The war on drugs has created the biggest opportunity in history
for organized crime and international gangs.
But it’s also damaged the police themselves
in ways that are often hidden from the public.
I’m JS Rafaeli.
I’ve spent years writing about drugs—
why people use them,
and why our governments chose to declare war on them.
At VICE, we make a lot of films about drugs,
but in this show, I get to dig a bit deeper.
I get to talk to fellow expert drug nerds
about their research into the crazy world of mind-altering substances.
[NEWS ON DRUGS]
Neil Woods is an ex-cop who worked undercover
infiltrating some of Europe’s most dangerous drug gangs
but now campaigns full-time to end the war on drugs.
What was your role within the police, specifically with regard to drugs?
For almost 14 years,
I infiltrated some of Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs.
I used to catch drug dealers for a living.
But for the last ten years,
I’ve been actively campaigning against the war on drugs
because I realized that, especially during the time I worked undercover,
I caused significant harm to individuals,
the community, and society.
But you weren’t operating at the high-level suit and tie
godfather end of organized crime, right?
So what I would do is I would go into any inner city area,
and I would find the people who were homeless or living in squats
and look for the most vulnerable people, really, to manipulate.
I would appear as somebody who was
on the periphery of that kind of community.
You tend to find that they are using the most drugs,
they've got the most connections.
So I would use them
to try and get them to introduce me further up the chain
and see how much I could climb the ladder, really.
And that’s sort of the very roughneck, chaotic end
of the organized crime drug networks, right?
That was the reality of the street work that I did
is that it was very chaotic.
You know, the drug dealers were people
who were happy to be immediately violent
because it was part of their reputation building anyway.
Unlike the people at the top of the tree,
that old-fashioned undercover work was about,
because they were careful businessmen, really.
I’d been buying heroin from a guy in Fenton, in Stoke.
I thought he was happy with me
because I’d been buying weights of heroin off him for weeks.
But I knocked on the door,
and he answered it by putting a samurai sword to my throat.
And I can still clearly remember that cold steel.
Genuinely, I thought this was it, you know, I’d pushed my luck too far.
And he was swearing at me, screaming.
His face was blood red.
He was saying, “You’re DS. I know you are.
You’re fucking DS, drug squad.”
And then I heard this woman laughing behind him, and she said,
“I thought he was going to say he was then.”
Anyway, I managed to buy four bags of heroin from him.
I was putting them in my cigarette packet,
and as I was doing that, I looked up,
and there’s a knife almost in my stomach.
There’s this guy in front of me trying to rob me
for the heroin I’d just bought.
So I managed to run away from him,
but it was just one of the examples of just how dangerous that world was.
And how does undercover policing actually work?
How are these operations structured?
So wherever I went in inner city,
I would have to spend months there
because buying drugs off one person two or three times
might be enough to catch one person.
But if you want to catch people above them,
then you need to gather evidence of conspiracy.
You need to have the data from phone conversations,
the fact that somebody was in one car at a certain time,
or various aspects of corroboration which would build a picture up.
So then at the end of, say, six or seven months,
then everyone would be arrested in one go.
And so for most of the big operations I did,
there was no less than 60 people.
And one of them, it was 96 people were all arrested in one go.
And over the 14 years you were doing this kind of police work,
how did you see it change?
It became more violent with every passing year.
It was quite easy to buy it the first time
because they didn't see it coming.
They didn't know there was going to be a cop knocking on their door.
But of course, it’s an arms race
because the police get better at catching people,
but organized crime always responds.
They always up their game.
And one of the ways that they do that,
the most important way that they do that
is they become more violent and more ruthless.
Because if they can intimidate people into stopping an introduction
from an undercover cop
or from an informant grassing them up,
then they’re the ones who survive.
By the end of it, when I worked infiltrating the Burger Bar Boys,
every single moment in their company,
I felt in threat of immediate violence.
I was headbutted and punched.
They told me to strip and showed me a gun.
They said, “You’re drug squad. You’re wearing a wire.”
That violence, that ruthlessness, that aggression,
we’ve caused this,
and we’re still causing it to get worse.
And when you talk about an arms race,
how is that specific to drugs policing
as opposed to other forms of crime?
We have to understand the fundamental difference between normal crime
and drugs prohibited crime.
Because if you catch a burglar in any community,
then you expect burglaries to go down as a result.
And they do because there’s a limited number of people
who are willing to and able to commit that crime.
So burglaries go down.
You catch a drug dealer...
crime goes up
because you create a gap in the market,
two people will fight over it, and violence will go up.
And by constantly disrupting that market,
you are perpetually making it more violent.
You’re causing corruption
and increasing the levels of ruthlessness within it.
Police never reduce the size of that market.
They only change the shape of it.
And that changing shape is always for the worse.
Where does this arms race lead to?
Is there an endpoint to it?
Well, this is the thing
that everybody should really be terrified about,
because there is no end to this arms race.
There is no end to this war because there’s no peace treaty.
The more we try to police this, the more damage we cause.
Now, if you look at what’s happening in the UK at the moment,
we have this horrific phenomenon of child exploitation
that’s referred to in the UK as county lines.
And this is basically organized crime groups
both in inner cities and the countryside
are using children to transport and sell heroin and crack cocaine.
The reason that we’ve come to this
is because organized crime have adapted with this arms race
to the tactics that police use.
You know, this is my fault.
They've adapted to people like me.
They’ve adapted to the use of police informants...
because undercover cops and police informants
can’t infiltrate children.
And they using children as young as 12 to do this.
Now, of course, in the United States,
they’ve had children on the front line of dealing drugs
on street corners since the end of the 1970s.
So they're a bit ahead of the United Kingdom.
Wherever you are in the world, you can see the arms race.
You can see how things have gotten worse
the harder we try and police things.
Children are exploited all over the world to deal drugs.
It’s very visible in our smug democracy
in the United Kingdom at the moment.
But, you know, we mustn't forget this is a worldwide phenomenon.
Wherever you are in the world,
the brutality increases.
Global initiative into transnational organized crime
call the growing power of organized crime
the single biggest threat to our democracy,
to our democratic way of life.
The single biggest threat.
Now, they’re a very credible organization.
We have to be absolutely clear here,
organized crime exists because of drug prohibition.
It is what birthed them.
It is what gives them their power.
Nothing else. Nothing else.
OK, so we talk a lot about how the war on drugs affects drug users
and marginalized communities.
But what we hear less about
is how the war on drugs actually affects the police.
The war on drugs has completely ruined what policing should be.
And it’s a cancer at the heart of policing.
It’s a cancer at the heart of every criminal justice system
around the world.
But it’s difficult for people to believe this.
People want to trust the institutions,
and it's hard to convince them of the reality of it.
One important aspect that most people are not aware of
is that it destroys the effectiveness of police
to do normal, important policing things.
Up until very recently, we have had murder detection rates,
as in the percentage of murders which are solved,
between 90 and 95 percent each year in the United Kingdom.
It was quite similar in the United States.
All the way through the 1950s and 1960s,
they had their murder detection rate between 85 and 90 percent—
very, very good.
Then, in 1971, Richard Nixon declared his renewed war on drugs
and invested massively into drugs policing.
Within four years of that declaration,
the numbers of murders that they solved
dropped from around 85 to 65 percent,
and it's never climbed back.
Policing drugs separates the police and the community.
So you don't get the support of the community.
You don't get the information, the intelligence from the community.
Where you make organized crime more powerful,
they are the people who come to dominate those communities.
So if you look at an extreme example of that, look at Mexico.
30 years ago, Mexico had a 50 percent murder detection rate—
pretty good.
Ten years ago, it was 5 percent.
Now it’s less than 1 percent.
They don't solve murders.
Now, we haven’t had the same gun crime as the United States,
but it’s now finally happening here in the UK.
Ours is now down to 77 percent,
the lowest since we started recording these numbers,
and it’s going down.
Dame Cressida Dick made an announcement about it—
it is becoming harder to detect murders.
She made the announcement without giving any context
because the reason for that drop...
is the war on drugs.
And when we talk about how the war on drugs
drives police and communities apart,
how does that play out?
The war on drugs completely destroys that idea.
It completely separates community and police
because people use drugs.
It's normal human activity.
So you are separating the police
from significant parts of that community.
And of course, the other way that the war on drugs damages the police
is through corruption, right?
Well, that’s right.
Corruption is impossible to defend against
in the current drug prohibition regime.
It’s impossible because there’s too much money in it.
I’ve got many examples,
but the most dramatic, I suppose,
is at four and a half months into the operation I did in Nottinghamshire.
I’d just had a really difficult evening
the evening before,
where someone interrogated me with a knife pressed into my groin.
So I was feeling pretty paranoid.
You know, you've been working undercover for that long
and your senses are very fine-tuned, and you’re running on adrenaline.
So the next morning, just before the briefing,
two of my backup team had gone off sick.
So I was introduced to these two replacements.
First one, shook his hand. No problem with him.
The second one, shook his hand,
and just the hairs went up on the back of my neck.
Instinctively, everything about him was just wrong.
I just didn't trust him.
So I went to the boss, and I said, “Look, boss...
I can't do my work knowing that this guy knows what I'm doing.
I don’t trust him.”
And he was great.
He said, “No problem, we’ll just exclude them both
so they don’t ask any questions.
And they’ve not been in the briefing,
they don’t know what you’re doing, so it’s fine.”
So I was reassured. I put it out my head.
Didn’t think much more of it until 12 months later
when Nottinghamshire brought down the gangster Colin Gunn.
I found out then that this cop, a guy called Charlie Fletcher,
was an employee of Colin Gunn.
Gunn had paid him to join the police.
By the time I met him, he’d been in for seven years,
being paid £2,000 a month on top of his police wages,
plus bonuses for good information.
The way that corruption plays out around the world,
we need to start being scared of.
Just like in the UK, the corruption that I’ve seen
was caused by thinning out the competition
and making some people richer.
It’s the same everywhere. It’s the same pattern at every level.
So the corruption from transnational organized crime
is because by policing, we’ve thinned out the competition.
We now have monopolies or cooperatives.
You know, international gangs, like British organized crime gangs,
are now joining with the Mafia
to share costs, to pool resources,
to make corruption more possible.
And that means that they're rich enough to take over entire nations.
So entire nations are now narco-states.
They are owned completely by organized crime.
So countries like Guinea, Guinea-Bissau,
some of the northern Latin American countries,
their governance is eroded— it’s taken away.
Drugs money corruption,
it does erode an entire fabric of a society.
It takes away governance.
What was it for you which just made you say enough is enough
and quit doing this type of investigating?
I was a bit slow, to be honest.
I was resistant to my own conclusions and my own feelings.
And I had to face up to the fact that
all of those vulnerable people that I was spending time with,
I was causing harm to them with no justification at all.
One of the people I got to know in Northampton,
she was one of the kindest people I've ever met.
Uma explained to me one day, she said,
“I can give up heroin.
In fact, I do.
I stop quite regularly to give myself a tolerance break.
You know, I take two weeks off
so it becomes cheaper for me.”
She says, “But the trouble is, after two weeks off heroin,
I become suicidal.
I really get close to suicide
because I remember the feeling of my uncle’s fingernails
when he sexually abused me as a little girl.”
And I met a lot of people like Uma,
but that one was a real smack in the face.
I’m praying on her. I’m lying to her.
She’s so generous to me with her truth and her reality.
What would have happened if one of the gangsters
had twigged that she’d introduced you up the chain?
If those particular gangsters had paid attention to her,
the fact that she had introduced me,
she’d have been murdered flippantly,
quite casually, just to make the point
and to put other people off.
And again, that’s my fault.
That’s the presence of me in that marketplace
that creates that threat that didn't exist before.
Almost all of the people I met and spent time with
and learned about and enjoyed the company of, actually,
all of those people,
they were self-medicating for childhood trauma.
They were using heroin to deal with pain.
They were using crack cocaine to deal with pain.
They’d been sexually abused. They’d been neglected.
They’d been physically abused.
And these are people who need help.
And all of the resources of policing, all of that fortune
was churned into the activities of people like me,
was preying on them instead of helping them.
And that is a brutal indictment of our policy.
So what’s the solution to this whole problem?
The solution to this is to end the war on drugs.
Now, what I mean by that, because I’m part of
the Law Enforcement Action Partnership [LEAP],
what I mean by that is we need to legally regulate
all the drug markets
because that’s the only way
to take the power away from organized crime.
Now, don’t get me wrong, all other kind of drug reform,
drug law reform is a good idea.
Decriminalizing people for possession of drugs is a great idea
because people should not be criminalized
for what they do with their own mind and body.
But just decriminalizing possession,
that still leaves power in the hands of organized crime.
We’ve got to regulate the markets.
The easiest one is heroin.
Like they're trying to do in Canada, have safe supply.
If you can provide a medical safe supply to people who need it,
people who are hurting,
people who are using it problematically,
then that snatches the money out of the pockets of gangsters, like that.
If you protect those exploited people with a safe supply,
that's what organized crime hates.
That’s how to take the power away from them.
Of course, on the other end of the spectrum is cannabis.
You know, Germany’s just gone legal.
Malta’s just gone legal.
We need to get our act together in the United Kingdom.
We need to look at the way that it’s being done in the United States
and learn as best we can from their mistakes
and their successes.
And by that, I mean that it has to be done with social equity.
It has to be done so that those people most marginalized
by the war on drugs
are empowered.
They’re given opportunities by legal regulation.
And then what about the argument that if you legalize drugs,
all the criminals will just find some other crime to do?
I love that question
because whenever I have a police officer in an audience,
that’s the question they’ll ask.
It’s utter nonsense.
There isn’t enough laptops to steal.
There isn't enough cars to steal.
But also most drug dealers I've met,
they wouldn’t risk other crime
because it’s too high a risk and too little to gain.
The profit margins aren’t there,
and you’re likely to get caught.
You’re not likely to get caught dealing drugs,
and the profit margins are huge.
That’s the difference.
Yeah, robbing banks is actually quite hard.
Robbing banks takes some incredible levels of stupidity, yeah.
One final question:
Isn’t this kind of what the whole show
Exactly what the message of
People love it as a piece of drama, brilliant, brilliant as it is.
But you know, one of my colleagues at LEAP,
he was one of those murder detectives.
And he will tell anyone that
It's based on real people, real events.
It’s part of the history of what birthed LEAP.