Examination of Witnesses (Questions 25
- 39)
TUESDAY 9 JUNE 2009
MR MARTIN
BARNES AND
MR HARRY
SHAPIRO
Q25 Chairman: Thank you very much
for coming to give evidence today. You had the benefit of hearing
the evidence of Professor Strang and some of the questions we
ask you will be a repetition of the questions we have asked him.
The UN's 2008 World Drug Report and the 2007-08 British Crime
Survey seem to indicate that we are holding our own in respect
of the trade in cocaine. However, SOCA, the international organisation
which deals with international crime, seems to think that the
war against cocaine has been won. What is your view?
Mr Barnes: I do not think SOCA
actually used the phrase "that the war against drugs has
been won".
Q26 Chairman: Winning.
Mr Barnes: I do not even think
they necessarily used that word. There was quite a prominent report
on the BBC just a couple of days before SOCA's most recent annual
report. What SOCA do say in their annual report is that in the
last year there has been "a discernible difference in the
accessibility, purity and price of cocaine". They also describe
it as a market in some measure in retreat. There is no question
that we are seeing quite significant changes in the nature of
the cocaine market, the key point being that there is clear evidence
of significant reductions in its purity. SOCA point to the success
of enforcement measures as really a primary driver for that. The
difficulty is that there is no evidence at the moment of enforcement
activity impacting on availability and in turn on price. We have
seen the price of cocaine fall quite significantly over the last
ten years or so. Obviously there are regional variations across
the UK and the price can fluctuate, potentially in response to
law enforcement measures, but the average price of cocaine has
been coming down. SOCA are probably right to point out that there
is some evidence emerging that enforcement activity, both at very
high level in terms of upstream production, source countries,
in terms of trafficking, could be having an impact but it is too
soon to say whether or not that is going to be a lasting impact
or increasing impact. I just think the evidence SOCA are pointing
to, which is almost really over the last seven/eight months, feels
too narrow and immediate a timeframe to make definite conclusions
that we are seeing a significant impact in terms of cocaine availability
through enforcement measures.
Q27 Chairman: How much cocaine is
escaping seizure?
Mr Barnes: It is difficult to
say. According to international estimates, a high proportion of
cocaine is apparently being seized. I have the figures.
Q28 Chairman: If you have, that would
be very helpful.
Mr Barnes: Let me quickly check.
I am not good at carrying statistics in my head so I do tend to
write them down. Estimate of cocaine seizures about 23% of production
1998 to 42% in 2007. I do not know what the figures are in terms
of seizures here in the UK against estimates of the amount of
cocaine actually landing on these shores. It is estimated that
about 35 to 40 tonnes of cocaine is actually imported. Clearly
one of the issues with cocaine, which is related to the issue
of its decreasing purity, is that it is significantly bulked out
in terms of volume between when it arrives on these shores and
when it actually reaches the end purchaser. So in terms of volume,
the 35 to 40 tonnes quoted as having actually arrived on these
shores, you need to factor that several times in terms of the
volumes which potentially are reaching the end users.
Mr Shapiro: On this issue of the
degree to which cocaine is cut, it is true to say that for the
drugs which have come from a long way, in other words heroin and
cocaine, most of the cutting has traditionally happened en route.
By the time the drug gets to this country there is relatively
little adulteration between wholesale seizures and what actually
finishes up on the streets unlike other drugs like amphetamines
which mainly come from Holland, so the supply chain is a lot smaller
and much more adulteration goes on here. The change that SOCA
have been referring to is the fact that there seems to be a lot
more adulteration going on with cocaine once it arrives here which
is a relatively new phenomenon, in fact a whole new industry has
grown up supplying those adulterants to organised gangs and traffickers.
Why that is going on is a little bit too early to say in terms
of trends. It could simply be that middle-market, low-level dealers
in this country have just found another way of increasing their
profits by further cutting the drug rather than trying to make
existing supplies which are under threat go further.
Q29 David T C Davies: If people are
cutting this stuff, with all sorts of other chemicals presumably,
does this make the user as high as it would if they were getting
the real stuff? If not, is it less addictive and, if so, does
this not mean that in a funny sort of way people cutting drugs
is, from our society's point of view, quite a good thing? It makes
them less addicted and less dangerous perhaps.
Mr Barnes: The picture is more
complex than that. If people are buying less pure cocaine, one
of the issues is that a lot of people who are buying cocaine are
simply not aware just how impure it is compared with even ten
years ago.
Q30 David T C Davies: Does it make
them, to use the vernacular, as stoned if it is cut?
Mr Barnes: It depends partly on
the way that somebody is using it. If the idea is to get a high
experience, then there is the possibility that you might actually
use more to try to get that high. In terms of the cutting agents,
one of them, for example, which is currently being used is phenacetin.
That is used as a painkiller and is actually banned in the UK
because there is evidence that it can have a potential carcinogenic
effect. People do not know what else is in the cocaine. In terms
of answering your question, does the fact that it has been cut
more potentially reduce the harm? There is no direct evidence
really to point to that because it does not tell you about the
patterns of use which might follow in terms of that change in
the purity. One pattern which is emerging is that more people
appear—and I will come in a minute on to this question about
whether more people are using cocaine because I note some of the
points made earlier—to be using cocaine for a night out
and will often mix it with alcohol, for example. One of the effects
of that is that you can in effect drink more and remain sober
for longer; just the nature of the chemical reaction that the
two drugs have. If you are using cocaine in that way, you are
probably not that directly interested in how pure the drug is
really as it is more a combined approach.
Mr Shapiro: There is some validity
in the point you make in the sense that the general consensus
is that the purer the drug is the safer it is: the more adulterated
it is, the more dangerous it is. That is not necessarily the case
and that can be the case with cocaine along the lines Martin suggested.
Q31 Ms Buck: Both you and Professor
Strang talked about the regional variations in what is happening
in the drugs market. What do you know about those variations in
terms of the demand and supply of heroin and crack and snorted
cocaine and what are the factors behind that?
Mr Barnes: We do not really know
enough about regional variations in the UK. If you take a snapshot,
the question is how accurate it is in terms of presenting an accurate
picture. Availability and supply can fluctuate. The margin of
fluctuation can be quite narrow, but changes in patterns can occur.
Inevitably the sort of data which is available does generally
point to higher levels of use in the larger cities, London being
a classic example. I am not sure that we have enough evidence
really about the regional variations. That is actually something
which SOCA is prioritising. Part of what it has introduced is
that when it gets to seizures, but also when it gets hold of the
cutting agents, there is much more testing and examination going
on to try to join up the dots in terms of the supply and distribution
networks. I suspect this is a picture which SOCA is actually collecting
more evidence on in terms of intelligence gathering.
Q32 Ms Buck: Do you know whether
there are totally different markets and if so how they operate
for, for example, crack and cocaine powder and heroin? What are
the means by which different kinds of markets emerge?
Mr Barnes: Again, difficult. One
of the emerging trends around cocaine quite recently, and there
is evidence and SOCA have actually supported this in terms of
the evidence they have gathered, is of almost a two-tier market
it appears and often through the same supplier routes and the
same dealers. You have your cheaper, less pure cocaine at a lower
price and your purer cocaine at a higher price.
Q33 Ms Buck: Sold through different
markets in effect, a street market, or not?
Mr Barnes: In effect almost through
the same market but the dealers are being quite shrewd in a sense
in dividing their immediate catchment area between those two levels
of purity and that two-tier market.
Q34 Ms Buck: What are the risks inherent
in that?
Mr Barnes: Again it comes back
to the question earlier about the potential risks of purity versus
the drug that is cut more with the adulterants. I do not think
of itself, as yet, that we have evidence of what harms the two-tier
market is necessarily creating because it seems to be a relatively
new phenomenon. What it does indicate and this might be what you
are touching on, is that clearly one of the concerns about cocaine
is that as the price has fallen it becomes more affordable and
does that potentially create a risk of more people having access
to the drug because they can afford it and therefore potentially
using?
Q35 Ms Buck: Obviously huge variations,
as you rightly said, depending on enforcement action in a particular
area and so forth. At the moment, in London, how much would it
cost to purchase a gram of cocaine and a gram of crack?
Mr Shapiro: Somewhere between
£30 and £50. The market is different because the selling
techniques are different. For cocaine you would be looking somewhere
between £30 and £50 a gram for powder cocaine. I just
want to make a point about this two-tier market. Although it is
being sold like that, SOCA themselves say that they have done
no forensic testing to see whether those different price levels
are actually represented by different purity levels or whether
this is just a marketing ploy. That is one point to make.
Mr Winnick: It could not be claimed on
expenses, I am afraid.
Q36 Martin Salter: I just want to
look at the cutting agent. I understand that for a while there
was a worrying tendency of middle-ranking dealers to cut cocaine
with some quite noxious substances like Harpic and Vim and the
rest of it. Far from the cutting agents being a good thing actually
some of the most damaging products someone might end up snorting
could be the agents it was cut with in the first place, never
mind the cocaine itself. I would be interested in your experience.
Mr Shapiro: May I say that there
is a level of urban mythology about what finishes up as adulterants
in drugs. It is a commercial market and what drug dealers want
is people coming back to them and buying more. It is unlikely,
unless there is some vindictive campaign going on between dealers
or users, that in the main those kinds of substances would be
cut because people just would not come back to that person. Generally
the adulterants in these drugs are what you night call benign
at some level, they are glucose, they are mannitol, the sugars
of various sorts. What has happened with cocaine, and Martin has
already mentioned phenacetin, is that is also being cut with benzocaine,
which is a mild analogue of cocaine where you would get the same
kind of numbing feeling in your nose and tongue which would give
you the impression that you were getting the real deal, whereas
in fact you were getting something which was kind of related to
it but really does not deliver the goods. You might think you
are getting it, therefore you are prepared to pay for it. If you
are a relatively naive user, you really would not know the difference.
Q37 Martin Salter: At what point
does cocaine start to move from becoming the almost exclusive
preserve of Bullingdon Club, posh-dinner-party-type people to
becoming a street level drug and more commonly used in working
class communities?
Mr Barnes: The big increase—and
we are quite reliant on published survey data which is primarily
the British Crime Survey—was really in the late 1990s, between
1996 and 2000, when we did see the big increase in reported levels
of cocaine use. As a general comment about the British Crime Survey,
there is a concern that the British Crime Survey may generally
understate overall levels of prevalence. To give an example, the
estimated number of people who have used crack cocaine in the
past year is at about 44,000. The Home Office National Treatment
Agency statistics estimate that there are around 200,000 people
who are problematic crack cocaine users. The British Crime Survey
does not, for example, cover people who are in temporary housing
or homeless or in university campuses or in prisons, so there
can be a bit of an understating where drugs are particularly focused
at more vulnerable groups. The key point is that we do have a
problem with cocaine and it is a serious problem. If you look
at the data evidence, I would challenge the claim that in terms
of levels of use it is a growing problem. We saw that big increase
in the late 1990s, but according to the published data it has
remained relatively stable, albeit at that higher rate, since
about the year 2000. Unquestioningly we are seeing clear evidence—and
you heard earlier from Professor Strang—of cocaine related
harms because those figures can hide changes in patterns of use,
ways that people consume the drug. There could be more hazardous
ways of potentially using the drugs. People will come into the
figures, go out of the figures, the drug using population does
change over time, but in terms of reported levels of use, people
who have used it in the last year or the last month, that has
remained relatively stable since about the year 2000.
Q38 Patrick Mercer: The British Crime
Survey shows a levelling off in use of crack cocaine. Is this
temporary or do you hope that this will be permanent?
Mr Shapiro: What is happening
there is that the typical problematic drug user who will present
to treatment services will often be using heroin and crack cocaine
together. The figures for heroin show a similar levelling off.
The reality of this is that we have an ageing heroin population
in the sense that there currently does not seem to be a new generation
of young heroin and crack users coming through the treatment system.
The members we represent, who work in young people's drug treatment
services, are seeing a different pattern of problematic drug use
which is much more around alcohol and cannabis and ecstasy and
at some level cocaine, but cannabis and alcohol are causing the
most concern. This could change of course but the treatment profile
at the moment is for young people and if those people carry on
in that vein, they will not necessarily become the heroin and
crack users in the next generation. That would at least partly
account for those statistics but they have to be taken in combination
with the heroin treatment figures as well because they are often
using both.
Q39 Patrick Mercer: What might lead
to another rise in future?
Mr Shapiro: The last time we began
to get a serious heroin problem in this country was in the 1980s
and it was partly due to the economic recession, but it was also
due to the fact that for the first time we had a different sort
of heroin in the country which was heroin you could smoke as opposed
to heroin you could only inject. That made a quantum leap in the
number of people who were prepared to try it because it looked
much less frightening than having to stick a needle in your arm.
There was that kind of toxic combination at that time which gave
us the heroin problem we have now, or certainly kick-started it.
Obviously we are in an economic decline at the moment but on the
other hand the drug market and the drug situation has changed
quite significantly and obviously up on the radar now much more
than it was in those time is the problematic use of alcohol. The
economic situation and things that are going on in society can
impact on this but you also have to look at the structure of the
drug market as well to determine where trends might be. At the
moment all the figures for problematic drug use are generally
stable and part of that reason is because of the ageing population.
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