Series: Drugs Uncovered: Part 9 Of 17

DRUGSTORE BRITAIN

How Easy Is It To 'Score' In Britain Today? We Gave Martin Deeson A Wish
List Of Illegal Drugs And Sent Him Shopping In Three Urban Centres And One
Rural Backwater. We Then Sent His Haul To A Forensic Lab For 'Purity'
Analysis, With Shocking Results

Bristol, Wednesday afternoon 'There goes my money,' I think, as I watch the
coke dealer bouncing happily off down the street. He has a spring in his
step, as befits a man who's just ripped off someone for ?55. In my hand is
a gram of not-cocaine and a ?10 wrap of nothing-like-cannabis. Which means
that, on the first drug deal of my mission, I have just been
comprehensively mugged.

I had met Paul, a shabbily dressed 30-year-old with bloodshot eyes, five
minutes earlier in St Paul's, known as Bristol's front line. My aim was to
see whether it was possible for a stranger to pull up in four British towns
and cities and rustle up a shopping list of prohibited drugs just by asking
around.

People had warned me that to attempt to buy drugs on the street in Bristol
was to risk a rip-off or, even worse, a violent mugging. It's one of those
cities that has a clearly delineated 'front line' - a street bazaar of drug
dealers openly working the pavement in an area where any of the big six
illegal drugs (marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, amphetamines, heroin and crack)
can be easily bought, a one-stop shop, if you like.

The science fiction writer Philip K Dick once wrote: 'Drug misuse is not a
disease, it is an error of judgment, like the decision to step out in front
of a moving car.' Buying drugs on the street is more than an error of
judgment, it is a mug's game, like stepping out in front of a moving stream
of traffic blindfolded with the words 'run me down' painted across your
forehead.

Street scoring is the last option of the desperate, the weekend dabbler, or
the stranger in town. It takes people into the twilight back-alley world of
unreported rip-offs, dangerously adulterated drugs, muggings and, at worst,
the so-called 'blow for some blow, grope for some dope' drug deals of the
type that helped spread HIV through New York so fast in the late Eighties.
At the time, rocks of crack were often offered by dealers in the New York
housing projects in return for oral sex.

So, in the interests of my mission, I start to live the hours, and in some
ways the lifestyle, of an itinerant drug addict: up at noon, change city,
book into a new hotel, hit the streets looking to score till late at night.
When I ask a man begging for money in Bristol city centre what the best
time of day is to score smack on the street, he tells me the dealers are
hardly early risers.

In Bristol, after my poor start, I secure a more promising tip from a guy
called Pete, a friend of the street beggar. Pete lives with his girlfriend
in a classic junk pad. He has a job, he keeps it together better than many
addicts, but still the one room they live in is mono-levelled (mattress,
clothes, everything on the floor).

I am expecting Pete to tell me the name of a street corner, or the address
of a squat, a place where I can expect to buy some heroin. Instead he just
asks for my mobile, dials a number from memory and has a conversation which
represents drug scoring efficiency stripped to its essentials:

'I need two tens of B. OK, five minutes.'

In current drug street slang, heroin is 'brown' because it is, usually,
that colour. Crack is described as 'white' and cocaine (which, confusingly,
is also sometimes 'white') most often as 'powder'. There are, of course,
many other names, including the catch-all 'gear', but 'brown' and 'white'
are the most simple and the terms that seemed to work around the country.

In front of the house - a big Victorian pile divided into bedsits - Pete
takes my UKP20 note, rolls it tight, and tucks it under a thick rubber band
he wears round his bicep like a poor man's version of a riverboat gambler
in a Technicolor western. Then he puts his jacket on over the top. 'People
get mugged on the front line all the time,' he says. 'You don't want to
carry your money where people can find it.' At the end of his road we cross
a busy junction where the cars keep their windows tightly closed as they
pass through this 'bad area'. Then we do a left down a residential street
and by the first house stands another white man with missing teeth and bad
skin who looks far more destroyed than Pete.

The two exchange nods and an 'all right?' and then, 30 seconds later, a
rangy young man with a Jamaican accent and bleached yellow hair swings
round the corner. 'All right?' he says to Pete, the other man and me. 'All
right?' the three of us reply. Out of his mouth he spits two wraps of
heroin, each wrapped tight in blue plastic from a corner shop carrier bag.
Pete gives him my money. We arrive back at the flat at the same time as the
girlfriend who has been nowhere more exotic than the corner shop.

Later that night, I buy an ecstasy pill off Tom, the musician I met in a
city centre bar. 'I've got loads of them,' he says. 'They're left over from
my skiing holiday.' Then he takes me back to his recording studio. He is on
a mission to show me how easy it is to get cocaine delivered in Bristol.

When his dealer turns up, the man says 'Sorry. I've run out of powder. Does
anyone want any rocks?' Then I watch as half of this group of educated,
successful young people with good jobs prepare to smoke crack. One of them
is a strikingly beautiful girl. She exudes health and a passion for life.
She looks about as far from the popular image of a crack-smoking druggie as
you can imagine. But when the improvised drink-can pipe comes near to her,
her face lights up.

'You don't do crack do you?' asks one of her friends who, like me, has
politely declined a turn on the pipe.

'It's just breathing,' says the beautiful girl, toking deep on the smoke.
'It's just a matter of what you choose to breathe, that's all.' Everyone
who has been smoking on the pipe laughs. At that point, as they are fond of
saying in the popular press, I made my excuses and left.

On this first night, I have already seen several sides of drug taking in
Britain: smack heads holding down a job and scoring their drugs more
quickly than you can buy a pint of milk, street-dealing rip-off merchants,
and successful young people smoking crack and mugging no one to pay for it.

Bristol
Street corner
Club Party

1 x Cocaine UKP45
1 x Cannabis UKP10
2 x Heroin UKP 20
1 x Ecstasy UKP10

Sub total UKP85

Cardiff, Thursday Afternoon

Asking around in pubs on a Thursday late afternoon, someone had told me
there is an area just off Tiger Bay which is one of the last stretches of
the old waterfront that hasn't yet been developed.

Pulling up outside a row of shops, I can see 15 or 20 Somali boys, all
under 20 and all wearing the international dress code of the urban street
dealer: baggy trousers, trainers and hooded tops (always worn with the hood
up).

I catch someone's eye. 'D'you know anywhere round here I can score?'

He shrugs. There is a body language to street scoring which I am already
picking up on only my second night: it's half Goodfellas and half hip-hop
videos. So, I know that the shrug he gives does not mean: 'No, I don't know
anyone who sells drugs.' What it means is: 'I may be able to help you and
if you show enough respect by waiting there for a minute or two without
looking too much like a plainclothes policeman then I might, just might, be
able to sort you out.'

So I wait. After five minutes, a new kid joins the group. He is no more
than 17; 18 at most. 'What d'you want,' he says, very aggressively for
someone sporting a moustache made entirely of bumfluff. 'I want to score,'
I say.

'What d'you mean score?' he asks.

I give him a look. 'Score.' I say. 'I'm not talking about football, am I?'
I think I might have overdone the sarcasm, and made him look a little silly
in front of his mates. Luckily, though, I'm dealing with a barely
18-year-old junior dealer and the age difference is enough that I seem to
have got away with it. I would never have dared say anything so impertinent
to one of the men on the front line in Bristol.

After a couple more minutes in which the junior dealer ponces a cigarette,
wanders off round the corner and then returns, he tells me to follow him up
the road. As I do, I get approached by a man in his thirties in tracksuit
bottoms and trainers. This man has scars on his face and a glaze over his
eyes. I assume they are working together and this is all part of the plan.
But in fact I have been 'poached', a common practice among street dealers.

'What d'you want,' he says. A quick assessment of his eyes, face and
clothes somehow tells me that he's unlikely to rip me off. Although,
admittedly that's what I thought about Mister Tea and Two Sugars back on
the front line. 'Brown,' I say. 'And white.' He doesn't bat an eyelid. Most
people who do one also do the other from time to time, either taking heroin
to help them sleep after smoking the rocks, or just taking them at the same
time for a buzz that is, reputedly, a feeling all of its own. (A street
budget version of what, in America in the Seventies, they used to call a
speedball - injecting heroin and cocaine, the way John Belushi did the
night he died.)

'There's no brown around here,' he says. 'Only white.'

'OK, white then,' I say, accommodating as ever.

'It's 25 for a half gram,' he says.

As crack is sold by the 'rock' (a lump that comes in UKP10, UKP20 and UKP40
sizes) and cocaine by the UKP50 or UKP60 gram (or UKP150 'eight ball' or
eighth of an ounce/3.5 grams) I assume what he's offering me is cocaine.
'I've only got 15,' I reply, then fish for some change and make it up to
nearly 20.

'OK, 20,' he says, and we do the swap thing (drugs and cash being exchanged
in these situations with as much mutual suspicion as when they used to
exchange Cold War spies at Checkpoint Charlie. No one lets go of the cash
until the drugs are within grasp and both walk away sharply from the
encounter. This is the moment of maximum risk: of a rip-off, or worse, and
it's also the precise moment you really don't want the cops to show up).

We are standing on a main road in Cardiff down by the docks, though we have
at least taken the precaution of positioning ourselves between the two
pools of amber light thrown by the nearest street lights. Then he's off. I
can tell straight away from the feel of the tiny clingfilm parcel that this
is not half a gram of cocaine but a small rock of crack.

As I walk back to where the car is parked out of view I hear a 'pssst...'
from the junior dealer who is 50 yards behind me.

'What happened,' he says, when I catch up with him. He has taken off the
sunglasses now (to wear them when it is this dark would be absurd even for
a junior dealer) and he looks a little hurt. I explain that I thought the
older guy was with him. 'No, you don't want to score off him,' he says,
'he's a crack head.' Which makes me laugh inside.

I tell him I still need some 'brown'.

'How much,' he says.

'Ten,' I say.

'The smallest is 20,' he says.

And so, one hour after arriving in Cardiff I'm sitting back in my hotel
room on the ring road looking at two little wraps of heroin and crack.
Well, I think to myself, they certainly know how to keep a welcome in the
valleys.

And then I go out to score some pills. Sometimes part of the art of scoring
drugs is not to look for them too hard, particularly as far as ecstasy is
concerned. Follow the fun and the little fellas will probably be round the
next bend. After an evening bar crawling round the booze theme park that is
Cardiff's St Mary's Street on a Thursday night, I make my way with a couple
of friends to an after-hours club where the music is good and the people
dance. It's a great night. And all completely legal.

Then, just when I've forgotten I'm supposed to be working and should be
looking for an E, the god of drug culture chucks one straight into my lap.
Leaving the club sometime after three (and considerably legally refreshed)
we get talking to three students who have just been to one of the city's
big nightclubs. Of course these random strangers have a spare pill and when
I tell them what I am up to they are more than happy, flattered even, to
sell it to me.

But now it's time to really put the drug scene to the test... and attempt
to score in the middle of nowhere.

Cardiff

Docks
Tower Blocks
Alleyway
Random Strangers

1 x Crack Cocaine UKP20
1 x Heroin UKP20
1 x Ecstasy UKP10

Sub total UKP50

Market Rasen, Friday Night

Market Rasen is a town that farming forgot. It sits slap bang in the middle
of the Lincolnshire lowlands, marooned in terrain so flat that the horizon
is as far away as on a cruise ship.

I walk straight into a group of three teenage boys with torn jeans, dirty
hair and mopeds. They have been studying my progress towards them for a
couple of minutes as if anything unusual moving about is worth watching in
a place where not much of interest ever happens.

'D'you know where I can find a bed and breakfast,' I ask.

And they tell me quickly and helpfully where I can find two or three. I'm
about to say, 'D'you know where I can buy some drugs?' but something stops
me. I had suddenly been struck by the thought that a stranger wandering up
to teenagers and asking for drugs in a town this size could soon get a
reputation. And all sorts of unwanted attention.

Instead I ask, 'Where's a good place to go out on a Friday night?'

'Ain't nowhere round here,' one of them says. 'You're best off getting back
on that train and going back to Lincoln.' Which is an hour away.

Instead, I decide to hit the market square the following afternoon to
purchase some 'brown'. I have been told by a journalist on the local paper
that ever since the farm labouring jobs disappeared the area has had a big
heroin problem, even though the Lincolnshire Police press office said the
opposite, in fact had gone so far as to say, 'we don't really have a drug
problem in Lincolnshire.'

That evening I make the rounds of the three pubs nearest the market square,
looking to buy ecstasy. Perhaps not surprisingly, I find it a lot harder to
strike up plausible conversations with people who once were farmers than
with gangster lookalikes on the waterfront in Cardiff.

Talking to a group of girls all sucking on Bacardi Breezers in a pub with
the loudest music in the world, they all express surprise that someone 'up
from London' would need to score E in a town like Market Rasen. 'Why didn't
you bring any with you?' they keep asking, shouting over the sound of
Marilyn Manson screaming 'Tainted Love'.

And, 'What d'you want it for? You've already said you're here on your own?'
There was never cross examination like this on the streets of Cardiff or
Bristol. In those places there was more of an urban 'want drugs/can do'
attitude.

'Why doesn't he talk to Brian,' says a twentysomething girl called Cathy.
Brian is standing at the bar with a group of his mates, all slugging pints.
All three have arms as thick as Cathy's legs and seem totally uninterested
in anything other than drinking and muttering to each other.

After a minute, I move over towards Brian. I stand for a moment on the edge
of his little circle then say, 'Excuse me, are you Brian?' 'Fuck off,' he
says very calmly. His three mates hardly even look up.

'I was just wondering...'

'I said... fuck off!'

It has always seemed fairly obvious that the drug scene in a small rural
town would be far harder to penetrate than the open air drug supermarket of
most British cities. In the country, I knew by report and past experience,
there is a lively and flourishing drug scene. But the codes of entry are
far harder to negotiate.

In the past, I have stumbled across farm boys taking acid and stealing
combine harvesters, and Hell's Angels smoking crack in the snug bars of
village pubs, but the difference is that you only see this if you know the
right people. In Market Rasen, I clearly didn't.

The next morning I take a stroll round the market square, looking for the
fabled heroin bazaar. Instead of knots of crusties I find small market
stalls selling bedding plants and jam. After last night's failure, I am in
no mood to play silly buggers.

'Excuse me, I was told there would be lots of kids hanging around the
market square getting up to no good,' I say to a woman selling farm-fresh
vegetables.

'Oh, they're only here during the week,' she replies. 'Right bloody
troublemakers they are as well.'

In a pub just off the square, I spot an archetypal reprobate with spider's
web tattoo, drinking on his own. After I buy him a drink he agrees to take
me to Terry, a local smack dealer who also knocks out weed and speed and
occasionally LSD and ketamine.

'I've nothing,' says Terry, a pale-skinned 25-year-old, still in his boxers
and T-shirt at two in the afternoon. He has taken us up to his bedroom in
the two-up two-down terraced house where he lives with his mum, who is
nowhere to be seen. In the corner of his room is a very old Atari computer,
and the walls are covered with posters of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, which
are all bright red.

'There's no train in or out of here on Sundays,' he says. 'And I can't be
arsed to go and score today. See, everyone wants their smack on a Friday,
and now it's Saturday I've only got my personal bit. There's always a rush
at the weekend. I'll sort you out on Monday though.'

As a last resort I head out to the Market Rasen racecourse. There may be no
farming left in the area, but there is a racecourse and this is what has
kept the town just about alive. In the nearest pub to the racecourse I get
chatting to a guy. Like me, he's not from round these parts. A
thirtysomething West Ham fan, with red hair, a cockney accent and a nicely
tailored light grey suit with drainpipe trousers and mod lapels.

'You don't know where I can get any gear do you?' I ask, after we compare
notes about how unnerving the countryside is for people more used to the
West Way and the North Circular.

'Charlie?'

'Yeah, that's right.'

'Wait here a minute, I'll see what I can do.'

Thirty seconds later he returns with his mate.

'It's 50,' says the mate, a 40-year-old in expensive trainers and a Henri
Lloyd anorak.

At thigh height, a paper wrap and a bundle of notes are exchanged between
hands hidden (largely) from view by the side of the bar. A transaction like
a million others taking place that sunny Saturday afternoon in pubs up and
down this chemical land.

Oh well, one out of three ain't bad. Slightly shamefaced that I failed to
score anything else on the most challenging stop, I collect my bag from the
B&B and head off up to the station to board the last train for Edinburgh,
the land of Trainspotting and my fastest-ever drug score on this chemical
quest.

Market Rasen

Racecourse

1 x Cocaine UKP50

Sub total UKP50

Edinburgh, Saturday Evening

It's 6.15 when I arrive at Waverley Station on this, the last leg of my
drug-buying tour. I walk straight into the back of a black cab. 'Are you
off out for the night?' asks the driver.

'Yes,' I tell him, 'I'm up here to meet a couple of mates and then later on
tonight we're going to check out a few clubs.'

'I expect you've brought all your bits and pieces with you?' he says.

'Err... what do you mean,' I reply, hoping he means exactly what I think he
does.

And so less than five minutes after pulling into the station in Edinburgh,
I am the proud owner of a small bag containing one gram of coke and an
ecstasy pill (total cost UKP70).

'It's a mitsubishi,' he says, pulling a substantial bag of drugs out from
underneath his driver's seat and indicating the brand name on the pill he
has produced. 'And the other stuff is smokeable.'

'What, you mean? It's crack?'

'No, no it's the pure stuff, cocaine, it's the only stuff I do.'

And where would be a good place to score heroin in Edinburgh?' I ask him,
since I'm plainly on a roll.

'Oh, I'd try the High Street,' he says. 'It's too late now but wait till
tomorrow when all the homeless are out. I'm sure you'll have no trouble on
the Royal Mile.'

And indeed, the following day I walk up to the first homeless person I see
on Edinburgh High Street and ask him if he knows where I can score some
'brown'.

'What's that?' he says. 'It's a colour. isn't it?'

'You know what I mean,' I say. I'm a little harder now after four days of
these stupid conversations.

'Well, if it's heroin you're after why didn't you say? I'll be up to my
dealers at the bookies up the road. If you want some, I'll meet you back
here in two hours.'

And so he goes off and I wait, and three hours later he gives me the gear.

'D'you want any crack as well?' he says and I say, 'no'.

After four days trawling for drugs on the streets of this country I am sick

of the whole thing. I am sick of the waiting and the trudging and talking
to people and scoring and the depressing lives I've seen on this drug
quest. Even a nun could score in Britain today but to do so she'd have to
mix with people who might mug her as quickly as they'd sort her out.

Deals were done in pubs and the back of black cabs and in nightclubs. By
the time the results were posted off to the lab for testing, the padded
envelope was a veritable party bag fit for a junkie's birthday. During the
five days, without ever really trying too hard, I had scored enough drugs
to kill Elvis twiceover.

Edinburgh

Back of a taxi
Royal Mile

1 x Cocaine UKP60
1 x Ecstasy UKP10
1 x Heroin UKP20

Sub total UKP90