Middle class drug addiction .
Mo
and keeps the brain active and the people healthy . Just look at the
drug addiction in Islamic countries and compare with a Hindu one like
India or Bali - not even a tenth..
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,7-101518,00.html
TUESDAY MARCH 20 2001
Kiss of the crack dealer
BY CAROL MIDGLEY
Crack cocaine is fast becoming the drug of choice for accountants,
lawyers and those in the City. We take a walk through Soho, the
epicentre for dealers and users, and see a dealer being arrested
It is 5.30pm and daylight is fading in Soho, the heart of London’s
entertainment district. Market traders in Rupert Street are packing up
their stalls, but for another set of traders lounging yards away in
the litter-strewn corners, business is still brisk. And about to get
brisker.
A bespectacled man of about 35 dressed in grey suit trousers and a
leather jacket, who might be a banker or teacher, breaks away from his
three male friends and approaches a man wearing a woollen cap who is
leaning against a wall. There is a brief exchange of words and the
woollen-capped man stoops down as if he might be about to kiss his
“client”. Instead he pulls a saliva-soaked package out of his mouth
and gives it to the customer, who puts it directly into his own mouth.
He turns and saunters back to his friends, the mission completed.
Another crack cocaine deal has been done and it is not yet dark.
An open crack market operates in Soho, a fact that the police freely
admit. The dealers are so arrogant that they swagger around in broad
daylight and boast to officers that, such is the demand, they will
never be driven out permanently. They carry the small, £10 “rocks”
inside their mouths so that, if faced with arrest, they can simply
swallow their cache, confident that a person cannot overdose on crack.
This was one of four deals that I witnessed during one brief walk
through the streets of Soho at a time when most people were still at
work. It is now a week later and I am sitting in the back of a police
van with officers from West End Central station waiting to pounce on
some of London’s most powerful crack dealers. This is Operation
Victory, a prolonged, highly expert operation that has gathered
evidence over several weeks from secret observation posts throughout
the streets. Tactics are changed constantly to try to outwit the
dealers. In two days the police will make 12 arrests.
One of the main targets is spotted standing outside McDonald’s in
Shaftesbury Avenue, the spine of theatreland. A signal is given and
seven officers suddenly charge out of the van, screaming at the target
to lie on the floor. They pin him to the pavement, but even under the
weight of seven men he is still struggling, his long dreadlocks
splayed out over the concrete and his face contorted as he attempts to
gulp down the rocks tucked into his jawline.
“Open your mouth! Spit out your drugs!” shouts one officer, holding
open the man’s mouth as another shines a torch on to his tongue — to
the obvious horror of bystanders. After ten minutes of writhing a few
rocks drop on to the pavement. They are placed in a plastic bag and
the fight is over. Yet the arrest barely ripples the surface of the
Soho underworld. Other dealers wander off for a while, perhaps to Moor
Street, near the Prince Edward Theatre, but within an hour they are
back. On this patch crack dealers can make £1,200 a day and are too
greedy to stay away for long.
Crack is a serious problem in this country but one that rarely taxes
the mind of Middle England. The drug is something they associate with
low life, the street beggars and pathetically dispossessed who eke out
lives of crime in squalid city ghettos. But they are wrong. The crack
market is certainly fuelled by street beggars, but it is also fast
becoming the drug of choice for middle-class users. The suited types
normally to be found snorting cocaine in the toilets of expensive wine
bars are increasingly opting for the bigger high of crack and
simultaneously helping to prop up this trade and the extra crime, such
as street robbery, that it spawns. The trend is reflected in the plot
of the Hollywood blockbuster Traffic, in which the American drugs
czar’s own middle-class daughter becomes hopelessly addicted to crack
and is forced to sleep with dealers to feed her habit.
Growing numbers of people asking for help with crack addiction are
white-collar workers — brokers, estate agents, record producers,
lawyers. Some are ordinary people holding down full-time jobs as
painters, say, or chefs. Experts say those who dismiss crack — a
cooked form of cocaine and baking soda that gives a massive high — as
merely an underclass problem are burying their heads in the sand.
According to Home Office figures, crack now forms a third of all
cocaine seizures. One in 30 British men aged between 19 and 24 has now
used crack, twice as many as in 1996 — and that is probably a
conservative estimate. Rajesh Armit Parmar, 29, a dentist from
Leicester, was recently struck off after admitting that he was a crack
addict.
Adam Frankland works for Turning Point, the leading drink and drugs
mental health charity. He runs a centre in Shepherds Bush that serves
Fulham, Hammersmith and the fringes of Westminster and Notting Hill,
offering specialist help for crack addiction. He says there are two
types of crack user: those who use every day — usually the
dispossessed with little else to do — and bingers, who want a weekend
“lifter”.
Of the 480 clients he sees, 42 per cent are using crack or cocaine,
compared with 33 per cent using heroin. About 5 per cent of the crack
users are in professional jobs and the numbers are growing.
“Crack and cocaine constitute the biggest drug problem in this
borough,” he says. “Crack makes you feel good about yourself, it gives
a real sense of elation that some people say is better than sex. Among
many young people it is the drug of choice after cannabis.” Shrewd
dealers have calculated they can make more money from crack than from
cocaine and so manipulate the market by withholding other drugs. They
will tell a City trader who usually buys a gram of cocaine that they
haven’t been able to get hold of any “Charlie”, but suggest he try
crack for a change. Frankland says that for working people the link is
definitely cocaine: “In Fulham, for instance, there is a lot of
cocaine-powder use among the middle strata of society — painters and
decorators, council workers, civil servants. And, of course, we know
it is used by the upper echelons of society.
“In the early stages they will use crack recreationally. At a dinner
party with friends someone might roll out a bit of crack and smoke it
and for those lacking in self-confidence it will strike a chord.” He
says crack use is often linked to jobs with irregular hours. “We get
quite a lot of couriers, white van drivers, jobs involving long hours
and a lot of hanging about. We see a lot of chefs, who have a pretty
unpleasant job, with split shifts and long hours. The kitchens of this
country are rife with cocaine. And crack is getting in there and
starting to become an issue.”
The drug is so addictive because its effect is so fleeting. It can be
smoked in an ordinary pipe or heated in tin foil and inhaled, often
through a makeshift “crack pipe” made from a plastic bottle. There is
an initial rush, giving the user a feeling of complete elation for
about two minutes, followed by a high of up to 30 minutes. But the
comedown is extremely severe, which makes the user desperate for more,
leading to compulsive use. Crack is so-called because when it is
smoked, the baking powder residue left in it crackles.
The problem is not limited to London. Gerv McGrath, who runs the
AddAction drugs treatment centre in south Derbyshire, says crack is
becoming more prevalent there and presents another serious
side-effect. “One worrying thing is that it is a big entry drug for
heroin, which is used as a comedown drug,” he says. “And the dealers
are brilliant businessmen with all the acumen of advertising
executives, and keep demand high.” Just as soap-powder manufacturers
constantly “improve” their product, so do crack dealers. A snowball,
for instance, is crack and heroin mixed together; CK1, a new product,
a combination of crack and ketomine, the horse tranquilliser.
For Superintendent Dean Ingledew, of West End Central police, who
organised Operation Victory, street beggars are still his biggest
problem, but he has seen a shift in the type of people buying crack.
“I have sat in an observation post and watched an attractive,
well-to-do-looking blonde in her early thirties walk up to a crack
dealer, hand over £10 and take a rock from his mouth into hers.”
I, too, saw some professional-looking people making a beeline for
Rupert Street and Tisbury Court, and conversing with dealers like old
hands. One fresh-faced young woman in Diesel jeans and a suede jacket
turned up with three male friends and broke away to do a swift deal
with a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and baseball cap as her
colleagues looked on.
The uniformed officers at West End Central are incredulous at what
they see. “The market is getting broader,” says one. “We see people in
suits buying crack who will quite happily put this stuff in their
mouth when a dealer has been holding it in his for God knows how long.
Apart from the risk of contracting hepatitis, what these buyers
probably don’t realise is that dealers swallow their drugs all the
time to escape conviction and then retrieve them when nature takes its
course.”
Ingledew adds: “Street crack is a crime fed mainly by begging
activities. The vast majority of people who give their £1 to a beggar
should know that it is converted to crack cocaine within a few
minutes. Rough sleepers are half to three quarters of the market in
Soho — people can make up to £150 a day begging here.
“We regularly starve the market with operations but demand is so great
that supply is back to normal almost immediately. Two years ago there
was a massive crackdown in which 33 dealers were taken out. The
quality of evidence was so good that most are still in prison, but
within three weeks dealing was back to full strength.”
The problem is so bad that local residents in Soho have united in an
effort to drive out the dealers. Mothers are particularly incensed
that the dealing often takes place yards from the primary school in
Great Windmill Street as they are dropping off their children at 9am
and where police now regularly patrol.
Katherine William-Powlett, the spokeswoman for the group Crackdown,
says: “No community should have to put up with it. People forget that
there are 5,000 residents in Soho and 1,000 children. I have a
two-year-old who I have seen run between the legs of two addicts and I
have come home with my kids to find someone shooting up on my
doorstep. If people want to take drugs behind closed doors, I don’t
have a problem with that — it is the blatant dealing that we cannot
tolerate.”
Back on Shaftesbury Avenue, where the alleged dealer is still pinned
on the pavement, the crowd is becoming hostile. The police must
balance a successful arrest with the risk of the man choking while
trying to swallow his drugs, which is why they are shouting at him to
spit them out.
To the passer-by, unaware of the weight of evidence against this man,
it does indeed appear a brutal scene and some protest loudly.
“Murderers. Leave him alone, you’ll kill him,” bellows one from across
the street. A Dutch tourist steps forward and ventures politely to the
officers that if they take this man’s drugs away, “he will no longer
have a job”.
The man further excites the sympathy of the crowd by moaning “I’m
dying, I’m dying”. Ingledew is well aware how things look. “To these
people, this is confirming every stereotype of heavy policing,” he
says. “Here is a black man being held down in the street by white
officers and the crowd cannot know what evidence we have.” If found
guilty, this man could get seven years.
Finally, he stops struggling and is hauled into the police van to be
taken into custody. The crowd of people disperse, shaking their heads,
to continue their evening out. It is quiet again and in Rupert Street,
a few yards away, the other dealers slink back out of the shadows and
the process begins all over again.