The Cocaine Trade - Home Affairs Committee Contents


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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