last year for which figures are available, the combined weight of
the two drugs seized through the thousands of operations, great and small,
mounted by British police and Customs was 5,299 kg, itself a record high.
The amount of cocaine being used in Britain is rather higher than Customs'
previous estimate for the whole of Western Europe.

Not that the agencies can be blamed for doing nothing. Since 1989 cocaine
and heroin seizures have risen by 600 per cent. Yet street prices have
plummeted: from UKP 100 and more per gram of either drug to between UKP 30
and UKP 50 today and this at a time of steady, if modest, inflation. Not
even personal computers have become so relatively cheap. In 1989 about
4,000 people were convicted of drug dealing or possession with intent to
supply; 10 years later the total was more than 15,000. Nevertheless, the
evidence is overwhelming that there are more dealers, and many more hard
drug users, than ever before.

Small wonder that the national agencies which deal with drugs the Customs,
the police National Crime Squad and the intelligence services have been
told to forget about targeting cannabis. This drug may cause cancer,
paranoia and longterm memory loss, and it too is cheaper than ever, taken
regularly by millions. But right now cannabis is not the problem. Across
great swaths of the country, where hard drugs and junkies were rarely
sighted a decade ago, heroin and cocaine, often smoked as crack, are
becoming the opium of the people.

The Class A consumption model was developed as a result of the 10year drug
strategy unveiled by Keith Hellawell, the former government 'drugs tsar',
in 1998, which set the ambitious targets of reducing cocaine and heroin use
by 25 per cent by 2003 and by 50 per cent by 2008. Meeting those objectives
is probably impossible . At least, however, the scale of the problem is now
understood for the first time. That realisation is prompting the most
radical changes in drug enforcement policy since the Misuse of Drugs Act
was passed in 1971.

Scene: the secure exercise yard, roofed by steel mesh, of the cell block at
Oxford police station. Kevin Williams (not his real name), who is 22,
squats on his haunches, staring at his trainers. Pale, listless and
pinthin, he's beginning to 'cluck', to feel the effects of heroin
withdrawal, and after his arrest on suspicion of burglary what he dreads
most of all is a night without drugs.

Kevin lives in a village of golden Cotswold stone near Witney, the
prosperous market town set amid lush countryside which Shaun Woodward
represented when he first defected from the Tories to Labour. Kevin began
using heroin two years ago when he split up with the mother of his daughter
and became depressed by a bitter custody battle over the child. He
graduated rapidly from smoking to injection.

How many dealers did he know in Witney? Perhaps half a dozen: he can
usually score by telephone within a few minutes. At the end of last year
the police mounted a major operation against alleged heroin dealers in
Witney and made nine arrests. For how long did it interrupt the supply? For
the first time in a generally gloomy conversation, Kevin smiles: 'I don't
know maybe an hour?'

I wanted to investigate the drug scene in and around Oxford partly because
I live there, but also because it conforms to none of the stereotypes
formerly associated with heroin and crack cocaine use. This is not an area
of longterm unemployment or grim urban decay. Pockets of deprivation do
exist, but the region has been booming economically for years. Its towns
and countryside are beautiful, and it is rich in cultural resources.

Ten years ago, according to Oxford's head of criminal intelligence, a
detective of 20 years' experience, 'the police more or less knew everyone
who took heroin in the city. There were about 50 of them, mainly old hippy
types, and they were like a family: they would pool their resources and
send someone down to London to get the gear. Now there's no way we know all
the users: there are simply far, far too many'. Not that Oxford and its
environs were in any way unique: 'I know from colleagues on other forces
that we could be discussing almost anywhere. This is an epidemic.'

A recent survey by Richard Huggins of Brookes University found that Oxford,
population 140,000, now has between 1,800 and 2,300 'problem' heroin and
crack users, defined as people for whom drug use has created a serious
dependency and health difficulties. About 70 per cent of this group
regularly use both drugs. In addition, there is a large, less easily
quantifiable group who use heroin and crack recreationally, often while
holding down a steady job.

I met one of them, Martin, aged 27, in Bullingdon prison, where he is
serving seven years for his first criminal offence armed robbery, which he
says he committed to finance a stay in a private drug rehabilitation
clinic. Yet until his arrest, as his fiveyear heroin habit steadily
worsened, he was managing to work in charge of a team of specialist
electronic engineers installing secure communications for the Army and
Ministry of Defence. 'I never had to steal because I earned good money,' he
said. 'I had two lives: my job, house, car, missus, little 'un. And then
this other life. I always had smart clothes; I shaved. Most people had no
idea I was a gearhead.'

Sometimes he spent his month's wages in four days, buying heroin. But 'I
didn't have a problem getting credit because I was earning'. Heroin and
crack users are getting younger, and the drugs do not conform to any social
class. Energy and Vision, a drug education project run by two exusers, Paul
McCabe and Spencer Hudson, is gathering data from anonymous questionnaires
filled in by children from Oxfordshire schools. Five thousand have already
been analysed. The results are alarming. Heroin and crack use can be found
in every local sixth form: typically, between 10 and 15 students in year 12
will admit to having tried these drugs at least once.

Recently McCabe and Hudson compared the responses of a top, singlesex
public school, an outoftown estate comprehensive and a state high school in
the depths of the Cotswolds. The trends and levels of drug use with
cannabis commonly having been smoked as young as 12 were identical.

The first promise David Blunkett made after his appointment as Home
Secretary was that he would 'rid the country of the plague of hard drugs'.
Whether one looks at the picture nationally, or in a locality such as
Oxford, it is a pledge more easily made than delivered. Drug operations
against dealers and traffickers, whatever their size, are costly and
labourintensive, involving lengthy surveillance and a crucial element of luck.

'Drug jobs are like putting your money on a horse,' said another Oxford
detective. 'Sometimes the horse doesn't come in, however good the tip. You
can be building a picture of a prominent individual for months, and when
you've got enough you go for it. But when you go through the door, you may
still be unlucky: that day there won't be any gear.'

And even successful operations, such as that mounted in Witney, tend not to
affect the drug supply perceptibly. Earlier this year Oxford police
arrested a major 'Yardie' criminal who had been dealing heroin and crack
cocaine from a house on the local Barton estate. Wanted for murder in the
United States, he was later extradited. Almost immediately, said Detective
Chief Inspector Jim Trotman, head of Oxford CID, other dealers, also of
Jamaican origin, moved in to fill the vacuum.

'At least the replacements don't live there: they come up in cars from
London,' said Trotman. 'For the residents, that is an advance.'

Professor Mike Hough, who leads a specialist drug research team at South
Bank University in London, has just completed an evaluation of the
Metropolitan Police's huge Operation Crackdown, a coordinated series of
raids and arrests against hundreds of crack and heroin dealers across the
capital.

It makes bleak reading. Following the raids, 'there was little discernible
added difficulty in obtaining Class A drugs, and no change in local
price... although over 80 crack houses were disrupted, our best guess is
that most relocated or reopened at the same premises within a very short
period of time'.

The main reasons, Hough concludes, were the growing demand for crack and
heroin, and the 'very high profits which can be made from selling drugs,'
which meant there were always more people who wished to become involved.

'Am I saying, "Don't run Crackdown?" I don't think I am,' Hough said. 'The
fact the UKP 1m that the operation cost didn't make a visible difference
doesn't make me say, "Let's pack up and go home". The market might have
grown faster if we didn't try to contain it. But I do think it's very
difficult to come up with a good enforcement solution.' Talking to police
and Customs officers about Class A drugs over the past few weeks, I have
sometimes heard something close to despair. 'Did it make one little bit of
difference putting them away?' asked a Customs man who played a leading
role in some of the biggest drug prosecutions over the past 15 years. 'Has
it made one bit of difference taking out these people we call the main
players? Not remotely, not even remotely.' In Tottenham, north London, for
many years one of the national epicentres for Class A drugs, Superintendent
Steve James, the local police chief, remembered his days in the midEighties
on Scotland Yard's Central Drugs Squad. He said: 'If we seized an ounce of
heroin, we used to hold a party. It was rated a major seizure. Now, if we
get hold of a kilo we don't even bother to go to the pub.'

Universally, those involved in drug law enforcement from local cops in
Oxfordshire, through Customs to intelligence chiefs agree that the war on
drugs can never be won through enforcement alone. Ultimately, as
Hellawell's 10year strategy made clear, it must go handinhand with measures
designed to reduce demand, and to rehabilitate those with drugs problems.
At the same time, they are not ready to concede defeat. Despite the years
of failure, senior officers are placing their faith in a radical change of
strategy: this time, they insist, enforcement will make a difference.

Abandoning operations against cannabis traffickers is only the first step:
henceforth largescale cannabis seizures and prosecutions will emerge only
as a byproduct of investigations into the supply of heroin and cocaine. The
second stage, which is already being enacted, marks an even sharper break
with the past. The prime goal of drugs investigations is no longer bringing
traffickers to court. Instead, the agencies are being ordered to aim for
'disruption'. What matters most is reducing overall drugs consumption
figures, stopping cocaine and heroin reaching the streets, and if this
means fewer prosecutions and trials, so be it.

The most dramatic manifestations of this change of strategy are taking
place abroad. In the last 18 months, with virtually no media coverage,
British Customs, working closely with the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6,
the signals intelligence organisation GCHQ, the American Drugs Enforcement
Administration and similar agencies from Spain, Portugal, Colombia,
Venezuela and other countries in Latin America, have tracked and seized
more than 20 cocaineladen vessels bound for Western Europe. The weight of
pure cocaine seized totals 160,000kg, of which up to a third may have been
bound for Britain.

The role of GCHQ is crucial. Its ability to track ships across the globe by
their radar and radio emissions makes it possible to make highly informed
predictions as to which vessels may be worth arresting, even in the absence
of informants. Until very recently, if a ship had been identified by this
or other methods, Customs' strategy would have been to wait until it landed
in Britain, to watch what happened and then to make seizures and arrests.

A long series of highprofile legal fiascos such as the notorious case of
Brian Charrington and Curtis Warren, when all but one of 10 defendants
charged with importing 900kg of cocaine walked free have produced an
alternative.

'Why get ourselves bogged down with trials which may last many months and
see our staff crossexamined up hill and down dale as defence counsel play
the game of hunt the informant?' asked one senior source.

Under the new strategy, Customs is relying increasingly on South American
'special units' of local lawenforcement staff, vetted as free from
corruption and trained and kitted out with the latest hitech equipment by MI6.

There have already been notable successes. One related group of six ship
seizures, Operation Journey, netted more than 25 tonnes of cocaine,
disrupting a supply route from the Orinoco delta. Six weeks ago US Coast
Guards, acting on British information, seized 13.5 tonnes of the drug from
a single vessel; at least three huge seizures from UKbound vessels have
been made since February off the coast of Spain.

At some point, so the proponents of disruption argue, shipping the drugs
will become so dangerous and costly that the traffickers will find another
business.

Yet the economics remain daunting. Drugs markets do not behave like any
others, because the markups from source to consumption are so extreme. To
buy enough coca leaf to manufacture a kilo of cocaine, with a street value
of at least UKP 50,000, costs only about UKP 200. Intercepting some but not
enough of the total supply may simply eliminate competition, allowing the
suppliers who remain to raise their prices and profits.

The need to cross the sea makes the cocaine trade comparatively visible.
Heroin, mainly from Asia, is much harder to track. But if land shipments
are not revealed so easily by signals intelligence, the vast flows of money
created by trafficking are beginning to show up more regularly. Senior
Customs officers are convinced that here lies a potential 'drugs war winner'.

At present, about a quarter of the 1,200 UK Customs investigators devoted
to fighting the drugs trade work mainly in following the huge amounts of
money involved, a proportion which is set to triple over the next two
years. Again, there have been significant recent successes. In one pending
prosecution, it is alleged that a network of bogus travel agencies
laundered more than UKP 1bn over three years on behalf of Turkish and
Pakistani traffickers, channelling funds from Britain via Dubai to
Pakistan. British police forces are also beginning to shift their campaign
against regional 'level two' distributors from prosecution to disruption,
under a policy known as 'stash attack' once again, cutting the flow and
reducing the overall consumption figures is now the primary target.

The blunt truth is that for the foreseeable future, there is no
alternative. While it may be possible for a former Tory Minister of the
rank of Peter Lilley to call for the legalisation of cannabis, legalising
Class A drugs is not practical politics. Even its advocates, such as Keith
Morris, former British Ambassador to Colombia, admit that it would probably
lead to a rise in the levels of addiction.

Whether we like it or not, the tide of Class A drugs will remain controlled
by criminals, and as that tide rises people are drowning, literally.

On 29 January, 50 yards from my back garden fence, the body of Errol
Radburn, 27, was found when it snagged at the end of the propeller of a
narrow boat on the Oxford canal. Missing for five weeks, he had enough
heroin in his system to kill him, but when he hit the water he was alive:
he died by drowning, not from the effects of the drug.

In other circumstances, this might have been a case of manslaughter. His
friends and family say he used the drug only rarely, and needed help to
inject. The likeliest scenario is that, when he began to show signs of an
overdose, someone with him panicked and, thinking that he was dying,
pitched him into the canal.

Although he had keys in his pocket to a flat next to where he was found, no
one was formally interviewed by the police. 'How did he die?' asked Det
Chief Insp Trotman. 'The chances are we'll never know.'

After a 30minute inquest, the coroner recorded an open verdict. Errol's
brothers, Steve and Roger, tried to find a lawyer to represent them, but
none of Oxford's solicitors wanted the work.

Perhaps it would have been too much trouble. Then again, Errol Radburn was
only the first of eight users to die a heroinrelated death in Oxford this
year. The 70 tonnes of Class A drugs consumed annually in this country can
also be measured in wasted and shortened lives.

Next week: treating the Class A epidemic crime, drugs and rehabilitation.