SERIES: DRUGS UNCOVERED: DANGER ALL WAYS

The impact of the economic downturn is felt not solely in legal
markets - increasingly drug users are turning to cheaper options,
especially in rural Britain where amphetamines such as uppers and base
are on the rise. Havana Marking examines a growing concern

As the effects of the credit crunch kick in, spare a thought for the
13 million illegal drug takers in the UK. If you can't give them any
sympathy, have some for the drug agencies, mental-health organisations
and police forces bracing themselves for a new wave of drug-related
problems. One effect of economic downturn is being felt: cocaine
dealers are offering the much cheaper amphetamine as an alternative
high.

It may be a while before the swanky clubs and bars of central London
see the change, but in rural Britain, where belts are tightening
faster than most, cocaine dealers are feeling the pinch too. A
combination of less ready cash, the strong euro against the pound and
a number of large-scale busts this year is threatening their income
and, just like the legitimate businessmen around them, they are
looking for alternative ways to stay afloat.

In a market town on the southwest coast it's happening already. 'I
decided against buying any coke this weekend,' one local tells me.
'I'm a builder, and my trade will be one of the first to go, so I'm
trying to be careful. The dealer suggested speed instead. I haven't
been offered speed for almost 10 years!' The offer was made on a
Friday night in the local pub - and you can bet the same thing was
happening in bars and cafes across rural Britain.

Fifteen years ago, on the same high street, there were boarded-up
buildings and charity shops. Speed was taken in those days by a few
punks and travellers, washed down with cider or Special Brew. But
where folk 'on the DSS' used to be housed, there is now a boutique
hotel, a gastropub and a shop selling scented candles. The farming
crisis of the Nineties has, for the time being, been averted by luxury
cereals, organic milk and posh bacon. Agricultural land itself has
gone from UKP 2,000 per acre 10 years ago to more than UKP 5,000 per
acre.

But West Country locals are well aware of their fragile incomes. 'I've
already noticed a difference,' says the cocaine dealer, refusing to be
named. 'People take the drug to party and celebrate. At the moment
they'd rather be at home watching the TV.' He won't be drawn on the
economic margins of his trade but told clients that if they 'just
wanted to stay up and drink a bit more, they might as well take speed'.

The history of the drug in this small town reflects exactly the
situation of the UK as a whole. Over the past decade, cocaine
consumption has significantly increased while all other substance
abuse has fallen. In 1998, 1.2 per cent of adults in England and Wales
reported taking coke in the past year, doubling to 2.6 per cent in
2006-07. The 'glamorous' days of cocaine, champagne and rock stars are
over. Cocaine, as one user tells me, 'is common as muck'.

Despite the record seizures of the drug by police last year, the
cocaine trade is estimated to be worth UKP 2-UKP 3bn a year in
Britain, making it one of the most lucrative drugs markets in Europe.
Unsurprisingly the growth of cocaine abuse reflected the economic boom
- - the UK's economy had grown in every quarter since 1992. In addition,
the strong pound and euro had added to Europe's attractiveness to the
international cartels. John Walters, director of the US National Drug
Control Policy, reported in April this year that the amount of cocaine
seized at the Mexican border had significantly declined. He speculated
that traffickers were taking advantage of the market and had moved
their trade to Europe. 'It's no doubt that those forces are there,' he
said. 'It's more profitable [in Europe], and it's a better exchange
rate.'

But the trade in the UK has also become increasingly sophisticated.
There is now a two-tier cocaine market, with luxury and economy
versions on sale. Price per gram varies from UKP 50 to UKP 30
accordingly, with the 'coke-lite' increasingly in the reach of both
younger and poorer users. The student and rural drug-taking scene is
almost entirely made up of this latter type.

The price, of course, reflects the quality of the drug. 'Five years
ago coke in Dorset was roughly 60 per cent pure,' says Mindy Crespi,
chief executive of the East Dorset Essential Drug and Alcohol
Services. 'Now it is more likely to be 30 per cent.' As the recession
starts in earnest, even UKP 30 is going to feel like a huge amount.
'If a dealer offers you amphetamine - the effects of which last longer
- - it's going to feel like much better value for money.'

Drug takers, just like their dealers, react to economic conditions as
sensitively as the City. In fact, with no regulation - apart from the
fact that it's illegal - and no taxation, the drug trade is a pretty
free global market. Value for money is what shoppers look for when
times are hard, and drug consumers are no different. 'The drug market
is always responsive to economic conditions,' Professor Christine
Godfrey of the University of York tells me. 'The first thing people
will do is cut back on their cocaine and alcohol use. The second thing
they will do is look for cheaper alternatives.' Many might admit that
their drug use is not quite so casual after all. Amphetamines look set
for a comeback.

It's a frightening thought. As Crespi adds: 'Amphetamine tends to be
purer and while the effects last longer, so do the comedown and
related mood swings. Domestic abuse increases significantly.'

Speed is one name for a family of man-made chemicals, including
amphetamine sulphate and dexamphetamine. They are stimulant drugs that
work on the central nervous system, elevating levels of dopamine and
adrenaline. According to one drug advice website: 'They cause an
increase in heart rate and blood pressure. They make the user feel
more alert, confident and give a sense of increased energy. They
reduce the desire for sleep and suppress the appetite. They can cause
tension in the muscles, and cause tightness of the jaw, which leads
some people to grind their teeth and chew constantly. Users tend to
talk a lot.'

'Other less popular effects,' the helpful website goes on, 'are
anxiety, paranoia, irritability. It also puts significant strain on
the cardiovascular system.'

Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter produced in several areas
of the brain, and plays important roles in behaviour and cognition,
motor activity, motivation, sleep, mood, attention and learning. It is
said to 'teach' the brain by rewarding it with pleasure when we do
something beneficial, such as eat or have sex. Thus amphetamines
trigger the reward of pleasure. However, the nerves receiving dopamine
signals become less sensitive quite quickly. The user needs to take
more drugs, which reduces their sensitivity still further.

This goes on until, writes Professor Nicolas Rasmussen of the
University of New South Wales in his brilliant book On Speed, the
signalling is 'so low without drugs that pleasure is completely
impossible, and nothing besides getting more drugs is a strong enough
reward to motivate behaviour'. Needless to say, amphetamines are
highly addictive.

What's more, amphetamine psychosis, complete with paranoid delusions
and auditory hallucinations, is extremely close to natural mental
illness. So much so that since the Sixties, scientists researching
schizophrenia have given amphetamines to their lab rats. Since 1970,
dopamine excess remains the leading theory of the cause of
schizophrenia and speed-freak rats have served as the key animal
model to study and discover anti-psychotic drugs.

Amphetamine was discovered in 1929 by American scientist Gordon Alles,
as he searched for a drug to cure asthma. He injected himself with his
new chemical and noted that within seven minutes his nose had cleared,
and within 20 minutes he was experiencing a 'feeling of well-being'.
He noted nothing more until the next morning: 'Rather sleepless night.
Mind seemed to run from one subject to another.' He was granted a
patent in 1934, and a decongestant inhaler, Benzedrine, was created by
the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline and French. By 1937 students
were using the inhaler to help them stay up and study last-minute for
their exams. So began the non-medical use of amphetamines

In 1938 a German firm produced a very similar chemical -
methamphetamine - which it marketed as Pervatin. The Blitzkrieg was
apparently fuelled by this as much as new machinery and tactics.
German paratroopers caught behind British lines were described as
'fearless and berserk', marching further in a day than was considered
humanly possible. However, official Nazi sanction of the drug waned as
stories of addiction and collective delusion filtered through the
ranks. A whole unit had, in the dead of night, believed they were
under attack. In a group fit of paranoid psychosis they had all fired
their guns into the dark, exhausting their ammunition and thus
allowing themselves to be captured by the Russians the next day
without a fight. Methamphetamine is much stronger per milligram than
its older brother - and its hideous side effects revealed themselves
that much more quickly.

Allied forces continued to use amphetamine (a jolly good cure for
battle fatigue) and Benzedrine was issued in most first-aid kits. But
the use of Benzedrine - or 'Benny' as it came to be known - grew
beyond the military. Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac and William
Burroughs all cracked open the inhalers and ate the contents, fuelling
both the bebop jazz and beatnik movements. The 'new vision' of
spontaneous creativity was born. The highs were considered worth the
extreme lows. On the Road was written in three weeks on a Benny bender.

Despite growing alarm from certain medical sectors, the pharmaceutical
companies looked for new ways to market amphetamine and its relatives.
Diet pills, antidepressants and postnatal depression medicines hit the
market throughout the Fifties. 'Better living through chemistry' was a
common motto.

By the early Sixties, 3 per cent of all British doctors' prescriptions
were for amphetamines. As well as tired housewives, overworked
physicians and crazy musicians, a new breed of drug taker emerged: the
teenagers.

It was mods who really took amphetamines to heart. They favoured
Dexamyl - a triangular blue tablet marketed for both neurosis and
obesity - and deliberately took too many. Immortalised in the film
Quadrophenia, their sharp suits, soul music and mopeds seemed the
epitome of cool, the Brit beatnik, no longer constrained by crooning
Fifties claustrophobia.

In the film, young Jimmy (played by Phil Daniels) finds excitement and
glamour in mod culture. Swept along on a tide of 'blues' (Dexamyl),
lust and anarchy he joins in the battles against the rockers on
Brighton beach. Life unravels for Jimmy soon after. Still taking
Dexamyl, he is depressed, paranoid and suicidal.

The mods' bad teeth (a direct result of speed abuse) and paranoia soon
became more notorious than their music or fashion. Hippies, Allen
Ginsberg specifically, then started the war against speed heads. 'All
the nice gentle dope fiends,' he wrote in 1965, 'are getting screwed
up by the real horror monster Frankenstein speed freaks who are going
round stealing and bad-mouthing everybody.' Frank Zappa and Grace
Slick got in on the campaign: 'This is Grace Slick,' broadcast a rock
radio station in 1968. 'One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you
small. And if you shoot up speed you won't be there at all, because
you'll be dead, baby.'

Medically, too, speed was outlawed: prescribed amphetamines were all
but banned in Britain in 1964, seemingly reducing the street supply by
25 per cent. The US took a good deal longer; despite the protests,
amphetamines were still prescribed until 1980. Speed was later
embraced by punks. Disaffection and nihilism suited the drug well. It
was self-destructive, consciousness-obliterating and the opposite of
anything remotely related to flowers. But also the minority drug choice.

The recreational drug was reinvented as whizz, and came back for a
while in the party and gay scene of the late Eighties and Nineties.
Rave culture spread the use of drugs, notably ecstasy (a form of
amphetamine) and speed, across the country on a scale never seen before.

The city clubs were packed out with whistling ravers but so, too, were
the fields and aircraft hangars of rural free parties. In Dorset, an
old clay pigeon range became the Country Club and every weekend West
Country kids drove miles to pop pills and dance their little trainers
off. Drugs were now officially everywhere.

Acquiring drugs across Britain is easy; some would say more so in the
countryside. Buying heroin is 'like going for a drive and a cream
tea', one Devon user told me. The pretty town of Axminster is known to
local youths as 'Smackminster'. Every town in the UK probably has a
dealer and each one will be preparing for the economic downturn.

'We do know what happened last time there was a recession,' Harry
Shapiro, spokesman for DrugScope, one of the UK's most respected drug
agencies, tells me. 'Heroin. Mass unemployment, the collapse of the
manufacturing industry and a cheaper form of smokable heroin all led
to a large and sudden smack problem. Even today's users tend to have
started taking the drug back then. Thankfully, a new generation of
heroin takers has never emerged.'

However, America's recent experience is worrying. The cocaine market
has been supplanted by a dirt-cheap, locally produced drug:
methamphetamine. Also known as crystal meth, or 'ice', the same drug
that sent German soldiers berserk, it is estimated to have been taken
by up to 12 million Americans. Illegal and mobile labs are crawling
across the rural, Bible Belt of the States. Three million people use
the drug weekly, 1 per cent of the population.

Also known as 'Nazi crank' it is considered a 'redneck' drug,
flourishing in the poor white rural areas, and it has started to be
discovered in the UK. In January last year, a study for the
Association of Chief Police Officers found that crystal meth 'is being
produced, sold or used in every area of the UK except Scotland'. It
also found increasing levels of crystal meth in other drugs, notably
heroin and cocaine, so some people were taking it unwittingly.

In the past three years, police have made their first discoveries of
crystal meth labs in the UK, including one on the Isle of Wight and
one in Derbyshire, and ACPO is aware of its dangers. Simon Bray,
leader of ACPO's work on methamphetamine, says they were determined to
stop the drug getting 'a firm foothold in the UK. Meth does not yet
appear to be an established problem here but, having examined the
experience of other countries, there is every possibility that use of
the drug could increase'.

Of all the amphetamines, meth is the most dangerous, and one that the
UK has so far avoided. ACPO believes that a cheap supply of cocaine
has left the UK relatively untouched. But as sterling loses value and
people can no longer afford cocaine, meth has a real chance to expand
here.

'It's impossible to predict what will happen to the drug market in a
recession,' says Shapiro. 'But at least since the last economic
crisis, we now have established drug support agencies across the
country.' Let's just hope that this recession is different from the
last one.