WHY I, AS AN UNDERCOVER COP, BELIEVE IT’S TIME TO DRAW A LINE UNDER THE WAR ON DRUGS

THE narcotics trade provides the financial basis for almost every other form of organised criminality in this country and abroad. The scale is staggering: the global drugs market is worth £375billion every year, and an estimated £7billion a year in Britain alone. Britain spends a further £7billion policing the drugs problem – and that’s without the associated costs of imprisonment and public health and everything else.

It might not seem visible to the majority of ordinary, law abiding citizens, yet drugs and the gangsters who deal in them blight our towns and cities and dominate our criminal system. More than half the inmates in British prisons are there for drug-related offences.

I have done more than most to send the gang members to prison. After joining the Derbyshire Constabulary aged 19 in 1989 I helped pioneer undercover detective work in the field. For more than a decade, my chosen method was to befriend the hopeless addicts at the bottom of the chain, often posing as a dealer, before steadily gaining access to those who control the trade.

I bought drugs and pretended to deal them. I’ve seen the brutality of the gangs up close, including face-to-face meetings with psychopathic criminals, and I despise them.

Over 14 years on the front line, I have come to know the trade inside out, and at great cost. There have been attempts on my life. Until we face the truth about the drugs trade, the violence it exploits and the misery it creates, then there can be no answer. THE intelligence was impressive. The photos and files painted a picture of just about every species of criminal: dealers, pimps, thieves and thugs. And the link was The Lord Stanley, an oldfashioned pub halfway between Leicester and Derby. Just about every regular there was connected to the underworld.

I was in my mid-20s, just three years into my career working undercover. Running the place was ‘Alan’, a notorious gangster involved in drug dealing and extortion. I can’t use his real name, for reasons that will become clear later.

WITH my partner Phil, a fellow detective, I walked into the pub and I spotted one of Alan’s lieutenants at the pool table. After half an hour, I made my approach, pretending to look for ecstasy – ‘500 pills to shift to some students’.

The henchman, known as ‘Deano’, broke into a sly grin and disappeared, returning with a bag of pills. I took ten from him as a tester – as is cusa tomary with any new source – slid him £30, and left. From then on we became regulars, buying hundreds of pills at a time, claiming we were moving them on in Derby.

Alan would hold court in a corner of the pub and our opportunity to approach him came when Deano complained about being owed money by someone who stole cash from phone boxes – a dead business once people started using mobiles.

‘Pay and display parking machines is where it’s at these days,’ I said. ‘You can make a few hundred quid off each one.’

This came straight out of the Derbyshire CID case files. Three days later Deano waved me over to Alan’s table and told me to tell him about it. I described it again.

Alan stared at me though his thick glasses, completely unreadable. He let the silence sit for significantly longer than was comfortable. Then he quietly asked: ‘Who did you say you were again?’

Then the questions started. Who was I selling to? In which prisons had I done time? What other scams was I involved in?

Throughout the interrogation, Alan would frequently disappear to his ‘office’, returning a minute later, rubbing his nose and getting a little more excited each time. He was obviously very into cocaine.

We passed the test. Two hours later Alan had not only tried to recruit us to run pay-and-display scams, he’d also offered to sell us stolen antiques, wide-screen TVs, Mac-10 pistol and whatever drugs we wanted. We were in. OVER a couple of months, we bought pills, cocaine and heroin from Alan. He was charismatic, intelligent – and vicious. I was sitting in the Stanley when he burst in, obviously high. ‘I’ve got something for you, mate,’ he said. ‘Have a look at this…’

Another figure cut in. ‘Alan, mate, I’ve got the cash.’ It was a smalltime villain named Will Skipton, who owed Alan money. ‘See, it’s all here – just a tenner short. I’ll get that tomorrow, promise!’

Alan smiled. ‘Mate, don’t worry, tomorrow is absolutely fine.’ Visibly relieved, Skipton sat down. Alan nodded to Dom, another of his lieutenants.

Dom’s first blow caught Skipton on the side of the face, the crunch echoing around the pub. Dom drove his fist again and again into Skipton’s bloodied face before dragging him out of the door.

Alan turned back to me, all smiles as if nothing had happened. ‘You were saying you like decent speed [amphetamine]… well I guarantee you’ve never had anything like this before.’

He threw a bag of toxic-looking pink sludge on the table. The gooey consistency mean that it was close to pure.

‘Go on, do a bit,’ Alan laughed. ‘I got it just for you.’ What was I meant to do? Amphetamines were essential to my cover story. I was supposed to be an expert. I took a bit of the pink goo on my finger and knocked it back with a slug of beer. ‘No no no – take a f ****** proper hit. It’s on me.’

Alan was enjoying this. There was no option. I took a massive lump and slammed it down. An awful chemical heat rose from my kidneys, followed by an unbearable dryness of the eyeballs. My heart started to pound like a pneumatic drill. Phil got me out of there as fast he could without looking suspicious. I didn’t sleep for three days.

Thankfully, Alan never put me in that position again.

The ‘bust’ was about to go down and Alan was the primary target. Phil and I sat at our usual table and watched Alan as he walked in. The door flew open and 30 hardas-nails cops in full body armour burst in. It was pandemonium.

The main drug stash in the back room was thrown open, and many arrests made. But there was no Alan, who slipped right out the back.

After months of dangerous work, I was fuming. How could this happen? I asked my boss.

‘Either he’s got someone in this

department – in which case you’d have been dead months ago,’ he said. ‘Or he’s working for another agency. Could be Regional Crime Squad, could be National, could be MI5. We’ll never know...’ NOT being able to talk to anyone about what I did was difficult, and as time went by I paid the price. The mental cracks were starting to appear. I’d walk to the front door of the home I shared with my wife Sam and our two children and have to pretend I had just had a completely normal day at work.

Sam and I had started to argue a lot, and when we were fighting I would suddenly remember a violent incident with a gangster or a villain threatening me. I struggled to sleep and started drinking more than I should. Many of the gangs I faced committed horrific crimes and I take pride in having held them to account. My drugs investigations put people in prison for a total of well over 1,000 years.

For me, however, every single one is a year of wasted human potential. I haven’t gone soft, but after 14 years undercover, living with dealers, addicts and gangsters, I know their motivations. The vast majority of people in the drugs trade are not – as many police officers believe – inherently ‘bad’. Most believe their best option in life is to sell crack and heroin to a captive market.

Some were capable of sickening violence, but they became that way through exposure to the drugs trade. I realised I wasn’t part of a ‘war’ on drugs but of an arms race.

We used undercover tactics to send a whole generation of criminals to prison, which for them is a graduate school where they trade knowledge, streetcraft and intelligence. They figured out our tactics and responded by becoming more brutal.

IT’S not just theory – I’ve watched with my own eyes the process by which the teenagers were transformed from schoolkids into hardened gangsters.

The drugs war corrupts everything it touches. Addicts are criminalised and forced to become hostages to their dealers, gangsters are forced into depths of brutality they wouldn’t otherwise stoop to. Most painful to me, it corrupts the police.

Since leaving the force in 2011, I’ve joined an organisation called LEAP – Law Enforcement Against Prohibition – which was founded in the USA in 2002.

This is not a naive utopian movement. We’re a bunch of cops and, when we say the war on drugs must end, it is based on experience and on deep, hard-headed analysis. We’ve lived this and we’ve studied it. We know our business.

One of the phrases I often hear is that the war on drugs should end because it is unwinnable.

I disagree. The war on drugs is eminently winnable. All we have to do is consider the possibility of not confronting the issue of drugs as a war and instead choose a course that will spare future generations the awful harm that prohibition does.

Believe me this is not a conclusion I have come to lightly and I know that it will seem controversial, particularly to the parents of young children.

But this is from the heart: control and regulate the supply of narcotics and you deprive the vicious gangsters of the money that enables all their operations.

At a stroke you allow some of the most vulnerable people in society to seek help for their addiction.

And you allow the police to get back to doing the vitally important work they are actually trained for.