THE DOCTOR

officials, who each found ingenious ways to outwit each other. Drug War describes how the sale of illegal narcotics and stimulants first boomed.

In 2018 there were 4,359 deaths related to drug poisoning in England and Wales – the highest ever, and also the highest known year-on-year rise, at 16%. Cocaine seizures in Europe are at a record high, with more than a million drug busts annually. Here we look at the criminals who blazed a trail that still blights us.

Book charts rise Drug War: The Secret History by Peter Walsh is out now in paperback from

Milo Books.

WHETHER it’s county lines gangs, sellers on the dark web or street-corner dealers, drugs play a sizeable part in the criminal activity in Britain today.

Estimates put their cost to society at around £19billion.

Yet the tactics and markets used by them all – from petty crooks to kingpins – were established by a generation of “Mr Bigs” who got things rolling.

Now the British “narcos” are named in a book that charts, for the first time, the rise of the modern drug trade.

It also details the cat-andmouse games played between the smugglers and the Customs

TOP TEAM confiscated luxury yachts, a Ferrari, a Rolls-Royce Corniche and even a light aircraft.

Green, known due to his elusiveness as the “Pimpernel”, walked free and moved to Holland, while Brooks served a short jail term.

Both were later convicted in their absence in France, and in 2012 Brooks was jailed for 28 years for shipping almost two tonnes of coke. Green died last month of skin cancer, at the age of 77.

TRAIL