Undercover Drug Cop: Why We Need To Legalise ALL Drugs | Extraordinary Lives Podcast | @LADbible

body we managed to interrupt the drug Supply in Northampton for a full two hours so seven months of work nine months 96 people arrested being constantly in fear of my life being assaulted you know I was at one point I was stripped naked by that guy enjoying operation and all of those things that I went through for the sake of interrupting the drug supply for two hours [Music] thank you Neil we've met before obviously but for any new listeners or watches could you just briefly describe Who You Are yeah I'm a former undercover police officer from the United Kingdom so I used to catch drug dealers for a living and now I'm part of the international movement the law enforcement Action Partnership better known in the UK as leap UK and what does that aim to do we are part of where we are the growing movement of police and other law enforcement who are calling for an end to the War on Drugs uh we call for an evidence-based drug policy um interesting and we'll get into that in a little more detail but I guess what I'd love to do is go back to kind of the beginning of your career uh you were an undercover drugs officer what was the actual title is that correct or have I said it completely wrong I I don't know um just undercover police officer really undercover police officer uh what age did you start the undercover section of your job um I was 23 yeah it was 1993. 23. so how does someone get into undercover police work um well I mean I just fell into it to be honest uh you see I I started in the police now I was when I started in the police I was really terrible at it I was a very young 19 year old um uh put this uniform on and I I really I mean I didn't realize how young and naive I was until I was in the police put it that way I didn't deal with confrontation very well um I just felt like I was quite sheltered so I struggled to stay in the job to be honest and I only stayed in for the first two years just to prove to myself I could and I was hating every minute of it right but I settled in a bit more and I stayed in then it became four years I was in the job um but then I got an attachment to The Drug Squad um just I think the month's attachment to start with um so when you say you had an attachment to The Drug Squad is that just a standard thing that happens in the police that people get put in different places no it happened then because of a particular shift in politics in 1993 so in the UK at that time there was the mother of all moral panics about drugs and that was about crack cocaine because the Tabloid newspapers had been telling the British public for years that there was going to be this problem and they kept publishing stories about how crack cocaine was destroying America right with an emphasis on on black neighborhoods a very sort of racist coverage of of what was happening so the moment that crack cocaine did finally hit the streets of the UK there was a panic big moral Panic that had been whipped up for years so there was lots of pressure from the public and this this was perceived as a political pressure from the government which they they then demanded of the police do something about this so the government actually set priorities for policing and they said that you must make the investigation of heroin and crack cocaine your number one priority above anything above domestic violence above anything at all and so there was enormous amount of financial investments in drugs policing and so part of that was the idea of giving young rookies like me an attachment to The Drug Squad and try and share this expertise Now The Drug Squad hated it because they they were very specialist unit you know trained in surveillance and there were seasoned detectives and to have people like me under the under their feet got on their nerves a lot but when I was there one of them looked at me looked me up and down and said um you fancy having to go up buying some crack cocaine which was so quite surprising request you know but I thought you know I'll I'm game for anything and so I was given 20 quid and pointed to this particular door there was a rapidly set up observations point with a camera and and um yeah I went to knock on this door and this this huge guy onto the door and said who are you what do you want you're not a [ __ ] student are you I [ __ ] hate students and there I was looking at him thinking I've got no idea who I am because I hadn't thought about that about a cover story or anything I was just told to knock on the door so I thought well that'll do yeah I'm a student and this woman behind him said is he [ __ ] stupid you just told him you hate students but he laughed and um and he offered me a a wrap of crack cocaine from several in his hand and I took it and gave him 20 quid and I walked back to The Drug Squad and I went there you go I've got it and that defined the next 14 years of my life because that kind of undercover work hadn't really happened in the UK before right now don't get me wrong I didn't invent undercover work it'd been going on for a lot longer but normal traditional undercover work was was very high end you know it was introduced by informants at the top level not worth buying um single wraps of Street dealers you know with no cover story or training or anything yeah so how rapidly did it get from you doing oh I'm a student here's 20 quid to literally designing a whole cover story and who you were for six months at a time two years wow um but in that two years in that leading up to that I was doing sort of several weeks at a time yeah um or I would be doing more than one job at a time one one would be returning to a particular Pub in in leicestershire um arranging to buy stolen cars of this particular cocaine dealer but in the week I'd be doing another operation somewhere else so so yeah it was like it was quite busy and in between that I was still going back and doing like a couple of shifts in uniform because it was quite confusing and then I was told right from the outset that I was not to tell any of my colleagues what I was doing because that would be dangerous which because why would it be dangerous well this is something I didn't really truly understand at the start but I was told in no uncertain terms I must not tell anybody the work I was doing now obviously this was seasoned Drug Squad officers people who've been detectives investigating drugs in drugs crime for a long time and they knew what they were talking about and they made it clear to me and they basically said you can't trust anybody invest when you're investigating drugs organized crime they have moles everywhere and I I mean I did as I was told you know I didn't tell anybody and that made it quite um a strangely lonely place to be honest but it was many years later before I realized the genuine risks of it and how much how different it is doing normal policing to doing drugs policing because corruption isn't a problem in normal policing it's only a problem when you're investigating drugs no that's interesting that's interesting and I'd love we'll get into that in a bit more depth I think but so just going back a little bit then so you're still a fairly young man and when you say about going to a pub uh over and over again for a couple of weeks to buy cars off a a drug dealer or something stolen cars at that point when you're doing that um did you feel like you had a shield because you knew you were undercover police officer and you knew that if it was uncovered who you were they might be afraid to do something to you because you were a police officer or did you feel in danger at that point no I very much felt in danger uh very much so I mean for example the pub job where I was buying various things um I'd seen the intelligence about these people and I knew how dangerous they were and I mean and they were genuinely dangerous people but it was the danger which made me I suppose there's a danger that made me develop now I was I was a I was genuinely a pretty crap cop uniform cop um certainly the first two or three years but I'd found within the cover work I found something that I could rapidly develop in and it suited my personality and it suited um the way that I could develop and and that danger the risk you know made me made me develop very quickly very quickly and also I learned by mistakes and I made some dangerous really dangerous mistakes and you know when you when you come close to physical injury it's amazing how you quickly develop yeah of course yeah I suppose the penalty for failure was quite high in your in your specific role yeah exactly I mean one of the big mistakes I made particularly with that Pub job was um to have something to talk about I made myself out to be a connoisseur of amphetamines all right okay which I'm I'm clearly not at all but you know I would talk about the old days of Dexys and the different tablets and the different types and how much nicer methamphetamine is to to your normal British and fetamine sulfate and these things like this and uh you know just because I'd read it in a book I thought I could pull it off and I suppose I was doing until one day this main target of the operation came to me and said hey you I've got something for you and again we held up this little Sealy bag see-through bag with this sort of pink toxic looking goo in it oh God and he said you're gonna love this and I'm thinking yeah okay and the trouble is he must have picked up on the momentary reticence on my face just a flash of reticence and I then picked up on the fact that he'd picked up on my reticence because I could see a momentary down to cross his face and I knew in that Split Second I had to pour water on that suspicion I had to otherwise this was only going in One Direction I was in trouble I know from that Split Second I was in trouble so I had to show him enthusiasm so I said yeah yeah great but that's yeah dip my finger in and put it in my mouth and he looked at me and said you're going to need more than that with your tolerance oh God I think you know I'll get it okay so I stuck my finger in again and got a big blob and put it in my mouth and could almost feel the mouth also you know foaming on my tongue my tongue dissolving and went down my throat it was hot and started that weird warm feeling in my belly and of course within about 20 minutes I was completely out of it I was it was at the time the average seized amphetamine was five percent pure 40 pure right genuine base um and now I knew enough about the drug that I wasn't going to overdose but I was it was a rough ride I mean it was too intense it was anxiety-inducing it was horrible so did you have to get away from here oh I had to get out I had to make my excuses right now yeah I had to make thanks for the amphetamine now I've got to immediately leave yeah I just said yeah I'm gonna go party I'm not gonna party you know I'm gonna go to this place and I'm gonna go to this club I'm gonna meet up with this person and um but actually what I did is scuttled back to my backup team and went to the safe location and uh quickly dictated some notes and then got driven home and I couldn't drive yeah that leads on to an interesting point actually um which I see a lot of people asking about on the internet because I think a lot of uh this is including myself a lot of our understanding of how undercover work works is from Hollywood films yeah so there's this kind of like you know it always splits between the films that show that you're not allowed to take drugs and that's how the criminals catch people out and the films that show that you can take drugs to maintain your cover so can you clear that up for us well yeah I mean clearly you can it's just it's just common sense you know if I needed to take some drugs to maintain my cover then then I needed to to do it it's as simple as that really and thankfully it very rarely happened very rarely um because you develop a good sense of survival and I wish I'd developed survival for that day because I tell you what I didn't sleep for three nights oh God but mind you my house has never been so tired right okay you know when I was being driven home I was daydreaming about the fact that I've got eight cans of lager in the fridge thinking that's going to to take the edge off all right to finish the eighth can I felt no different at all Jesus I mean thankfully I didn't I mean I had to have cannabis a few times but that's just cannabis in it you know but uh thankfully I never had anything I had to have anything stronger like heroin or I mean crack cocaine wouldn't have worried me particularly but heroin would have done um you know with no tolerance I suppose it would be a strange situation where someone would force you to take Heron I guess wouldn't it unless you'd build your cover to be around someone they took it well someone was really suspicious once it was it was I was in a car and the the guy that was introduced me to the dealer was in the front seat I was driving the dealer got in the back and I knew they were suspicious of me that certainly the dealer and the dealers May so I knew how to cook up so what I did is I parked up in the street and I cooked up in the car so I got my spoon and my lighter and threw the filter in put some citric acid in cooked it up till it bubbled put it into the barrel and uh drop my trousers and went position my groin to inject into my groin and inject it into the car seat wow so you know that was that was one way that at that time it you know it built it they never doubted me after that so I guess the groin thing is good because presumably they wouldn't be actively staring into your groin so it's a way of kind of yeah exactly and they're not gonna they're not gonna stir and and it is the most I have to make this very clear for for from harm reduction advice going into the groin is the worst thing you can do right people do go into the groin because it doesn't heal properly I think you can keep going into it all the time and so quite often people go into the groin because they've damaged veins in their legs and arms and going into the groin it doesn't heal up the same so you can use it for longer but it is incredibly dangerous you know and uh and then would you so when you did that you kind of injected into the car seat would then you would you then have to act in a way that would you know make it look like you just received a an injection of heroin I could have done and there have been times when I would play uh gouging or rattling gouching being and being under the effect of heroin or rattling being um making out that I'm withdrawing but on that occasion I didn't behave any difference at all it's just I was presenting myself as a problematic heroin consumer who was who was just stopping myself being ill really okay so let's move to the bit that you talked about earlier about the uh the longer periods of time that you'd spend the extended periods where you'd spend in a role so can you talk us through how it worked like when you arrived in a new town like would they say you're going to this area to investigate this area or would they say we want you to investigate this gang or this person who lives in this area can you just talk us through how it works with moving somewhere and setting yourself up so quite often before I went to a place I would we would have the opportunity to build up a legend so for example if I said that I'd spent the last six months um at selling on a market stall in the town of Chesterfield and I used to go to a pub in Chesterfield and knew that you know I would have to spend time going to that Pub in Chesterfield right it was checked up then I would know the name of the person behind the bar and I would know um enough detail about that to survive any intrusive sort of um surveillance from the opposition so to speak so you you put those kind of things in place and you think very carefully about the legend and with every passing year that Legend had to be thought about in more detail much more detail but whenever I went to a place now and this is an important Point actually so I'm glad you've asked me this this question because wherever say that a constabulary wanted to run this operation they would have to run it as per the rules of the East Midlands Special Operations unit according to National guidelines but once this team was assembled and it tends to be assembled from those people who involved in crime investigation who are good at what they do they would all be told that they must not communicate at all before or during the operation with any other cop and they would be set up in a building completely away from the police station they would be cocooned from it completely separate and just before I got there they would all be sat down and given a written lawful order and they would be told you must not ask the undercover operative their real name or where they're from or any other personal details and if you do you'll be disciplined now aloof loader is a big deal in the place it it it really makes you sit up and take notice that you know you're going to be in trouble if you breach this this lawful order now the reason for that lawful order is to protect me but to protect me from who it's to protect me from my colleagues and the fact that this safe location is separate from a police station and it's cocooned from normal operations is to protect me now this is important to note because that kind of protection doesn't exist for any other kind of policing this is only for drugs covert investigations because let's face it that's trying to protect me from corruption and the corruption doesn't exist in any other kind of policing and do you think that process exists as a uh really stringent safeguard for things that could possibly happen or do you think its existence is an acceptance that the corruption is real very very clearly it is because of an acceptance that the corruption is real it's an attempt to defend against what is accepted to be endemic so right yeah I mean that's that must have been quite a an intense thing for you in the sense that I guess what you've described there to me it feels like what you're saying is you go into that situation once you get in there what you're essentially being told is all these people who are now responsible for keeping you alive potentially might be corrupt yeah and might actually not have your best interests at her yeah exactly that and I'm using the same pseudonym and fake details to the gangsters on the street as I am to the cops that are my backup yeah that's really what you're doing and quite often I've had times when I wonder who I might feel most at risk from really more often than I would that I would like to dwell on too much to be honest really and did you ever feel that throughout your time there there was places you were when you felt I'm not quite as safe as I'd like to be with this group of uh colleagues yeah absolutely operation in Leicester in 2001 um some very strange things happened at the end of that operation where I did not trust the activities of my team and I still went out on the streets and that's when I ended up having a gangster find the hidden camera on me when I was already suspicious of my of my backup team from their behavior and and that almost got me killed because he found that camera and I ended up being chased across the car park by a car a car trying to drive down a pavement after me and trying to run me down and they missed me by two meters you know and I'd gone seven months of that operation without any problem like that and you look back on that time now and and you know how do you feel about it do you think it was coincidence or are you still suspicious about um absolutely suspicious especially with things that happened to me with the years afterwards I mean I suppose my most infamous or my my biggest brush with with corruption was within the operation in uh Nottinghamshire now for the Nottinghamshire investigation there was lots of pressure under me for to find out about the sort of gang wars that were going on at the time because at the time the best wood cartel he was run by Colin Gunn was at war with everybody else and at the time the shootings in Nottingham were major news like front page type you know newspaper news there was talk that because of this daily shootings in Nottingham that the home office was considering um taking control of Nottingham Chicago off the chief Constable right you know it was that bigger news so there was that kind of pressure going on now I was only on the periphery of the Basswood cartel's operation I wasn't high-end but I was doing my best to get close to them and I did buy drugs off one of his lieutenants but after four and a half months into that operation I just I'd just been interrogated by that particular Lieutenant he he interrogated me with and he went with a knife pressed into my groin which is really uncomfortable I cannot tell you in fact it's quite off-putting um was that just a routine thing or did he become suspicious of you I think that was his routine because testing yeah just testing um you know taking me four and a half months to get to an introduction to him sure and yeah he he was vicious so that had been a long day at the office so to speak the next the next day the next morning two of my backup team went off sick you know we'd been all working long hours and so I was introduced to two new cops so the first one I met him no problem at all shook his hand the next one shook his hand and the hairs went up in the back of my neck and I was just deeply suspicious of this guy you know but when you've been working undercover for for months you know you're sensors are pretty fine-tuned you know you're very sensitive to even for nuanced body language and this guy was just wrong so I complained to the sio the guy in charge and I said look boss I can't have this guy knowing what I'm doing so he excluded them both he was great so I put that on my mind I was reassured so would he say anything like why would you just say it's a gut feeling I don't like it and that was enough that's what I said to him and that was enough for him right he said well if you're not happy that's it great which yeah there's good support from him really so he we he just got rid of them and they hadn't been in the briefing so there was nothing lost anyway I put that on my mind having been reassured 12 months later when collingham was brought down by a very uh huge detailed operation by Nottinghamshire Conservatory it turned out that that cop had taken an exception to a guy called Charlie Fletcher was an employee of Colin gone my God so it's clear that Colin Gunn got closer to my inner circle than I did to his by some considerable way now Charlie Fletcher was paid two thousand pounds a month on top of his police wages plus bonuses for good information and by the time I'd met him he'd been in the police for seven years right and it's only good fortune that he was caught now in the debrief for that and I met with some senior police and one of them at the time said to me look Bootsy of course we know this happens with this much money involved how can it not happen now people should let that really sink in because this is an attitude I've heard from many senior police not just in Britain around the world that it is accepted that organized crime is so wealthy from the organized crime that control the drug Supply are so wealthy that they can routinely corrupt police that they pay people to join the police they pay people to join the prison service and other institutions and that our drug policy has caused blanket corruption that's accepted now I think it's important for the public to know that because if the public understand that then they will bring bring pressure on the political systems that make things change okay so just just to jump back a little bit so when you arrive in a new place and you are integrating yourself with the community and you've got a sort of um I guess a mission that you're trying to accomplish what was your feelings about the people that you were meeting like with the drug users or the drug dealers were you seeing them as sort of enemies of the state were you seeing them as people that were bad and needed to be put in prison or were you just was it just a job for you you know like what was your connection with them yeah I mean when I started working undercovering for the first few years I was really pleased to be doing the work not just because it was making me develop I was feeling myself getting better at it and and because I you know I I found it enjoyable as an intellectual exercise as well but also because I felt like I was doing the right thing you know these drug dealers were destroying our society as I saw it and I I looked down completely on the people who were using these drugs problematically I I saw them as less than human because I was I saw them as people who were stupid enough to have tried these drugs in the first place and didn't have the willpower to get themselves out of it I just looked down on them you know really judgmental but I suppose it was my method at developing the tactics that really got me to see them clearly because I realized if I needed to survive in order to keep myself safe in that environment I needed to understand how to behave and in to do that I needed to understand who I was who were my peers my apparent peers in that environment which is the most problematic heroin and cocaine users sure people who are living on the edge of society living in squats or they're homeless or or part of that community and in order to get to know them and understand them better I spent a lot of time listening to them and it became clear to me that every single one of those people had a story every single person and or all of them were where they were because of childhood trauma all of them they all had an abusive father like one guy said to me yeah I used to get battered but it's all right I know I deserved it yeah and that was such a common phrase or Uma one of the kindest people I've ever met this young woman called Uma and or that was a nickname in in Northampton she said to me yeah I can give up heroin and I do regularly to bring my tolerance down I'll stop for two weeks but the trouble is the end of that two weeks I've become suicidal because I remember the feeling of my uncle's fingernails as he sexually abused me as a little girl geez so she was using heroin to blot out that emotional pain and for her that was a completely rational decision because heroin was keeping her alive and that's not uncommon I met lots of people like that and time and time again I was listening to these people and thinking well if I'd been through that I would more than likely be in exactly the same place yeah so that's just something I hadn't understood as a as an arrogant young man really yeah it's so complex isn't it and I can see how as a young man as well who was at the height of his game and doing a good job and probably being rewarded for it that must have made it even more hard because you're going I'm doing really well here and yet this I'm getting these creeping feelings of morality but before you got to the point where those feelings of morality sort of um took over could you talk us through some of your most dangerous operations well I told you the one about um when the guy found my camera and he and he tried to kill me with the car did you always have a camera on you would that always be a thing well you wouldn't wear a camera to start with because you you very much at risk of being searched to start with so I I would take the decision to wear one once I perceived the risk of being searched to be sufficiently reduced got you so the thought of being in a situation like you're describing knowing I had a camera or what you know in the movies they're always the most tense scenes where someone's wearing it and the people are talking about searching them and stuff like that the adrenaline must have just been unbelievable in those cases well yeah and this is how I suppose um the death of a Thousand Cuts for PTSD works because I've got complex PTSD I'm diagnosed and it's a chronic condition for the kind of things I've experienced it's not just one singular event it's not it's it things that eats away at you it's the death of a Thousand Cuts so in 2001 you know I had a cap my camera was found and it almost got me killed so when I was wearing a camera in 2004 yeah when I put it on I I was my heart rate went up I was sweating I was having to calm myself and I was having to rationalize it and for that operation for the Burger Bar boys when I when I uh for anyone for anyone who's unaware who were the Burger Bar boys Okay so back in 2004 I think that's the year I did that operation the burger boys were a very Infamous Gang um Infamous for being regularly at war with their Rivals the Johnson crew in Birmingham uh the main target for my operation was implicated in seven different murders he was also the person who provided the machine guns for the murder the infamous murder of Leticia Shakespeare and Charmaine Harris so they were they were very notorious and they were genuinely very brutal um they'd taken over the drug Supply in Northampton so the Birmingham gang where they were spreading their implements so when I studied the intelligence like I have to do as a as an operative to agree that it was a Justified operation they it was quite clear in their parade in the intelligence that this gang they were using sexual violence as part of their reputation building you know they were gang raping people for drug debts and male and female that's part of the intelligence yeah wow um and in fact during the operation they did a gang rape in one of the in one of the cars that I was that I knew them in and that morning the car was found burnt out so they were very good at covering their their tracks they were very Savvy they were very brutal and I had to really develop a good Legend and I spent a long time trading in stolen property go going shoplifting with with some Street people which was great fun um which actually that's another question so are you allowed to commit crimes to maintain your cover yeah yeah um if it's Justified I mean look at it this way I never had any intention of keeping the stolen property I would take it back to the safe location so that means that the active theft isn't complete because I've I have no intention of permanently depriving it um but but again it would it could be easily Justified even if you know if there was a theft um so yeah I did cut shoplifting and it was good fun uh I know I had I had to get out a free jail card which means I didn't have the same concerns of a cheat code yeah so um so I spent a long time developing a reputation and finally getting an introduction directly to the Burger Bar boys they would only deal with certain people directly I've been buying off their minions and that day when I got an introduction I was taken to where they were sort of holding Court the sort of temporary headquarters which was a snooker Club in the center of Northampton I was directed in there and I was directed into the gents toilets which is quite a big room several cubicles and urinals there and within a few moments the door burst open like banged open dramatically and this hooded figure came in and he went into the cubicle stood on the toilet and looked over the closed door and said what's this and I got an introduction from the from the guy who was who my mate who I got to know and then he the next thing the door burst open again and four more hooded figures came in and they came in and they started walking around me in a circle and the guy in the cubicle was asking me questions and asking my mate questions and change sort of changing the nature of the question trying to catch me out and as he was doing this they were one of them would headbutt me on the side of the ear although another one would push me another one would punch me in the ribs and all of the time the sort of violence was starting to increase and my ear was hurting you know if you'd been head-butted on me and it's surprisingly painful but this sort of sense of imminent extreme violence was building and I knew what they were capable of you know I'd seen the intelligence I'd heard what people have been saying on the streets and I really thought that this was it I wasn't I was either going to get murdered or I wasn't I was going to be left in a beaten bloody mass in there and all the time I'm answering these questions so you just try not to react to the violence are you just answering questions and then being here you're not saying yeah why are you hitting me or anything you're just no no I didn't say anything to them I was just answering his questions and putting up with all of it and that was the right thing to do that was the right Behavior for who I was purporting myself to be in my poor mate he was shaked he was literally shaking he was just pale dripping with sweat and shaking and and the thing is he'd made me learn an extra cover story that we'd known each other for years right he was backing me up by saying yeah I've known him for years mate but she hasn't yeah he was just trying to get me the hookup that I'd asked him to do so it was and I'm also another another worry I had was would my mate would my new mate suddenly bottle it and say no no I don't really know him I didn't know that so um yeah anything any manner of things could have gone wrong and then all of a sudden he said all right then what do you want and I went I'll have one and one please as polite as that I said what I'll have one and one please meaning a 0.4 deal of heroin and a 0.4 deal of crack cocaine and I gave him 40 quid uh and I was given yeah he handed me he handed me the drugs because as soon as he said all right what do you want then without saying the word the fourth they just went out in single file like all coordinated beautifully choreographed and and they did the deal and then we exchanged phone numbers and he put me as my nickname and weirdly okay I should explain this really but my nickname for that operation was Woody and so anyway we're exchange phone numbers and I knew I was in there and that was the most important part of the operation I'd got past that barrier from that point onwards I spent months Gathering evidence of conspiracy against the whole gang the six the six burger bar boys and eventually 90 of their wider gang you know the backup team people who were working for him Runners sex workers all sorts of different people but I should make a point about the name why I called myself Woody and the reason is because I've got to a point where I was so disturbed by the corruption that I'd come across you know I told you about the the undercover that the cop was against um and there's so much corruption I'd come up against that I'd gone into that operation genuinely nervous or genuinely feeling completely vulnerable to corruption completely and so my way of dealing with that and still doing the job was to sort of stick two fingers up with the universe right to just say [ __ ] it I'm gonna use almost my real name and that was a huge operation that bringing down that gang right that was one of your biggest ones that was easily the biggest easily yeah in terms of in terms of I mean I think I'd had um 56 or 60 people arrested for the one previous but this was 90 96 people and Not only was it 96 people it was literally every single person involved in the trade in that town like everybody so seven months into it I'm thinking wow this this is going to be huge because there isn't any that I hadn't there wasn't anyone I'd met I I'd met everyone involved yeah I've got everyone's number there was no new phone numbers to me there was no names I'd heard I hadn't met and bought drugs from and when did it start to shift for you when you started to realize that you didn't believe you were having a positive impact anymore yeah and that's a difficult question to answer to be honest because I went through a long process of being resistant to the conclusions that were forming in my head you know I kept being faced with my own realization you know the evidence was quite clear in front of me but I kept being resistant to it so I kept going through these internal ethical discussions with myself look these people need help I'm praying on them look this is not having any impact but really the whereas I was resistant to the obvious conclusions the real Hammer blow which made me Force up face up to those was the end of that operation because I was so excited you know 96 people all these people are going to be arrested there were hundreds of cops involved in that hundreds and every single person in that trade was caught everyone so the Intel officer for that operation was tasked with keeping his ear to the ground to find out the impact of that operation on the streets of Northampton and he spoke to me week a week or so afterwards after the dust had settled and everyone was arrested he says yep Woody we managed to interrupt the drug Supply in Northampton for a full two hours so seven months of work nine months 96 people arrested being constantly in fear of my life being assaulted you know I was at one point I was stripped naked by that gang during that operation and all of those things that I went through for the sake of interrupting the drug supply for two hours now I don't know for sure that the Burger Bar boys Infamous Rivals the Johnson crew were the people who took over the drug Supply but you can sort of picture the scene can't you the rival gang gets a phone call they start laughing amongst themselves hey boys put the order in buy loads more gear because guess what the cops have done for us the cops have locked up six of the Burger Bar boys let's go and take over Northampton and is that is that just because there is always it once a void is created there's just a load of people waiting to fill that void in terms of suppliers always at every single level at every level both city-wide regionally or internationally wherever we're at your the world it's the same story the police never reduce the size of the market they never reduce the size of the market but we do something because we do all this work what we do is we change the shape of that market and that changing shape is never an improvement and what I mean by that is that you create a sudden Gap in the market yeah you created a massive money making opportunity massive because we're talking vast amounts of money here it's fought over by more than one person so more often than not Police Operations police successors and I used the word very Loosely those successes lead to an increase in violence but more importantly from from one of the themes that we've talked about today is the corruption the impact on corruption now covert police have said to me look of course corruption happens with this much money involved how can it not but it's more complicated than that policing activity actually leads to the corruption because when you and I've done this but I've arrested a gang or Kingpin character that controls the supply of a quarter of a city the gang that's most able to take up that opportunity is a gang that controls another quarter of the city so what you're doing is you're increasing the influence of the privacy and actually often organized crime use police informants to get the police to get rid of their rivals so they're using the police as that mechanism so the police are either doing it directly for organized crime or unwittingly for organized crime and what happens over time is not necessarily at street level but further up the ladder it means that over time monopolies are created or cooperatives are created and this happens at every level only last year the National Crime agency or various law enforcement agencies slipped out an announcement that British organized crime groups and organized crime groups are now allied with Italian mafia now there used to be Rivals they didn't used to work together but now they do they formed a Cooperative they share their resources now when you get monopolies and cooperatives it means that they have more disposable income and if they have more disposable income they have more to invest in corruption and all and the biggest asset of organized crime is corruption so the mechanism of policing is increasing the corruption over time I mean you're painting in an exceptionally Bleak picture of the effects of policing drugs but for people listening I suppose one of the things they'll be asking is well what's the alternative you can't presumably just go okay no more rules and no more police can you well no I mean this this is this is the misunderstanding about the way things are things are not controlled now they are out of control because prohibition is an absence of rules it's an absence of control the alternative is to take control away from organized crime by legally regulating these drugs drug prohibition has not worked it's been and is being a disaster drugs have never been more available they've never been cheaper or stronger or more varied organized crime has never made as much money as they are making more money with every passing year so the alternative is to take control it's starting to happen the the many countries now have legal cannabis markets North America Germany is about to go legal malta's just gone legal and cannabis takes a lot of money away from organized crime but we need to go much further and we need to do it urgently another example of Regulation that's been happening for a long time is in Switzerland they started prescribing heroin to problematic heroin consumers in 1994 and because of that they no longer have a heroin problem they don't have people dying from heroin they don't in the Netherlands because the Netherlands copied Switzerland and you know the real kick in the teeth for us in Britain is that the Swiss used British evidence to do that to develop that policy and since then our organized crime have been getting richer and richer from heroin and more and more people have been dying whereas in Switzerland they've halved their burglaries they don't have people dying from heroin and their organized crime erupted that income stream and what would you say to people who would say something like you know if you make the drugs freely available more people want to try them and want to test them and then potentially will get addicted to them as a recreational thing well it depends on the drug because we have to treat each drug according to its relative risks The Most Dangerous Drug and this is scientifically proven as well by the comparators in report published in the Lancet I think in 2007 various other studies the most dangerous drug is alcohol and we could control alcohol better with better regulation but other drugs need different regulation you know cannabis um it should be regulated with good social Equity uh it needs to be controlled so children can't get easy access and the evidence is in from North America that legally regulated markets protect children better because child consumption has gone down in those markets and protecting our children is a key and important part of what drug drug policy should be now if you look at the other drugs in the middle MDMA for example there are huge numbers of people using MDMA this weekend at festivals like Boomtown MDMA is the perfect example of a drug which is not banned because it's dangerous it's dangerous because it's banned the harm that's caused from mdmas from the fact that it's an unregulated product now would more people take MDMA if it was legally available for adults in a licensed Pharmacy you know what I don't know and I don't really care because people don't get addicted to MDMA it's not something that people develop a problematic relationship with people who consume it do so generally about three or four times in 12 months three or four times a year that's not something that people develop a problem with so do I care if even more people take MDMA and dance to music in a field well it's done oh whilst on that drug do I care no I don't what I care about is are children having easy access to it because organized crime don't care who they sell to what I care about is young people dying or having Health difficulties from an unregulated product that that's what I care about it's a really compelling argument and logically makes complete sense I guess as a final point to you you know to what what do you want to happen what are you campaigning for now and what would you hope to see as a change in the next five ten years all right well as part of the law enforcement Action Partnership we you know we we campaign on a lot of things now obviously we want the full goal we want all of the drugs legally regulated and controlled but there are many reforms that we can do and there's many things that we're working on at the moment and I'm working on for incremental reforms so for example in the UK at the moment we have record drug deaths they do also in the states they've got uh drug death problems everywhere Australia or all around the world and most of those drug deaths are opioids now there are simple ways while we wait for our governments to prescribe heroin to take control away from organized crime while we wait there's lots of things we can do we can have overdose prevention centers which the UK governments are dragging their feet with and they're dragging their feet within the U.S in Canada they have them they save lives no one has died from an overdose in an overdose prevention center a place where people can go and safely take their drugs in the absence of Alvarez prevention sites we can we can make ready access and easy access to naloxone now naloxone I always carry my kit because I'm naloxone trained naloxone reverse is a heroin overdose and if there was more naloxone out there literally less people would die oh half the people who die from heroin die in company and if someone which means that half at least half of the deaths could be prevented there is another issue I've been working on and this is possibly the most pressing issue that we could work on and that is the fact that we cannot fight the climate crisis until we end drug prohibition we can't because for cop26 and for those that don't know that was the climate crisis of the climate conference at cop 26 the wrong people around the table we needed to have the drug cartels there right in fact you could even say only the drug cartels can save the planet really because all of the equatorial countries were there and they signed up deforestation pledges but those pledges were meaningless because they don't control their own backyards Brazil signed the pledge deforestation in Brazil has gone up 69 since and the reason is that those governments don't control those forests organize crime do right and it comes back to the topic that we've been talking about throughout this discussion and that's corruption and the fact that policing has caused this corruption to be so big that it's literally taken over entire nations so West Africa for example most of West Africa is a narco state guinea guinea bissau Senegal Guinea for example apparently has the fastest deforestation on Earth and less than well about a year ago there was a military coup there and that military coup was about who controlled the assets from the cocaine smuggling it was basically a drug gang war so these governments are now run by transnational organized crime if you look at the Mexican cartels for example there used to be 20 cartels but policing and the activities of the drug war means that there's now only three right and presumably they're much more powerful and each one of those three now has much more disposable income and they eat and they have a bigger GDP those cartels have a bigger GDP than West African countries and they've used that power to take over those countries so how can you get a government to agree to a deforestation pledge when they're not in control how can you do that well you can't and unfortunately whereas deforestation is important everywhere it's important that we Trump plant trees in in um in the UK or Sweden or north of North America but it's not as important that we maintain as we keep the trees in the green belt which is around the the hottest part of the earth the equator because it's a quest is substantially more carbon and arguably it's the single most important aspect of the fighting the climate crisis because you can eventually stop Nations burning coal but you can't replant 500 year old trees in the jungle and the Equator so the only way we can solve this crisis is through good governance but the corruption caused by the War on Drugs has taken away that governance so we have to solve drug prohibition first with so we've got two simple choices we either seriously talk to the drug cartels or we take their power away from them by legally regulating the drug trades we have no other choice it's a fascinating conversation and it's amazing to think that where we started a little while ago was somebody going and spending 20 quid by knocking on the door and that sort of has sprawled into the understanding about the implications for ultimately what we're discussing now is the entire human race isn't it well our society at the very least look Neil it's been an absolute pleasure to meet you again and the thing that I always find really fascinating about your story is the fact that you were somebody who was very good at a certain thing and were open-minded enough to completely reverse your mission in life to almost the exact opposite of what you'd been working at um thank you so much for coming in thank you for your time good luck thank you good to see you as well good to see you too and you look well by the way thank you foreign [Music] so that was Neil Woods an undercover narcotics officer I'm joined now by the episodes director Josh um what were your thoughts on that very depressing actually I found that um yeah I'd agree just like someone that has you know a similar that he twists he switched his entire view of what he's doing and he dedicated his life to something that he realized was making the problem infinitely worse and we're still there we're still fighting War on Drugs and it just gets worse takes a lot I guess to be able to admit that to yourself that's something you've dedicated your life to was was making things worse the bit that really stood up to me was when he said that after seven or eight months of work and 96 people arrested they'd interrupted the supply chain for two hours it's so depressing isn't it I mean it just makes you think what we are doing like yeah and the way that you know that sort of chain reaction of people funding drugs for about drugs it's kind of like it's just so systemic and um it's clearly not going to work this way but it feels like the political yeah political social will is just not there to to radically overhaul it and effectively give out drugs regulate them take it away from criminals put it on governments but you just can't I can't really see it properly happening potentially decriminalization is obviously the next step but as he's saying like that that's not going to solve the issue if where the drugs are coming from they're they're being controlled by you know criminal entities what do you think brownie the standout moment for me was at the end when he talked about the impact of the drug community and the criminality around drugs and the environment that stuck in my head so much and I'm going to be thinking about that many days to come on an angle I haven't heard before and when he explained it it just made complete sense and so much Clarity that I couldn't believe I hadn't thought about it before and actually I found it quite impressive um and admirable actually that it sounded like it's come at a personal cost for him oh yeah because he did touch on the fact that he'd been diagnosed with complex PTSD and he mentioned some things quite casually that sound really traumatic but he still carries on on his mission he's you know he's got a steadfast about it exactly and I think that's really admirable everyone always asked me to do this one on stream [Music] um [Music]

Channel: LADbible TV

Views: 607,166

Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, undercover drug cop, undercover narcotics officer, undercover at a drug gang, drug gangs uk, birmingham drug gangs, bruger bar boys gang, taking drugs undercover, amphetamine and crack, crack cocaine epidemy, drug policy reform, legalisation of drugs, drug dealers and drug addicts, police cracking on drugs, policing drugs, interview with undercover cop, podcast, extraordinary lives

Id: 9UH_zk6B3Rk

Length: 56min 7sec (3367 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022