DRUGS: THE DEALERS
THE days when cocaine was the preserve of the relatively wealthy middle class are long gone.
It’s cheaper than ever to buy drugs.
Pills are being flogged at pocket money prices.
Dealers are targeting a whole new section of society, preying on those who prefer a cheap hit than an expensive night at the pub. Therein lies the problem. Addiction is spiralling. It’s easy to get hooked when a pill costs less than a pint.
Demand fuels the increasingly lucrative trade; a trade in which customers are dying in greater numbers than ever before.
Official figures analysed by the M.E.N. show that police recorded a 35 per cent rise in drug trafficking crimes last year.
Yet this merely represents the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ according to one senior police officer.
Despite numerous arrests and the jailing of key figures, dealers continue to pedal Spice in Piccadilly Gardens, while recreational drug-taking in Manchester’s clubland is almost ubiquitous. And people are dying. Drugs like MDMA – ecstasy – are becoming increasingly potent.
Sometimes, pills sold as ecstasy are actually other cheaper and highly-dangerous psychoactive stimulants.
Dealers are putting lives at risk by using pentylone, a class B drug, and selling it as ecstasy.
The people who use ecstasy or cocaine – or ketamine, a powerful anaesthetic – find it can be cheaper than drinking alcohol alone.
An ecstasy tablet costs between £5 and £10, while a gram of cocaine costs £30 to £40. A gram of ketamine is about £25. Increasingly, authorities in Greater Manchester are looking to education and welfare rather than simple enforcement of the law.
Decades of police activity to disrupt the supply of illegal drugs and tackle the criminal gangs behind the trade has had successes, but the narcotics industry appears bigger than ever.
The Home Office estimates the illegal drugs trade is worth about £5.3bn every year in the UK, not including the £10.7bn the National Crime Agency reckons it costs the public purse in treating people, catching dealers and associated acquisitive crime.
GMP has an annual budget of £524m. The majority of the force’s work arguably concerns drugrelated crime.
Plenty of drug dealers are being locked up.
GMP regularly prosecutes street pedlars, frequently petty criminals and addicts who trade Spice, and occasionally the Mr Bigs who swamp our city with narcotics.
In the year up to April, GMP seized drugs worth £166m, while criminals convicted of drugs crimes and firearms offences were jailed for a combined 861 years.
Every week, the force seizes hundreds of cannabis plants but many more farms go undetected, with even small-scale growers able to make tens of thousands of pounds.
Earlier this year, Fiki Yarasir – nicknamed Mario because of his likeness to Nintendo’s plumber – was jailed for 25 years over a major international heroin trafficking operation.
Undercover police followed him to an industrial unit in Cobden Street, Pendleton, Salford, where they found 210 kilos of heroin hidden in furniture, with a street value of £63m.
Yarasir, 53, who was living in Glossop, was convicted in Germany in 1997 for importing heroin from Turkey and served 10 years behind bars before making his way to the UK. Six others were also handed long jail sentences.
In March, a drugs baron living in leafy Hale was jailed for 25 years for flooding Manchester with cocaine and heroin.
Julian Solomon and his gang trafficked vast amounts of the drugs from Belgium via Holland.
Investigators found drugs worth £66.5m hidden in a lorry carrying a tractor at King George Docks in Hull last year.
The swoop was the culmination of months of surveillance by officers from GMP’s Serious Organised Crime Group.
It led to seven of the gang being jailed - for over 103 years in total – after being convicted of drug conspiracy charges.
Also in March, members of a drugs gang inspired by the Breaking Bad and made up of students were jailed for conspiring to sell more than $1m worth of drugs around the world on the dark web.
The University of Manchester students took payment in the electronic cryptocurrency Bitcoin and holidayed in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Amsterdam – until they were brought down by the FBI.
Ringleader Basil Assaf, 26, and his accomplices Elliott Hyams, 26, James Roden, 25, and Jaikishen Patel, 26, all from London, were jailed at Manchester Crown Court after admitting a catalogue of drug-related offences.
The young men immersed themselves in the recreational drug scene during their first year at university, but later became involved in dealing on an international scale.
Inspired by Walter White – the teacher who turned to the meth trade in cult TV show Breaking Bad – they dealt ecstasy, the hallucinogens LSD and 2CB, and ketamine, a horse tranquilliser abused in clubland – across Europe and to customers in America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as in