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T
he change that has been buffeting the
drugs field for the last five years was
neatly contained in two images shown at
HIT’s latest Hot Topics conference, held
in Liverpool in November. On the first
slide, shown to a captivated audience at
the Foundation for Art and Technology, appeared an
encrypted message sent to an online drug dealer. It
appeared as a stream of 500 or so random letters
and numbers. Total gobbledygook in fact. The second
slide was the same email before being encrypted. It
simply read: ‘Dear XXX. Please can I order some
heroin? I’d like three grammes to my house in London
at this address.’
What investigative journalist Mike Power, the author
of
Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How
the World Gets High
was showing the audience was
how easy it is, with a bit of online know-how, to order
any drug you want on the internet and get it delivered,
no questions asked, to your front door from anywhere
in the world. No shady bedsits or risky street corner
transactions, just a polite email requesting to be sent
one of the most vilified substances on the planet.
Accompanied by other, highly fresh Hot Topics
talks on naloxone, legal highs, club drugs, the drug
trade, harm reduction, sex work, employing users and
policing, Power’s presentation shed light on the
world’s rapidly changing drug market, and with it, a
whole new raft of problems for those working in the
harm reduction sector.
By way of Colombia, Cambodia, Liverpool and
China, he described how recent developments in the
way drugs are produced, sold and consumed has led
to him to deduce that regulation is the only sensible
way of stemming the decades of ‘bloodshed’ created
by the war on drugs.
What set him going on his investigation into the
modern drug trade, he explained, was a story he
covered in deepest Colombia in 2007, accompanying
a UN-sponsored team whose job it was, backed with
heavily armed Colombian soldiers, to destroy, field by
field, as many coca plants as they could.
Power asked one of the coca farmers what he was
going to do next in order to feed his family. The farmer
explained that, economically, coca was the only
feasible crop to grow. As soon as the soldiers had
moved on, he’d start planting coca in the next field.
At the time, with cocaine use rocketing across much
of the West, Power knew that what was happening in
the Colombian field was indicative of the ‘relentless,
circular, insane story’ of the drug war ‘that fascinated
me’. Spin the globe and Power took us to the
rainforests of Cambodia in 2008, where the UN scored
a major strike in its battle to stop the production and
trafficking of safrole oil, the major component of
ecstasy pills. The huge seizure of the oil stopped an
estimated 245m pills reaching the European market
and resulted in a drought in good quality ecstasy.
This bust, he explained, created a gap in the market
for a substitute, and mephedrone emerged to fill that
8 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| January 2014
Cover story |
Hot Topics conference
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
How easy is it to have any
drug you want delivered to
your door with no questions
asked? This and other
issues raised at HIT’s Hot
Topics conference gave a
revealing snapshot of
changes in the drugs field,
as
Max Daly
reports
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