Dealers with business cards who deliver in just 27 minutes

HARD drugs are as easy to obtain as a takeaway pizza because organised crime is flooding Britain’s streets with ‘abundant’ supplies, a Government analyst warns.

Substances such as cocaine and ecstasy can be delivered to the door in minutes by dealers – in some cases more quickly than a 12-inch pepperoni. Many dealers even carry business cards.

An official Home Office study revealed violent county lines gangs have usurped local dealers in virtually every part of the country and are intimately linked with a ‘dramatic increase in violence’.

Report author Dame Carol Black, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, told a Home Office drugs conference in Glasgow: ‘You can buy whichever drug you want almost anywhere. It’s almost – for some drugs – as easy as getting your pizza.’

A BBC investigation found it took just 27 minutes to get hold of an order of cocaine from a dealer in Leeds, who had his own business cards.

A reporter texted a dealer at 7.35pm, received a reply 20 minutes later, and seven minutes after that handed over £60 cash for two small bags of drugs.

Dame Carol’s review said organised crime is driving use of hard drugs and other illegal substances in rural areas. County lines gangs use dedicated phone lines to sell drugs – mainly heroin and crack cocaine – out of major cities and into shire counties, market towns and coastal resorts.

Dame Carol said: ‘The county lines model now stretches all over the country and has largely displaced local dealers.’

Increasingly, local children are being recruited to work for the gangs rather than youths shipped in from urban areas, she added.

‘It is a very violent business model, both for victims and between groups,’ she said. ‘Potential future saturation of county lines markets raises the threat of violence still further.’