Kate Saunders
By the time I made my first visit to a real Dutch dope café, they had been around for quite a while and even provincial stag parties were starting to get rather tired of them. This did not matter. I thought I was doing something incredibly daring and cool.
I was in my early forties, and finding the onset of middle age as bewildering as a second puberty. In some ways, the two states are uncannily similar. There’s the same haunting of mirrors, because your face keeps changing and you never know what shape your nose is going to be from one day to the next. And there is the same desire to pilfer from the cupboard marked “forbidden”—in the case of the 40 year olds, before it is too late. In the blink of an eye, you will become your parents. You have one last chance to do all of the naughty things you didn’t get around to when you were genuinely young. As a lifelong square, I had a lot of catching up to do.
I happened to be staying in the quiet Belgian town of Liège. I was there with my then eight-year-old son, visiting his father. My ex-husband told me, in passing, that he had visited one of the famous Dutch cafés in which dope was smoked openly and semi-legally. It was not in the fleshpots of Amsterdam, but in the town of Maastricht (the one that gave its name to the treaty) just across the border and about 20 minutes away by car. Seeing my fascination, he offered to take me there.
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Jonathan Power
Pakistan is the hub of the Anglo-American/Nato war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Britain’s embassy in Islamabad is its largest in the world. And the city is full to the brim with American spies and senior military people. But the truth is that the war in Afghanistan is going badly. The Taliban are gaining the upper hand, funded by proceeds from poppy-growing, which they now encourage in a reverse of the policy pursued when they were in power (back then, it was un-Islamic).
In the course of a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation in his office in the presidential palace, Pervez Musharraf, military strongman of Pakistan, made no effort to persuade me that the Taliban and al Qaeda were being defeated or that the war in Afghanistan was going well. There was an absence of bravado and an apparent openness to new ideas—such as talking more formally to the Taliban/al Qaeda and even buying up the poppy crop.
Indeed, Musharraf is the first world leader to tentatively back the idea of western governments buying the Afghan poppy crop to stop it reaching the drug barons yet without impoverishing the farmers. “Buying the crop is an idea one could explore. Pakistan doesn’t have the money for it. We would need money from the US or the UN. But we could buy up the whole crop and destroy it. In that way the poor growers would not suffer,” he told me.
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Alex McBride
The hot stillness of the August morning was about to be broken. Two cops holding a stubby battering ram, known as a “red rooster,” silently counted to three and attacked the door. On the third bang they were through, a wave of officers washing in behind them. Linda, a black woman in her early twenties, dozing in bed, heard the noise and sat up. A boy in his late teens called Michael had been asleep on a chair beside her; he knew exactly what was happening. “It’s a bust,” he said, slipping a wedge of bank notes into the bed. A few seconds later the cops were in the bedroom: “Police, nobody move!”
I met tearful Linda the next day in the cells. Her husband and two small children didn’t yet know she was in custody, charged, as was Michael, with possession with intent to supply class A drugs. Linda didn’t look like a dealer. She was healthily plump, had no previous convictions and had tested negative for drugs in the police station. The judge granted her bail on condition that she surrender her Jamaican passport, which she was unable to do because it was somewhere in the bowels of Lunar House in Croydon. She would have to stay put, perhaps for months or, if convicted, years. Linda was inconsolable. It was money that had landed her in jail. Her husband, a native Brit, had been making her feel bad that she wasn’t contributing to the family’s finances. She cut hair part-time but it wasn’t bringing in much. Linda had resolved to do better. It was a stroke of luck when her friend Coral, a prostitute, invited her to come and make some quick money in the provinces. Coral worked as a prostitute to feed her crack habit. For the first few days all went well, and Linda made money hand over fist. She stayed with Coral at her flat, which ever-enterprising Coral let other crack addicts use in exchange for free drugs. Linda sensibly hid her takings in her pants.
On the third day, to Linda’s mild surprise, Coral and her crack buddies got up early, locking the door from outside as they left. Linda was left alone with Michael, a young man from Jamaica who had also been staying with Coral. Linda assumed she wouldn’t be gone long and went back to sleep. The next thing she knew the police were in the room asking her about the drugs strewn about the room and the money in her knickers.
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Richard Dawkins
Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.
Gerin oil addiction can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities from which all but confirmed addicts are excluded. These communities are nearly always limited to one sex, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonised sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin oil symptomatology. Gerin oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a prurient desire to interfere with, and preferably reduce, the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the horror with which Gerin oil users view homosexuality, even when expressed in long-term loving relationships.
Gerin oil in strong doses can be hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in their heads, or see illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who reports high-grade hallucinogenic experiences may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such following-pathology can long postdate the leader’s death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of “drinking the blood and eating the flesh” of the leader.
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Katharine Quarmby
At any one time the state is parent to about 60,000 children in England. The vast majority enter care because of family problems, rather than because of their own behaviour. Children are taken away from their parents for their own protection. Sadly, once they are in care, the future for most of them is bleak.
Fewer than 10 per cent of children in care achieve five A-C GCSE grades, compared to half of all young people. In 2002, 59 per cent of care leavers finished school without any qualifications. Fewer than half were in education or employment at 19, compared to 86 per cent of all 19 year olds. Care leavers are far more likely to end up in prison. In the most recent data available, one quarter of the adult prison population has been in care and almost 40 per cent of prisoners under 21 were in care as children.
Of the 60,000 children in care in 2003, the majority, over 40,000, lived with foster carers, 3,400 were adopted, over 6,000 were still at home but under supervision and 9,600 were looked after in children’s homes, secure units, hostels, lodgings or residential schools. There are problems with every part of the system. Adoption is still only available to a small number of children, because by the time they enter the care system for good they are often too old to be adopted. There are too few foster carers, they are poorly rewarded and many of them have little training. And after the abuse scandals in children’s homes, residential care remains shrouded in controversy.
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Peter Wayne
To begin at the beginning, I must make a confession. As regular Prospect readers will know, I am a heroin addict. In my case, the millstone of addiction lives side by side with a cycle of criminality. I’ve spent most of the last 20 years in prison.
I do my time, hope that one day I might break the habit. Whenever my release comes round, I head off determined not to make the same mistakes. It never works out, but last time, on a chilly February morning one year ago, I was more than usually optimistic.
Wandsworth prison in southwest London had just initiated a methadone (heroin substitute) scheme for people like me. I had a letter from the prison’s senior medical officer, addressed to a drugs agency in Soho. I had been instructed to report there straight away.
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Peter Wayne
Whenever a release date draws near, my thoughts turn to the possibility of rehabilitation. And there is, of course, never a shortage of unsolicited advice from one’s peers. The other night, a gang of us was seated around a bucket of hooch, mulling over our prospects.
A pugnacious “face” from Dartmoor had good news. “Discharge grant’s gone up to ?52. If yer homeless, ?110.”
“Yeh? But the train takes forever to get to London. We’ll have to wait hours before we get the first bag of gear.”
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Mark Bowden
I was surprised to find Fast Eddie unarmed. A fit, ruddy man, he is otherwise exactly as described, a blunt businessman presiding with frenetic industry over his growing makeshift empire off the busy runways of Eldorado airport in Bogot?. This is my first day back in Colombia, trying to get a handle on what many feel will be America’s next great military adventure: a moving shadow beneath the calm surface of US foreign policy as George W Bush settles into the White House. The new president has presented a neo-isolationist face to most of the world, warning would-be supplicants not to count on American intervention, but Colombia may be the big exception. In April, the Bush administration requested another $800m to assist that country’s counter-drug efforts. The US is already heavily invested in Plan Colombia, an international effort to kill with one stone two stubborn old birds-cocaine trafficking and a 40-year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency. This is one of those plans that looks brilliant in a Capitol Hill briefing room. If it works, it could be a triumph. If it doesn’t, well, think quagmire. Some are already invoking the spectre of Vietnam.
To Fast Eddie, the word is “opportunity.” His empire is a network of tin-roofed trailers just off the airport tarmac, surrounded by an impressive assortment of small planes, vehicles, refrigerators, razor wire and all manner of supplies. These are boom times for Eddie’s Operation Support, which serves as supply depot, dispatch centre, reception and farewell station for every man, woman, weapon, field ration, dog and fence post shipped south by America’s escalating military investment in this beleaguered nation. It has been almost a year since Washington voted to contribute $1.3 billion (over three years) to Plan Colombia’s overall $7.5 billion stabilisation package. Colombian President Andr?s Pastrana has postponed implementation of the military component of the plan, a massive offensive against coca crops and processing facilities protected by the guerrillas in two of the country’s southern states. But so far the threat of this push has not been enough to force the country’s guerrillas to the negotiating table. Unless they back down, the thrust should begin this summer. To hear its most avid supporters sell it, that would merely be a necessary step towards making all of South America safe for Jeffersonian democracy.
There are optimists and there are pessimists, and then there are optimistic pessimists like Eddie, who sees the billion-plus as a first step down a twisting, bloody road for Uncle Sam. Eddie is a Colombian-born American citizen, a veteran of the US Air Force. “I’m a permanent alien,” he says. “I was a foreigner in the US and now I’m considered a foreigner here.” But first and foremost, he’s a businessman. As both a Colombian and American, a two-edged patriot, the prospect of protracted war pains him. Sadness etches his features as he ponders it. But hey, that’s no reason for a fella to take his eye off the ball! In anticipation of the build-up, Eddie has spruced up his waiting lounge. He has hosted as many as 200 troops here at any one time, orchestrating it all with a 9mm handgun strapped to his hip. But today, it is missing.
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Peter Wayne
My mother would have called it “navy.” But it was an altogether more unusual shade of deep Prussian blue-sleekly tailored, double-breasted, three-quarter length, velvet collared-a cashmere overcoat which overwhelmed me with the desire to own it. That I hadn’t the money to buy it never entered the equation. On the afterwave of the crack cocaine I had ingested minutes earlier, the coat already belonged to me. As I stared at it in the window of Crombie’s exclusive emporium in Jermyn Street, I knew what I must do.
It was four days before Christmas, and the interior was decked out accordingly. Two immaculately dressed assistants were attending to a haughty-looking matron, deliberating over a selection of poplin cotton shirts piled high on the counter. The trio looked preoccupied enough as I swept past them with a nod of the head and a convivial “Good afternoon.”
Heart beating preternaturally, I snatched the prize from its hanger and stuffed it into my capacious bag. I was just about to help myself to a grey number further down the rack, when I noticed the lens of a CCTV camera recording for posterity my impulsive hoist. As the drug furies raged inside me, chiding me for my idiocy, four burly security guards materialised out of nowhere, surrounding me before I had a chance to bolt for the door.
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Peter Wayne
It began innocently enough at King’s Cross station, just hours after my release from prison earlier this year. It was midday. Having travelled down to London by train from Lindholme prison near Doncaster, circumstances decreed that I visit the bank to withdraw some cash for my immediate needs. There was a branch of Barclays directly opposite the station concourse. That would do nicely, I thought, at least until I had the chance to visit my own branch (in more fashionable Regent Street) to sort out cash cards, cheque books, overdraft facilities-all the necessary accoutrements of modern living.
Gingerly, I crossed the busy arterial. Given the decade of imprisonment I had only that morning completed, the experience proved unnerving. The fumes from bumper-to-bumper traffic were nauseating after the pollution-free atmosphere of my years in a car-less penal estate. The colours about me seemed brighter and the buildings (especially the revamped St Pancras) seemed grander. But I could see few differences between the tawdry King’s Cross I had left behind at the end of the 1980s and the seething dystopic ram-jam which welcomed me back into the world today. The crowds still milled. The homeless still begged. Along the wide cracked pavements the hustlers still hustled. What was it about this scene that disturbed my newly released sensibilities? It took me a while to realise-everybody looked so young.
The dealer caught me as I came out of the bank. “You wan’ some powder?” he asked, his face lamp-black, his head a bouquet of ill-kempt dreadlocks, Tommy Hilfigered, yellow-eyed, anxious to make a quick sale. “Heroin?” I asked, rather nonplussed by this bold approach. “Best gear on the Cross,” he assured me, his eyes darting swiftly around in their sockets, making sure all was still safe and dandy. I hesitated. How had this complete stranger identified me as a potential customer? Maybe my gaol pallor had given the game away. Maybe the prison-issue jeans. At any rate, he had me sussed for what I was. It felt like Christ’s temptation in the wilderness.
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