Drug Wars: The terrifying inside story of Britain’s drug trade

by Neil Woods, J.S. Rafaeli

TO KNOW THE TRUE STORY BEHIND A WAR, ASK THE PEOPLE WHO FOUGHT IT 'An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal' The Drug Wars have been fought on British streets for decades, bringing destruction, corruption and violence in their wake. Yet it is a story that remains fundamentally untold. Until now. In this groundbreaking book, former undercover police officer Neil Woods, who risked his life infiltrating some of the UK's most vicious gangs, pieces together the complex and terrifying reality of the drug war in Britain. Calling upon gripping first-hand accounts from those on both sides of the battle, Drug Wars is told by those who are fighting it.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime, Crime, History, Drugs, Biography, Law

320 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 28, 2018

Reviews

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 4 out of 5]

"An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal".

Wow, this book is brutal but so engaging. Sometimes it's difficult to find non-fiction that excites and is unputdownable, but this was exactly those things and more. It focuses on the drugs war currently taking place in the UK from the perspectives of those in the know - the police who are actively fighting a losing battle by trying to stop the illegal selling and use of these drugs, from the sellers who are increasingly also part of gangs, and the drug users. It discusses the history of the drug trade and how it grew to the big beast it is today. It also highlights the incredible lengths that dealers will go to in order to protect their turf and the sort of things users will do to get their next fix. You frequently hear about dealers killing rival dealers for exactly that reason and we all know that junkies think nothing of commiting daylight robbery to obtain money to pay for drugs. It really is a sad state of affairs, and this book illustrates just how savage this world can be.

"Drug Wars" is an unforgettable, difficult and distressing read and a lot of the stories actually shocked me. It's a very dangerous and crazed world. As i've always thought, to lower the amount of users you need to get to the bottom of the issues in their lives that drove them towards these substances. Only then will we make a breakthrough.

Many thanks to Ebury Press for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

[Chris Steeden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neil Woods was an undercover UK police officer that infiltrated drug gangs between 1993 and 2007. He had previously written ‘Good Cop, Bad War’ back in 2016 that I had read at the beginning of 2018. The question he wants to answer in this book is ‘how has it come to this?’. Teaming up again with JS Rafaeli they will look at the British War on Drugs and the people caught up in it. They will dig into the history from the 1960’s to the present day (2018 was when this was published). How have we gone form a handful of heroin addicts in the 60’s to the gang violence we hear about daily in the news.

Woods begins in 1964 with the Mods and their drug of choice – purple hearts - a combination of amphetamine and barbiturate. This is when the media began reporting drug taking and investigating into its use. Media drug scare as it was called. Not that this was the first, but Woods feels that this was the beginning of the British War on Drugs. He goes on through history and it is quite compelling. I learnt a lot. It also looks at the way the police are handling it. One chapter is all about police corruption. This is one dirty business.

This a very readable book. What I would say though is that the addicts, the police, the medical professionals interviewed are really there to back-up the author’s views. I find it hard to argue against a lot of the arguments brought up in the book but this is a one-way street. In that respect it is a bit of an echo chamber. I have no facts to go against what the author puts forward so I have to take it all at face value. The way the book is laid out you can see how the drug scene has grown and how it has been mis-handled by the authorities.

Some chapters are better than others which keeps the book for me at three stars. Because of the way the chapters are set the book does not flow completely and feels a bit disjointed but that is really a minor quibble.

What is perfectly clear is that the current and past policing has not worked and something needs to change. The gangsters are getting more violent and the drugs are getting stronger. Surely having the authorities having control and regulating the industry would be better?

[Freya Derby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently listening to this on audiobook for the second time and cannot stop recommending it to people. It takes you through the history of drugs policy in the UK with all these mad personal stories about counterculture and the people who it actually affected. Very empathetic to users, critical of the current system and descriptive of how policy has taken us here. You really get an idea of all these different drugs scenes and the motivations of the individuals involved. You also see how there's this bizarre I guess cognitive dissonance between the individual and the state. Cannot recommend it enough.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book by Neil Woods, a former undercover police officer, and JS Rafaeli, a journalist and writer with Vice. Their first title, Good Cop, Bad War, was an account of Wood’s career infiltrating drug gangs around the country and why in the end he concluded the war on drugs was futile. I reviewed that book, awarding it the full five stars (see here: https://bit.ly/2LnwTqW) not least because it takes some guts to admit that the endeavours of one’s career have in effect been a colossal waste of time.

So, to Drug Wars, their follow on. This is a more cerebral book, in that it is an historical account of how we as a society got to the situation we are in, rather than the author’s experiences as an undercover officer. Woods and Rafaeli trace the origins of the war on drugs in Britain, placing this in the wider international context, particularly the drug war’s origins in American moral crusades.

The war on drugs has clearly failed. That much is so obvious the observation seems almost superfluous, yet those who support continued prohibition – and there are many who still do – seem unable or unwilling to accept it. What Drug Wars makes tragically clear however is not just that it was a failing endeavour right from the beginning, but that it never even needed to be fought, things were fine as they were. Nowhere is this clearer than in the section of the book that touches on heroin.

The fact is that for years the Britain had a small, yet stable, population of heroin addicts. In 1959 there were just 62 known heroin addicts in the UK. By 1964 there were 342. These were medics who started dipping into the medicine cabinet only to become addicted, ex-military and sailors who discovered the drug abroad, romantics who went looking after reading Cocteau, De Quincy, Kerouac and Burroughs. This is an important point, they weren’t kids off council estates lured by horrible dealers, because there weren’t any dealers. Why? Because once someone was an addict, they could just go to a GP and get heroin for free. This might sound like madness but giving addicts heroin was a pragmatic and entirely rational policy. It meant they had no need to steal to support their addiction, no need to sell their bodies, and crucially, no need to sell heroin to others to fund their habits. Prior to the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971 – possibly one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation ever to enter the statute book – the UK heroin population had grown to approximately 1000 addicts, but this was a slow and gradual growth, nothing like the explosion of addiction that would follow.

Even after the passage of the Act, this British System survived for a while, but eventually, after years of relentless pressure from the Americans it was to end. The result? The instant creation of a lucrative criminal marketplace. Where before there was no point in drug cartels smuggling heroin into the UK – a lot of risk for little reward, when one’s customer base would abandon you for the NHS as soon as they got hooked – now, the business case for doing so was obvious. The resulting explosion in addiction, the violence, was inevitable. There were later attempts to recapture sanity, notably in Liverpool where the British system was brought back to life with marked success. But once again it was destined to be destroyed by the cant and faux moralising of War on Drugs brigade and the tabloid press

Other parts of the book tell the story of Operation Julie – a comical exercise in persecuting harmless hippies, which would be funny if it hadn’t ruined lives and the rave scene of the 1990’s when MDMA made teenagers loved up and gangsters extremely rich. But for sheer vividness of all that is wrong with the war on drugs, it was the section on heroin that was most powerful to me.

Finally, the authors demonstrate how the war on drugs has perverted and undermined the very criminal justice system tasked with tackling it. Here we meet Frank Matthews, the pseudonym of a former Met police detective and undercover officer turned whistle-blower. Frank served in some of the Met’s most sensitive units, not least that responsible for witness protection. He describes in graphic detail the corruption and ineptitude he saw there, wrongdoing that aided criminals and endangered those they were charged to protect. Indeed, the details are so shocking that it’s difficult to believe, for if they are even half true, UK policing is rotten to the core. Just how could it be possible, what’s caused this rot? The answer is clear: the drug market is so lucrative, the profits so great, that organised crime has corrupted the very institutions who’s task it is to control them.

Drug Wars is a powerful and depressing read, but it’s also a hopeful one. All over the world the signs are that people and societies are finally starting to see sense. From Portugal, to Latin America, people are saying that enough is enough, that prohibition has failed. Even states in the United States, that bastion of moralising conservatism, have legalised cannabis. For so long, the UK has refused to budge, despite our history of trying to do things differently, but just this week the government has reluctantly agreed to medical marijuana. Things can change, we can do things differently, we don’t have to fight this pointless, utterly pointless, war.

This is an important book, essential reading, and I really can’t recommend ot enough.

[Ben Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal account on how the policy of ‘the war on drugs’ in the UK has failed, how it has given power to the criminals and the corrupt whilst leaving the most destitute in our society abandoned and vilified.
Strikingly clear that policy needs to change.

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 4 out of 5]

"An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal".

Wow, this book is brutal but so engaging. Sometimes it's difficult to find non-fiction that excites and is unputdownable, but this was exactly those things and more. It focuses on the drugs war currently taking place in the UK from the perspectives of those in the know - the police who are actively fighting a losing battle by trying to stop the illegal selling and use of these drugs, from the sellers who are increasingly also part of gangs, and the drug users. It discusses the history of the drug trade and how it grew to the big beast it is today. It also highlights the incredible lengths that dealers will go to in order to protect their turf and the sort of things users will do to get their next fix. You frequently hear about dealers killing rival dealers for exactly that reason and we all know that junkies think nothing of commiting daylight robbery to obtain money to pay for drugs. It really is a sad state of affairs, and this book illustrates just how savage this world can be.

"Drug Wars" is an unforgettable, difficult and distressing read and a lot of the stories actually shocked me. It's a very dangerous and crazed world. As i've always thought, to lower the amount of users you need to get to the bottom of the issues in their lives that drove them towards these substances. Only then will we make a breakthrough.

Many thanks to Ebury Press for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

[Travis Lupick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a review but is based on an interview I had with the author. It was originally published in the Georgia Straight newspaper.
It can be difficult to imagine a world without the war on drugs.
A world without police officers knocking down doors or drawing their guns to seize a substance as relatively harmless as cannabis.
A world where there are no longer dealers peddling unknown products on street corners or using physical violence to settle their disputes with addicted customers.
A world in which people who struggle with an addiction receive compassionate care and treatment from the health-care system, instead of getting thrown into a prison cell for committing a crime that hurts no one but themselves.
In Drug Wars: The Terrifying Inside Story of Britain's Drug Trade, authors Neil Woods and JS Rafaeli remind us that we don't have to imagine this world. In fact, it was not so long ago that it was still the reality in the United Kingdom.
"There is a time in living memory for some people in the U.K. when there was no crime associated with drugs at all," Woods tells the Straight.
In a telephone interview, the former undercover police officer (1993-2007) and board member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (formerly Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an international group with members in Vancouver and across Canada), explains that as late as the 1960s, U.K. citizens addicted to opioids did not obtain the drug from a dealer, but from a doctor.
Called the "British System", the country's medicalization of opioids distribution meant there was simply no need for a black market, and therefore no petty crime that comes with an industry that exists outside of the law.
"Britain was very late to come to the prohibition table," Woods says. "It resisted the United States-driven moral imperialism for a long time. The system in the U.K. was, if you had a problem with drugs, you got help.
"With heroin, that meant a doctor would prescribe heroin to you," he continues. "Which meant that, during the time of the British System, which went from the 1920s all the way to the end of the 1960s, there was no criminal association with drugs whatsoever.
"Nobody died, because the drug that was given to people was of a pharmaceutical grade," Woods adds. "Addiction was seen as an unfortunate medical condition rather than a moral failing."
North Americans tend to think of the drug war as a U.S. phenomenon, perhaps with the occasional mention of cartel violence in Mexico and the fentanyl crisis in Canada. But prohibition is a global conflict that has left no corner of the world unscathed. In Woods's highly readable—though, at times, a little thinly sourced—account of the drug war as it has played out in the U.K., there is a lot that Canada can learn, both from Britain's successes and its many mistakes.
Woods describes how the war on drugs perpetuates itself, creating a never-ending cycle of addiction, persecution, corruption, and more addiction.
"As soon as heroin was given to the black market, then it became an incentivized product," he notes. "There was pressure from organized crime to use the dealers to find new customers. You can either pay for a problematic addiction by stealing or allowing yourself to be sexually exploited. Or you can find new customers to pay for your own habit."
Meanwhile, authorities' efforts to break that cycle created a series of unintended consequences—unintended, but not totally unanticipated.
"The arrival of fentanyl in heroin, it was predictable," Woods says. "This is called the 'Iron Law of Prohibition'. That any product in a black market will always get stronger. Just like with alcohol. Within two weeks of alcohol prohibition [in the 1930s], no one could buy beer. They could only buy moonshine or whiskey, because those are cost-effective to smuggle. This is why fentanyl is coming in: because it is cost-effective to smuggle."
These are problems born of nothing less than a grotesque transfiguration of the state's enforcement of law and order, Woods argues.
"Drug policing is qualitatively different from other forms of modern police work," he writes in Drug Wars. "Aggressively policing actions that aren’t wrong in themselves, but only wrong because they are prohibited, places very particular strains on the Peelian bond between the police and the community."
Once upon a time, policing mostly consisted of chasing burglars and responding to disputes that had turned violent. Officers were members of the communities they patrolled and maintained healthy relationships with the people they served to protect. Then drugs were declared illegal. The money followed.
"The enormous amount of money that they [criminal organizations] get from drug sales forms the bank for every other form of organized criminality," Woods says. "It has completely changed the face of crime. But, perhaps more importantly, it has completely changed the nature of policing. Because it has ended, in so many places, what should be the relationship between police and community."
The most alarming sections of Woods's book are not about drugs themselves, but about the once-unimaginable levels of corruption that the prohibition of narcotics has made possible.
"In the old days, informants were an incredibly useful tool," one of Woods's sources, another former police officer, tells him in the book. "The drug money has changed all that—to the point where a lot of criminals are now becoming informants specifically in order to manipulate the police. Having a corrupt officer in their pocket has become just another tool for any serious gangster.
"Eventually, it got to the stage with me where so many of the top echelons of any OCG [Organized Crime Group] were all registered informants, that it became impossible to properly investigate anyone—because they all have their own high-level cops protecting them.
"So, for any real detective trying to investigate organised crime, you don’t know which criminal is under the protection of which of your bosses. Suddenly your investigation is getting sabotaged from above, because you’re poking your nose into areas that might threaten someone else’s informant.
"This means you can’t actually solve cases—and if you push too hard it will harm your own career advancement," the former cop laments. "So any talented, ambitious detective looking at the drug trade is now hobbled from the start."
Woods tells the Straight that after 14 years as a police officer who waged the drug war and then a subsequent decade spent fighting against it, he's come to view prohibition as significantly more harmful than the general public understands.
"We're sleepwalking, not realizing just how horrific is the situation that's been created," Woods says.

[Donna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow I ripped through this in no time; what a cracker of a book and really interesting too as well as quite terrifying!!i could read books like this all day look, gives a fascinating insight into the drugs world and all parts of it, police, drug dealers and users as well as the drugs scene. A seriously good read I was quite gutted when the book finished!!!!

[Stephen Hoffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unflinching and accurate history of the war on drugs in the UK and the misery it has caused. The writing is of the highest quality and keeps the reader's attention. It is a fine piece of investigative journalism.

It looks at a system which was evidence based and focused on harm reduction before the war and drugs and how the UK moved away from this towards an American style prohibitionist war on drugs.

The book highlights startling evidence that since the war on drugs came in to being deaths from drugs is up, drug related crime is up, drug use is up, drug related poverty is up and much more. It also highlights the racist aspects of the war on drugs, which has targeted black people.

As the war on drugs has become older and more layers added to it organised crime gangs running the show have increased their arms, violence and profits. They are the only victors from the war on drugs and have used their profits to corrupt the police and through that among many things threaten people in witness protection.

The book is enhanced significantly by the many eyewitness accounts given in this book, which gives us a bird's eye, gritty, realistic and truthful view of the war on drugs. It highlights those participating in it and those affected by it.

The book is strong in how it highlights how the tabloid press selling and sowing moral panic based on lies and half truths with little, no or manufactured evidence have become the biggest cheerleaders and lobbyists for the war on drugs. Its also played a key role in demonising drug users.

I'm not giving this book five stars as I think it would have benefited from hearing voices from those supporting the war on drugs and their arguments and then challenging them. I am an opponent of the war on drugs, but it would have been good to hear the key arguments from those who support the war on drugs and how to refute their arguments.

I also thought the authors too often towards the end of the book took potshots at those outside of their left wing ideological echo chamber. This ignores that their is opposition to the war on drugs from across the political spectrum, including from those who are not left wing like me.

I also think the book blamed the private market and capitalism a lot, whilst ignoring the statist origins of the war on drugs and the failings of the NHS in this area. The war on drugs is not capitalism, given you cannot have a free market with prohibitionism, rather a black market is created, showing the worst characteristics of the public and private sector and being a boon for gangsters.

I would have also appreciated more on the alternative approaches to the war on drugs and their successes as highlighted for instance in Portugal.

All that said this is a very good book and it ends on a hopeful note highlighting how the police themselves are abandoning the war on drugs and following a harm reduction evidence based policies. Why? To reduce crime and the threats to public health.

I would definitely recommend this book for those searching for the truth on the war on drugs.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a genuinely terrifying book about how bad decisions have repercussions for generations. The mess that is UK drug policy is laid out in a factual, almost academic, way while telling shocking stories of corruption, ineptitude, deprivation, and crime. The author is well placed to tell the story and he tells it well. There is a full history of how the "drug wars" moved from people going into Boots at Piccadilly Circus to collect their heroin to criminals carrying out armed robberies purely to raise the monte to get into the drug "business". It is a harrowing tale and Mr Woods warns that:-

"... one person can never put it together. You only ever have one piece of the puzzle. But, unless everyone sits round the table and shows all their pieces, the picture never comes together. But - no one round that table trusts each other, because the others might be corrupt as well. So the full picture never forms, and the corruption just grows."

The scale of the problem is frightening. Mr Woods says "The money was suddenly astronomical. Suddenly it's not your local copper getting corrupted - it's senior management. There's just no way to control that. If they admit that there are 250 corrupt officers at the Met and try to take them out, each one of them knows five more, and suddenly the whole force is finished."

I hadn't realised that the "moralising, abstinence based model of prohibition by law enforcement is something that has been forced upon us." Europe took up - with some coercion, the American model. Now our prisons are full of people who have committed crime in some way connected with drugs.

This book should be read by anyone interested in the way decisions have unseen consequences, and anyone interested in current policy around drugs. It is also of interest to people who read true crime as there are some truly shocking scenes described - including the mess that was the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

[R7835 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite an eye-opener. Maybe the author(s) didn't mean it this way, but it seems a bit naive and biased to say that the problems with drugs was the switch from the British system to the American system. A lot of other social changes happened over the years that would likely have seen the British system fail (maybe not as badly, maybe even worse).

There's also the view that if it wasn't for politics/media/police, there wouldn't have been a problem with all of the drug crazes over the past decades (pot, acid, ecstasy, mephedrone etc). The authors paint it as though everything was great when a new drug trend came along, but then the police and newspapers got involved and that's when everything went wrong.

I think if it were up to the author(s) they'd have everyone free to take any drugs they want, and once they are hooked, just nip down to their local Boots for a hit anytime they need one for the rest of their lives. This way the users can still live their lives, have a job, have a chance at owning their own flat. Wow! As it is, though, users have to get their drugs from the black market and that's the reason that their lives are a mess. Really??

An interesting, if biased, history.

[Jeanette Petersson Munro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. Showing the harm done in society due to the present system; not only to the drug addicts but also due to the increased corruption of our institutions, for example, the police. I didn't know that the father of one of the murders of Stephen Lawrence was involved in the drug dealing and was able to get a corrupted copper to protect his son!
I knew about the pervasive racism within the police but I did not realise the extent of Police corruption due to the drug trade and the enormous amount of money that can be made from illicite drugs.

Interesting about the user dealers who are interesting in getting more users so that they can finance their own habit. The present system clearly isn't working. Maybe, removing the "profits" may be worth investigating. We do know that many of the users are medicating some trauma so maybe we should invest more in having help available.

This book doesn't advocate using drugs in any way but how to handle drug addiction in society to reduce the harm done, as drug addiction, just like alcoholism, does do harm. Recommend reading to everyone to get a more long term overview of the issue.

[Ewan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d thought this book might be just a re-hash of Neil Wood’s earlier book, Good Cop Bad War, but in fact it’s a different angle on the same subject. While GCBW was more Neil Wood’s personal perspective from his time as an undercover cop, this book is more of an over-arching history of the British war on drugs. In fact there’s a slightly jarring aspect to the book where Wood’s is referred to in the third person, and you think ‘hang on, isn’t that the author of the book?’ - but I think that’s in order that the book is presented as a historical account rather than one person’s memoir. Also worth noting that, like GCBW, I think the book is basically recounted by Woods and the actual writing done by JS Rafaeli.

It’s informative and well researched, while still bringing the personal experience of its interviewees into the story when appropriate to illustrate the reality of the events it talks about. I’m come to expect that anything that deals objectively with the war on drugs will make for infuriating reading, in that it shows just how damaging and unnecessary drug prohibition has been, and this is no exception. Media scares that I remember from the 90s and 00s are shown here to be based on misunderstandings and outright fabrication.

I would recommend this, GCBW, and Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari as three books that will completely change people’s perspective on drug prohibition. I’d also recommend the Stop and Search podcast, which is how I heard about Neil Woods and these books.

[Margaret Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 1993 and 2007 Woods was among the first to infiltrate drug gangs, working undercover, befriending and gaining the trust of some of the most violent, unpredictable criminals in Britain. But after years on the streets spending time with the vulnerable users at the bottom of the chain, he began to question the war for which he was risking both his life and sanity. Tracing its beginnings from the nineteen-sixties to the present day, he uses gripping first-hand accounts and moving case studies from those on both sides.

​Although I was initially sceptical, Woods’s thoughtful, thorough and persuasive thesis made me rethink my position on the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. In Chapter 6 ‘Epidemics’ he sheds light on the explosion of numbers of UK heroin addicts from 1,049 in 1971 to 150,000 in the mid-eighties. Woods argues that this had much more to do with international politicking than the supposed moral weakness of those addicted. A grim but revealing must-read.

[Susan Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that I really agree with, the untold harm done by the judgemental war on drugs in unprecedented.

I had to take a point off for not having dedicated a chapter to the emergence of crack cocaine and the so called yardies. When I worked in the drug field crack cocaine was my area of specialism.

I loved the inclusion of CRI and how their treatment model has led to increased deaths. It was CRI who the commissioners decided to give the money to instead of my more holistic NHS service.

A book I would highly recommend to everyone to learn how the war on drugs has a negative effect throughout our society, not just on those who deal or use drugs.

[Sandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought and read this for research purposes, drugs being a subject I know very little about. This went a long way towards educating me about the development of the drugs industry in Britain; the actions that supported and those which attempted to hinder but throughout I felt I needed to read much more widely to gain even half the whole picture.

Possibly the reduction in trust was instigated by the use of the word 'terrifying' in the title, which felt more tabloid than I felt its authors desired.

[A. Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this book wasn't as interesting as I had hoped it would be. I kept thinking to myself "when is this going to get going". I understand why Woods delved into the 60s/70s, and it there were important facts in there, but I just found it dragged.

From the "epidemic" chapter though I read the rest of the book in one sitting. It was gripping and there were some points in there where the things Woods described, I had seen happen to people I grew up with.

An eye-opening read and one I'm glad I read.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible, terrifying, and thought provoking. You think you’re wise to what goes on in the world, but read this and your eyes are well and truly opened. Amazingly well researched and well written book that should be required reading for every MP in this country.
I thought Good Cop, Bad War was good, but this book blew my mind. The answers to the mess we’re in are staring us in the face. If only this country was run by these guys.

[Minty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book

Compelling, eye opening and should be compulsory reading for police officers, journalists, and politicians alike. It has left me stunned at the failure of our drug laws, at the systemic racism and corruption I think the police and at the continuing deterioration of the drugs situation in the U.K. An incredible read, especially at a time when the huge disparities within this country are so prominent.

Read this book.

[Terry Aikman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye opening and intelligent

An incredible insight in to the British drug problem. This book educates you and lays bare the facts. Intriguing with no glamour just reality. Best book I've read on drug crime by a mile. Highly recommend it you want to understand the truth of the drug wars destroying britain.

[Suzy Beaverstock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ending the war on drugs is a cause very close to my heart and this book was a fantastic.
Informed, comprehensive while not going above my head I learned so much from this and highly recommend.
Great as both an introduction to the impact of the Misuse of Drugs Act, but also to those with experience in the subject, I doubt anyone would put this book down NOT having learned something.

[Gavin Heron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic history of drugs as it relates to the police in the UK. The chapter on the symbiotic relationship between informants & the police is chilling.

The books conclusion immediately following this chapter that the police will help to redress the balance of the drug war is one that has some gaping holes - not least the network of informants & cops which Woods & Rafaeli warn us about.

[Martha Brindley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and terrifying look into the drug wars in the UK. Well written and very informative work of non fiction from police, dealer and user points of view. Definitely one to read for anyone interested in the current state of the drug wars in the UK. Thanks to Net Galley for my copy.

[Aparna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good insight into the illegal drug trade in Britain, mainly from the police perspective. It’s a terrifying wake up call about what the current prohibitionist drug policies is doing to our country.

[Gray Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book on the origins of the war on drugs. Touching on racism, the media and international relations, this was a real eye-opener of a book that I know I'll be talking about for years to come.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy via Netgalley in exchange for honest review.
This is gives a truly horrific insight into how the drug trade came about.
It is really frightening but a great read.

[Gavin Georgeson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't hooked

Bit boring covering the early years in depth them skimming past 30 years in a few chapters. I agree with all his ideas .

[Beth Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly eye opening and thoughtfully written

[Tim Wakeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting shows why corruption will always be a factor in policing.

[Eftychia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars