by Neil Woods
I contacted a criminal justice organisation called Release, and they in turn put me in touch with LEAP.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) was founded in the US in 2002. It is made up principally of members and former members of various enforcement agencies who, like me, have come to realise the utter futility and fundamental immorality of the War on Drugs. There are currently official chapters in twenty countries, from the US to Latin America, Europe and beyond.
It was incredible for me to discover this network of experienced, like-minded people. Before long I had joined as a chairman of the newly formed LEAP UK.
We campaign for an end to the War on Drugs, and the full legalisation and regulation of the illicit drugs market.
This may seem like an extreme position from someone who has dedicated so much of their life to putting drug dealers in prison, but I – like everyone else in LEAP – arrived at this conclusion based not only on my experience of fighting the drugs war, but also after rigorous, in-depth study of the larger issues involved.
This is not some naïve hippy, utopian movement. We’re a bunch of cops. I detest woolly thinking and imprecise data. I’m into rigorous methodology and peer-review. Essentially, I’m still a trained detective – I’ll only accept a piece of evidence if I believe it could withstand cross-examination from the best defence solicitor in the country.
So, when we at LEAP say the War on Drugs must end, it is based both on our hands-on experience and on deep, hard-headed analysis. We’ve lived this – and we’ve studied it. We know our business.
I still think like a cop. I still feel loyalty to police around the world. Other people have written volumes about the public health and policy issues of the War on Drugs; my specialist knowledge is in how it specifically affects law enforcement.
It’s worth looking at the damage drug prohibition does to police forces themselves.
In January 2008, the internationally renowned professor David Nutt was appointed Chairman of the British government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. He lasted eighteen months. He was sacked for arguing that drug policy should be based on scientific evidence rather than political convenience. Several other longstanding members of the Council resigned in protest.
One of the nice things about coming from a police background is that politicians have to at least pretend to listen to you. No one wearing a suit and tie in the House of Commons or in local government can accuse me of passing judgement from an ivory tower. I know about the fight against drug cartels; I’ve put my life on the line for that fight. I’ve earned my right to speak out on this.
The fact is, though, even most politicians realise that drug prohibition is a form of wasteful madness. In 2014 the British government released a major report, which, even after significant political fiddling, concluded that punitive measures have no actual impact on levels of drug use. Developed democracies with liberal drug policies have roughly the same or lower drug use than those with harsh laws.
The numbers are pretty simple. On average, about 10% of people who use drugs use them problematically. It’s 6.8% for cannabis, 10% for cocaine, 10% for alcohol and 15% for crystal meth – with heroin as an outlier at 25%. This 10% figure is exactly the same for people who have a problem managing gambling problems, yet successive governments have actively encouraged the gambling industry and the construction of new casinos.
With 90% of users managing to consume drugs without wrecking their lives, it seems like an act of actual wilful self-destruction to spend £7 billion a year criminalising those who do have a problem – thus ensuring they are unable to get the help they need.
The evidence from around the world is fairly conclusive. Wherever drug policy has been moved away from law enforcement, the positive outcomes have overwhelmingly outweighed the negative.
In the year 2000, Portugal had both the highest drug addiction rate and highest rate of drug deaths in Europe. The country was in crisis. Some estimates put the rate of heroin addiction at 1% of the overall population. In response, the government convened a panel of experts, and took the extraordinarily brave step of resolving to actually follow the advice they were given. Against the usual outcry from opposition groups and sections of the security apparatus, Portugal decriminalised drug use, and shifted drug policy from law enforcement to public health.
Fifteen years later the country has been transformed. Portugal’s rate of acute drug deaths per year is now three per million of population – the current UK rate, by contrast, is forty-six per million. Infection rates of HIV and hepatitis C are way down, as are both violent crime and petty crime rates associated with drug use.
Most significantly, there was no rise in the rates of actual drug use, despite the hysterical warning screams of the opposition. Casual drug consumption has remained fairly stable, with a significant dip in long-term heroin use.
In Switzerland they created a series of official injection centres in major cities, supplying clean equipment, medical advice and a space where addicts could inject safely. None of these places has ever seen a fatal heroin overdose. In addition, Switzerland uses Heroin Assisted Therapy – actually prescribing heroin to addicts – alongside various methadone programmes. HAT has an 80% success rate in weaning addicts off heroin, far higher than any other approach on record.
UK policymakers have a lot to learn. But they don’t even have to look abroad.
In 1982 Dr John Marks began a massively important experiment in Widnes, Cheshire. Using a loophole in the law he began prescribing heroin to users, instead of forcing them onto methadone or other programmes.
The results were astonishing. First off, there was a 93% drop in the level of acquisitive crime such as burglary, auto theft and shoplifting. The manager of Widnes Marks & Spencer was so grateful that she reportedly donated £2,000 to Marks’ clinic.
No longer having to scramble around for their £20 bags, Marks’ patients began to stabilise and improve their lives. Street prostitutes were able to leave sex work; thieves and robbers were able to take on – and keep – regular employment. The gangsters who had been running drugs in the town saw their market dry up, and drifted off to Liverpool.
Crucially, over those years Marks recorded a decrease in the number of users. There were no more pushers actively trying to get people hooked, and the number of addicts actually fell.
If the British government had adopted Marks’ strategy, my undercover career would have been very short indeed. Unfortunately, it did the opposite. When Marks’ experiment became public in 1995 he was vilified and blacklisted, and ended up having to emigrate to New Zealand to rebuild his life.
Within two years of the programme’s cancellation, forty-one of Marks’ 400 patients were dead.
I want to state once again that I am in no way downplaying the horrors and dangers of addiction. I have lived among addicts and seen the squalor and misery that the disease wreaks on their lives.
All I am arguing is that the police are not the correct tool with which to fix this problem. And unfortunately, just as in DIY, when you use the incorrect tool to try to fix something you can end up damaging the tool itself.
Put simply, drug prohibition is very bad for the police.
The key problem is that it’s much easier to chase stats by busting low-level user-dealers than by hunting down real gangsters and solving serious crime. Not only does this serve to actually protect the big organised crime groups – but also, cops forget how to do real police work.
This process has played out most clearly in the United States. In the late 1960s the clearance rate in American murder cases was 90%. Then came the War on Drugs. By the mid-seventies murder clearances had dropped to 64%, and have flatlined ever since – and this in an era of vast leaps forward in surveillance, digitisation and DNA technology. Not to resort to cliché, but one in three of America’s killers are getting away with murder.
The fact is, you can have all the tech in the world, but if you hand control of entire communities over to
the gangsters, you will never be able to gain intelligence or find witnesses to testify. For all that policymakers can talk about preventative policing and ‘Broken Windows’ policies, once you lose the trust of a community you simply will not be able to solve serious cases. The arms race of the War on Drugs dictates that the more you go after the dealers, the more they will protect their market by brutally enforcing the code of silence on civilians.
And the arms race has another, even darker effect on the police.
I had brushes with corruption on the force over the years. My experiences with Colin Gunn infiltrating my own unit in Nottingham, and meeting the not-the Untouchables special squad in Manchester, both deeply shook my confidence in what we were doing.
But in both cases, the reaction was simply, with this much money involved, how can corruption not happen? That money only comes from one source, the drugs trade.
Those were two random examples, and that was ten years ago. Following the inevitable logic of the arms race, one can only assume that by now it is much worse.
There is a standing order from the Home Office to Chief Constables across the UK that their top priority must be to maintain public confidence in the police. The reasons are obvious: the moment people lose that faith, society starts to break down. As a result, there are constant hushed rumours in police circles of stories of corruption being buried and soft-pedalled.
In 1930s America, it was the stories of police corruption that really destroyed public support for Prohibition. My instinct is that if the public were to ever learn just how often current police forces are forced to shrug and say well, how can this not happen? then support for drug prohibition would disappear just as quickly.
With regard to my personal field, undercover work, I read the headlines about the manipulation of female activists by Mark Kennedy and Bob Lambert with utter disgust. To me, they symbolised another example of departments that had completely lost their moral compass. But, I tell you now – you should be much more worried about the stories you aren’t reading.
The narcotics trade provides the financial basis for almost every other form of organised criminality. In Britain alone, remember, the market is worth £7 billion a year. It costs a further £7 billion in policing – and that’s without the associated costs of imprisonment and public health and everything else.
Over fifty per cent of the inmates in British prisons are there for drug-related offences. Read that figure again. Let it sink in.
Not only is prison essentially post-graduate advanced training for criminals, but every one of those prisoners means a family without a father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife or friend. These are people like Ali, Cammy, Ellie, Angus, Sara and Davo. They are you and me, had our lives gone in another direction – and I’ve seen just how knife-edge that difference can be.
Now imagine the good the police could do if drugs were properly reimagined as primarily a public health issue. Imagine if we stopped handing gangsters a £7 billion annual war chest with which to terrorise our communities and corrupt our enforcement agencies.
Though they’re not allowed to say it publicly, many officers and detectives agree with me. Most police are good people doing a difficult job. Most of them didn’t join the force in order to make the lives of the vulnerable even more difficult. Many resent being forced to do so.
The fact is, what we as a society are asking the police to do is to take care of our dirty laundry – out of sight and out of mind. Drug addiction is an issue that all aspects of society need to engage with. Outsourcing it to law enforcement alone is a simple act of moral laziness.
Every day that politicians continue the War on Drugs, it is not only a choice to make the vulnerable suffer for political convenience – it is also a direct betrayal of the police themselves.
In Bruce Lee’s masterpiece kung-fu movie, Enter The Dragon, there’s a scene where Lee is on a ship with some other martial arts experts. One of them, a hulking bully, confronts Lee, demanding to know what his style of combat is called. Lee replies, ‘The art of fighting without fighting.’
The bully scoffs and challenges Lee to fight. Lee agrees, but says they need more space, and suggests they take the ship’s dinghy out to a nearby island. The bully climbs down into the dinghy – at which point Lee simply unwinds the line-rope, so the bully is stuck getting dragged out behind the ship, soaking wet and at Lee’s mercy. There you go – the art of fighting without fighting.
One of the phrases I often hear from my own allies is that the War on Drugs should end because it is unwinnable. I fundamentally disagree. The War on Drugs is eminently winnable. All we have to do is stop fighting.
We need to take a moment and just consider the possibility of not confronting the issue of drugs as a war. Legalise and regulate the supply of narcotics and at a stroke you deprive the most vicious gangsters in the world of the £375 billion annual income that enables all their operations. At a stroke you allow some of the most vulnerable people in society to seek help for their addictions, instead of being shoved into prison cells. And, at a stroke you allow the police to get back to doing the vitally important work they are actually trained for, and can take real pride in.
The drugs war corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts the addicts who are forced to live in the shadows; it corrupts the gangsters whom the arms race forces into depths of brutality even they wouldn’t otherwise stoop to; and, most painful to me, it corrupts the police. You can’t ask an army to fight a war it isn’t meant for and doesn’t really believe in, day after day, without moral rot setting in.
If you need a vision of where the War on Drugs is heading, just look at the dystopian brutality of the cartel wars in Mexico, a country where every level of civil society has been grossly and wantonly violated by prohibition.
Or, to put things in further perspective – a few years ago I tried a thought experiment. I attempted to add up the total amount of time for which all my operations taken together had actually disrupted the UK drug supply. The number I came up with – at a very optimistic estimate – was about eighteen hours.
Now, think back to the thousand years that I put people in prison.
A thousand years of captivity, so that a few addicts had to wait an extra eighteen hours for their fix. Does that seem a fair exchange to you? Does it seem wise? Does it seem just?
Or, does it seem insane to the point of actual immorality?
I’m aware that not everyone is ready to hear this message. But they haven’t seen what I’ve seen. This isn’t theoretical for me – I know where it leads.
Since I began speaking about these issues, there has been some kickback from sections of the police. Most of my friends from the force have been forced to distance themselves.
One very close friend completely disappeared from one day to the next. I found out from elsewhere that she’d been called into the DCI’s office and ordered to delete my phone, email and Facebook contacts right there in front of them, or face career-damaging disciplinary action.
I half-expect that, when this book is published, some cops will accuse me of recklessness, or even betrayal, for exposing undercover tactics. Anyone who says this hasn’t been paying attention, and needs to spend more time trying to catch real criminals. Gangsters learn fast. I stopped doing undercover work almost ten years ago, and my tactics were almost obsolete by the time I walked away. Anyone on the street who would still fall for my tricks now would be such a small-time no-hoper that chasing them would be a waste of resources.
In any case, I’m ready for the criticism, and for the larger battle of ideas. There is some way to go. There are vested interests in sections of politics, law enforcement, religious institutions, privatised prison industries and parts of the media that are heavily invested in the War on Drugs. I just happen to have seen these issues much closer-up than they have. All I can do is try to convince people, one by one.
And there are many hopeful signs. Governments from Ecuador to Colorado to Switzerland are catchin
g up. If you had told me even a few years ago that cannabis would be legal in several American states, I would have assumed you had been smoking a bit too much yourself. I believe the tide is turning.
I also feel ready for this fight because for the first time in my life I feel supported. After my divorce from Sam I spent some time simply taking care of Tanith and Gareth, watching them both grow into incredible, smart, independent and generous people, whom I admire more with each passing day. Then I met Lynette. She is a wonderful, beautiful woman, a true companion for me and an amazing presence in the lives of the children. We married about the same time I began work on this book.
I’ve chosen to commit myself to ending the War on Drugs for many reasons. Partly it is about undoing some of the harm I have caused. I was part of the arms race like everyone else. I think back to people like Ali in Leicester; Cammy, Gary and Davo in Nottingham; and Angus and Sara in Northampton, and I have to recognise that I used and manipulated them. And I must accept that in doing so, I put their lives at risk. If the gangsters ever found out it was them who introduced me, they would have been the ones to suffer, not me. But at the time, they were all considered acceptable losses in the war I was fighting. That war needs to end so that more people like them aren’t put in harm’s way by people like me.
Most of all though, it comes back to fighting without fighting. I want to end the War on Drugs because I want to win it.
I hate the drug cartels. I’ve seen their viciousness and brutality up close, and I despise them. I want to stop them. I want to end their savagery and take their power away. And they should fear me. I’ve done more than most to send them to prison. I know their weakness. Fighting to end the War on Drugs will do more harm to the gangsters than anything I ever accomplished as a cop.