Another shrine has appeared in North London. On Tuesday lunchtime, Adam Henry, aged 15, was cornered down a side street off Westbourne Road, Islington, not far from Highbury Fields, and stabbed. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived, and office workers on their lunch breaks saw them trying to save Henry’s life. He was rushed to hospital, where he died.

Within a day, the customary shrine had appeared. At the foot of a low brick wall have been laid flowers, drinks and biscuits, less than a minute’s walk from Henry’s old secondary school, St Mary Magdalene Academy, which he attended until partway through Year 8. His yearbook entry said he enjoyed skateboarding and reading the Bible. It has been reported that, after leaving St Mary Magdalene, Adam was a pupil of the Bridge Satellite School, which specializes in teaching children with autism. Laying flowers on Tuesday evening, Henry’s family told Metro that he was “quiet and respectful… very funny. Just a nice boy.”

The police have opened a murder investigation. As yet it is not known why Henry, nicknamed “AZ”, was stabbed to death one lunchtime in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, minutes away from £8-a-pint gastropubs, a Bang & Olufsen showroom and the townhouse that was once Tony Blair’s. Like much of London’s Zone 2, Islington is an area where incredible wealth luxuriates a few doors away from poverty and strife. Beside the lawyers, celebrities and investment bankers live the boys and young men embroiled in violent street gangs.

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One might assume that the violence breaks out when one drug-selling gang encroaches on the turf of another, but the truth is more prosaic: stabbings can be precipitated by social media posts and petty personal beefs. If you are spotted talking to the wrong person, or you repost the wrong video, you can become a target. There are only a small number of street gang members, but thousands of children are one misstep away from becoming a target.

And when acts of thuggery take place, they reverberate through the neighborhood. Islington’s new youth safety strategy, which was published in November, found that even among young people in the borough unknown to police and child services, being robbed, and knowing someone who had been stabbed, was commonplace.

The result is an atmosphere of worry and fear. “We have to stay behind [at school] until 4:20pm [when] it’s dark,” said one child, “so when I leave and have to go home, I just shit myself.”

Another said: “As soon as you step out of your front door, you just have to be vigilant; you know you can’t go to certain areas, and you don’t go out when it’s dark,” said another. “You always see young people all ballied up [i.e., wearing balaclavas]. You never know what they are going to do.”

These teenagers are rightly worried, yet they have at least been fortunate enough not to be drawn into the street gangs vortex. The more vulnerable they are — and often this involves having ADHD, autism and other mental health problems — the more likely needy children are to be sucked in, and the more likely they will be abused, brutalized or killed.

“Gangs are just another form of social extremism,” one expert told me. (Because he works with vulnerable children at risk of violence, he asked not to be named.) “These kids are lost boys, and the gangs are found-families. If you’re vulnerable, and looking to belong, you’re more likely to become exploited by these groups.”

And what does it mean to end up in those groups? You might be coerced into missing school in order to go phone snatching on e-scooters; you might be strong-armed into selling crack and heroin on a “county line” from a drug user’s council house in Colchester or Norwich for weeks on end; or you might be required to carry out acts of brutal violence on people you have never met before.

There has always been some quantity of criminality in society, but its expression and scale are in flux. Thirty years ago, in London there were a small number of large street gangs run by seasoned adult criminals. But this order has fractured, and today there are a myriad of smaller gangs, sometimes headed by kids. In Islington, the most prominent street gang are the “Cally Boyz”, who are based around the Caledonian Road, a couple of minute’s walk from where Henry died.

The Cally Boyz made the headlines in July this year when five members were jailed for stabbing to death two people, including a 15-year-old, while on a “rampage” in an Islington council estate in 2023. The gang members wrongly believed that their victims were part of a rival gang who had dared to film a music video on their turf. Mistaken identity, unfortunately, is another recurrent feature of gang violence.

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In such a climate, Henry’s death does not come out of the blue, but nor is it run-of-the-mill. Two teenagers were killed in Islington in 2024; one was killed in 2023; in 2022, one 15-year-old was killed by another 15-year-old in Highbury Fields. Compared to boroughs such as Croydon and Hackney, Islington is not a hotspot for youth killings. In 2021, 30 teenagers were killed in London, the highest since the Second World War, but only two of these killings occurred in Islington. The violence is not always teen-on-teen; in March, three teenage girls were charged with killing a 75-year-old man in Seven Sisters Road. Still, the borough is less well known for its street gangs than for the original moped robbery gangs of a decade ago, and for the aging Adams crime family. Its leader, Terry Adams, was described by the judge who jailed him for money laundering in 2007 as “one of the country’s most feared and revered organized criminals”.

Henry’s death comes at a time when the number of teenagers being killed each year on the capital’s streets is falling: that peak of 30, four years ago, fell to 12 in 2024. But behind the fluctuating death tolls, the damage is incessant. “There is harm that’s not deadly, but it can be life-destroying,” the youth expert, talking about how young people get sucked into a 24-hour existence of brutal violence and relentless crime. “These children, they are not going to have good lives. They may not die, but they’re not really living.”

By the time a teenager has been stabbed, he has probably already been badly let down in some way, be it by his family or the state. Adam was killed the day before the Government launched its new youth safety strategy, which is being framed by Labour as an attempt to right the wrongs of the previous Tory government’s regime of austerity. With youth clubs closed, goes this account, teenagers ended up on the streets; as a result, the closures were blamed by multiple government reports for fueling youth violence.

But blaming the Tories for London’s youth murder problem is just “politicking”, says the youth expert. He says Labour could have done more themselves, and that those advising London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan on the causes of youth violence “don’t know what’s happening on the ground… they are not well-informed people”.

He adds the solution does not solely lie with more youth clubs, or the use of tired enforcement tactics such as stop and search, but in changing the school system so children with the kind of problems that can lead to involvement in gangs and violence can be helped earlier. He suggests that too many children with special educational needs are ignored or discarded from schools at an early age, so their problems go unaddressed, worsen and they become more susceptible to joining gangs.

By the same token, any school-age intervention will take years to make an impact on rates of youth violence, and politically, it is far trickier, and more expensive, to a headline-friendly quick fix. There seems little even a beefed-up police force, or a more efficient justice system, could do to stop these attacks. So far, attempted interventions have had little effect on this kind of deep-rooted youth crime. For the time being, the worried teenagers of Islington have little option other than to remain fearful.

The presumption is that the kind of people who carry out hits are a bit like Eddie Redmayne’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal reboot: mysterious, smooth, deadly professionals, whose employers are criminal masterminds who know how to organize a clean liquidation. But in Britain at least, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is an exchange of real-life text messages intercepted by police as part of an investigation into a planned triple homicide in 2019. The boss of an influential Turkish organized crime group in North London is hiring a criminal broker to arrange the killing of three men. “I’ll pay 150 bro then give u like 5 bricks new year January or something”, he writes. (That means £150,000 up front, plus five kilos of cocaine or heroin on completion.)

The man taking on the contract, formerly a senior member of a local street gang, feels the need to reassure his Turkish paymaster of his credentials, despite their longstanding criminal relationship: “U know I’ve killed about 9 people and made about 4 die bro its fucked up init,” he replies. Then: “First person was in 1st year in school bro kmt bro, after I do the ones on the list I think I’m gonna go into retirement.” Kmt is urban slang for “kiss my teeth”, an expression of contempt or nonchalance.

In this case, the planned murders were prevented before any shots were fired — thanks to the police monitoring these communications as part of a surveillance operation. But in May last year, an assassination attempt linked to the same long-running feud — which is linked to at least 20 murders in two decades — did play out on the streets of North London. A gunman hired by the Tottenham Turks pulled up on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike outside a busy restaurant in Dalston and fired six shots, injuring three members of the Hackney Turks, who were sitting outside. He also accidentally shot a nine-year-old girl who was eating ice cream, leaving her with severe injuries. The bullet remains lodged in her brain.

Last month, a North London criminal named Javon Riley was jailed for life for his role as a spotter and getaway driver in the hit. But Riley refused to name the individual who paid him £40,000 to help the gunman, telling the court he feared for his life. Meanwhile, the hitman himself remains on the run.

“We’re a million miles away from [the high death count] portrayed on TV shows like Mobland and Gangs of London, but these executions do happen,” says Ian Broughton, a former Met detective who advises on court cases involving drugs and firearms. “If it can’t be solved by diplomacy, when all else has failed, murder is the last course of action.”

Still, in the real world, gangsters are actually pretty bad at murder, and organizing an execution can hit the same problems as organizing a legitimate business project: service delivery can be unreliable; outsourcing means no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong; and too often efforts are more performative than results-based. High-level gang hits on Britain’s streets are, mercifully, less frequent than you might think, but when they do happen, they are often brutal, shambolic, and orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

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We know this thanks, in part, to a fascinating study into subcontracted violence among London drug gangs recently carried out by Jack Warburton, a researcher at Oxford University who specializes in organized crime. Warburton analyzed 17 contract hit cases, gaining access to closed-case police files relating to a large and detailed surveillance operation into the activities of a North London crime network as it planned three assassinations in 2019. The intercepted phone chats, beginning with the text exchange detailed above, show how the job was offered around the London criminal underworld like a gig on the chore-outsourcing app, TaskRabbit — with one of the three killings ultimately taken on by a low-level drug user who was seemingly incapable of finding his target, let alone killing him.

The job begins with the Turkish gang boss ordering the triple hit. A big figure in London’s drug trade, the Gang Boss is now living in Turkey, where he moved to evade the attention of the police. One of the three men he wanted dead was a member of a rival Turkish crime group, whom he held responsible for the murder of his cousin. Surprisingly, however, the other two were members of his own organization. He targeted one for going to the police, and the other for acting without the approval of senior group members.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the case, however, is that despite his organization’s nationwide reputation for violence, the Gang Boss opts to subcontract out the killings — using a senior member of a local street gang as a criminal broker. The pair trust each other, because the Turkish Gang Boss has been supplying the Broker with wholesale amounts of Class A drugs to sell on London’s streets for several years. Like last year’s attempted murders at the Dalston cafe, the use of predominantly black street gangs to carry out hits has been a regular feature of ethnically Turkish and Kurdish crime groups, enriched by decades operating as the chief gatekeepers of London’s heroin supply. Police have recovered numerous pistols and machine guns that have been passed from Turkish crime groups to black street gangs — who rely on their supply of drugs to make their own money.

The text exchanges reveal the Gang Boss and the Broker identifying the targets and agreeing the fee. However, even though he boasts about his own credentials as a killer, the Broker himself opts to subcontract the hits, asking an Accomplice to help him. The Accomplice is similarly reluctant to become directly involved himself, and so he in turn tries to find someone else to do the actual killing. And as the job moves down the chain, the plot starts to get a bit haphazard.

The Accomplice picks out a Journeyman — low-level drug user and dealer with little experience in carrying out contracted violence — to kill the rival gang member. However, he has no luck finding anyone to kill the other two victims. Frustrated, the Broker casts the net wider, bringing in a trusted relative with underworld connections. It is this Relative (now the fifth person involved in the conspiracy) who recruits the other two hitmen (the sixth and seventh people) from a prominent violent gang from another city.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman sources a gun, and alongside the Accomplice, steals an Audi 4×4 and fixes it with a number plate pinched from a similar car. They hide the weapon inside the Audi before parking it near the home of one of the targets. Little do they know that all of this time, the police have been intercepting their phone messages. The police are aware that one of the targets is in imminent danger — but they also want to continue monitoring the criminal conspiracy. So they decide to steal the Audi containing the gun, making it look like a regular car theft.

The criminals fall for it. Assuming the theft to be an unfortunate coincidence, they resolve to start again. But they find it challenging to source a new gun for the right price, and the plot descends into the kind of cluelessness familiar from Guy Ritchie films.

The Broker is meanwhile telling the Accomplice that one of the other three victims is an easy target. He’s recently been released from prison so must wear an electronic tag, meaning he’ll be at a certain address after a certain time every day. “…we should be cashing in tomorrow, this really is light work,” says the Broker.

But it doesn’t turn out to be light work. The Accomplice struggles to find the target or the property he’s tagged to. So the Broker pays £10,000 to a member of a local street gang from the target’s neighborhood — now the eighth conspirator in the plot — to carry out surveillance. When the two assassins recruited from outside London finally arrive to carry out the hit, they find the property is teeming with armed men providing protection. They abort the mission agreeing that they need more guns.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman is back to surveilling his target, who lives in a remote area on the outskirts of London. He carries out four separate surveillance sessions, each lasting between 10 minutes and a couple of hours — and the police know this as his mobile phone connected to the local cell tower. Bringing your mobile with you to a hit counts as a schoolboy error, and shows just how far out of his depth the Journeyman is. And so, with the plot nearing its violent conclusion, police swoop on the gang, arresting and convicting several of the UK-based conspirators.

It’s a case worth dwelling on, because it encompasses several traits that have become common in modern gangland assassination attempts. You would think violence and murder would be an essential in-house capability for an organized crime gang. But subcontracting out murder “makes strategic sense,” notes Warburton. It distances the criminal act from the person ordering it, and allows bosses to get on with the important business of making money. Note how the Gang Boss remained safely in Turkey, where he is less likely to be found by police or by rivals seeking revenge.

The safe haven du jour for European gangsters, however, is Dubai. For years, criminals have flocked to the Emirate to take advantage of its luxurious living, lack of gang violence, and crucially, its lax rules on money laundering and extraditing criminals. In June, British cocaine baron James Harding was jailed for 32 years after plotting to pay a hitman £100,000 to put a rival “permanently out of business” while lounging by a pool in a five-star hotel in Dubai.

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Nevertheless, by operating remotely and subcontracting out hits, British gangsters have surrendered some control over the actual operations — which often come with a distinct air of amateurism. Part of this is down to Britain’s tight gun laws, which mean there are simply not many people around who are proficient in wielding a gun. When gangs are able to source firearms, their lack of expertise means they tend to “spray and pray”. In the space of 24 hours, innocent bystanders Ashley Dale, 28, and Olivia Pratt-Korbel, 9, were killed in totally separate incidents in Liverpool in 2022, with both killed by gunmen hired to murder rival gangsters.

But even hiring trained gunmen is no guarantee of success. In 2021, a serving British soldier was jailed after he was paid to kill a man in Cheshire by a regional crime boss living in Spain. The soldier turned up at the man’s home with a Glock hidden in a pizza delivery box. Despite having a photo of his target, he managed to shoot the wrong man, blasting the intended victim’s stepfather in the legs.

Then there was the case of Anis Hemissi, the killer hired to execute the Swedish-Albanian drug trafficker Flamur Beqiri in 2019. Bequiri was shot dead in front of his wife and children on the doorstep of their £1.7 million home in Battersea. It’s a story that made national news, in part because Bequiri’s sister Misse starred in The Real Housewives of Cheshire. But despite being able to carry out the killing, Hemissi’s methods had a distinct flavor of Inspector Clouseau.

“The media presented [Hemissi] as this kickboxer, this professional killer, but he was the complete opposite,” Warburton tells me. Hemissi, who had flown in from Sweden under his own name to carry out the hit, was identified as the culprit within days because his attempts at subterfuge were so useless. “When he did the surveillance he rode a distinctive women’s bike and was litter-picking wearing a latex mask and a Swedish bin-collector’s uniform, so a local resident, thinking he was crazy, asked him what he was doing, and reported it to the police.” Hemissi was jailed for life in 2022.

Still, criminals are capable of learning from their mistakes. One of the main concerns crime experts now have is their increasingly sophisticated use of technology, with tracking devices increasingly preferred to human spotters to monitor targets’ movements. In 2022, Koray Alpergin, a Turkish radio DJ, was tortured to death in a disused bar in Tottenham while his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak was forced to listen to his screams. The Tottenham Turks wanted him dead over a drugs-related feud — and the thugs they hired captured him after attaching a tracking device to his car.

Nevertheless, such killings remain extremely rare. There are no detailed statistics on how many attempted and successful hits are carried out in Britain each year, but a College of Policing study estimated that 5% of annual homicides in England and Wales are linked to organized crime groups. That would equate to 28 of 570 killings last year. More general gang-related killings, including teenagers attacking each other with knives and machetes over petty beefs, were roughly twice as frequent.

But that stands to reason. Killing is bad for business in the criminal world, as it attracts reprisals, extra heat from the police, and impacts revenue. And despite their fearsome reputation, British organized crime groups are much more money-making machines than killing machines.

The underworld is, after all, a distorted mirror of the world we live in. As in the legitimate business world, crime organizations are now run by remote and unaccountable leadership, often based offshore, hoovering up the proceeds; there is a chain of harassed middle management giving everyone plausible deniability; and then there are the undertrained, underpaid workers actually doing the jobs. On the rare occasions they succeed, it’s almost always these hapless individuals who get caught — and almost never the person who bankrolled them. As in the business world, the reputation of the people at the top must be preserved at all costs.

No, the reason pink cocaine is “one of the most significant developments in the drug market in recent years” (according to a recent Spanish government report) is rather more basic. It’s because it’s pink. A bright, lurid, Barbie Dreamhouse pink that really pops on Instagram. It also comes in pastel yellow, pale violet and sparkly blue, too, but either way, the color is the thing. Illegal drugs follow hype cycles just as reliably as consumer products. Pink cocaine is the narcotic equivalent of a pastel green matcha latte or a bright orange Aperol Spritz. Did I mention that it smells of strawberries? 

Sold in distinct zip-up baggies and snorted in small “bumps” off keys, credit cards and designer spoons — including miniature pink AK-47s — tusi is now more popular than cocaine in Colombia where it originated, and is well established in Spain, where police seizures of the drug regularly appear in the press. It’s coming to Britain too. Last December, border police uncovered a huge stash hidden in a lorry in packets branded with the image of Pink Panther. “Pink cocaine in the UK was a niche drug last year but this year it’s more than that,” says Trevor Shine, the director of TICTAC, a drug identification service which tests drugs found by law enforcement. “It’s growing fast. At this rate in a few years it will catch up with drugs such as cocaine, MDMA and ketamine.” 

Joe*, a DJ familiar with Ibiza’s party scene, told me the tusi high is similar to ketamine, but with an extra twist. “Like ketamine tusi has that floaty, dissociated rush, but it’s more intense and playful. It’s heavier than just a bump of K. There’s this edge that makes it fun, almost euphoric, rather than just spacey. The mix of intensity and surprise is probably what makes it stand out.”

Joe first snorted tuci thinking it was just a new type of pink-colored cocaine, but says since then it has become a well-hyped drug. “The bright color makes it stand out in a baggie, people post it on socials as if it’s some exotic new drug. There’s a certain novelty to saying you’ve done pink coke.”

The exotic color — plus the fact that it’s sold for prices similar to cocaine, and often much more — have given it a sheen of undeserved exclusivity. It has also increased its social media clout through another form of modern viral marketing: celebrity association, albeit in a uniquely grim form. Reports following the death of the One Direction singer Liam Payne in Buenos Aires wrongly asserted that he had the drug in his system at the time of his death. Pink cocaine was also namechecked in the Sean “Puffy” Combs sex trafficking trial in the US, with one former employee alleging that “all employees, from the butler to the chef to the housekeepers”, were required to keep a supply of drugs on their person at all times, including cocaine, marijuana gummies and “Tuci”. Truly, it is a drug for our times.

Tusi first started appearing in Colombia in the early 2010s, made and sold by a new generation of young narcos in Bogota and Medellin who — like many young drug users — saw cocaine as old hat. The bright color helped it to stand out among the array of white powders being sold on the party scene, much like the blue crystal meth concocted by Walter White in Breaking Bad. Initially, the name tusi really did refer to its 2CB content but over time, the narcos swapped out 2CB for less mind-bending, more readily available drugs such as the dissociative ketamine, the more sensual MDMA, and caffeine, boosting its popularity, particularly within the reggaeton music scene, among tourists and young party people. 

Now, tusi is made by a mixture of amateur DIY cooks and well-trained chemists, often employed by crime groups. Every respectable young narco in Colombia sells their own brand of tusi with a distinctive image and color. One product sold in Medellin, “Homero”, is marketed with images of Homer Simpson. Tests of samples from one of Colombia’s largest dance music festivals last year found tusi was a bit of a mish-mash of highs. It mainly contained ketamine, MDMA or MDA (a similar drug to MDMA), and caffeine, although methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were also common. The tests also found only half of tusi samples were actually colored pink, with purple being the most popular alternative color. 

Tusi has now spread through South America and into Europe, the US and Australia. According to unpublished data from TICTAC, UK police seized twice the number of samples of pink cocaine during the first six months of 2025 than during the whole of 2024. The first organised criminal convicted of selling pink cocaine in the UK was also jailed last December. His main market was Essex, a consumer culture that seems almost ready-made for pink cocaine. 

Still, it is Spain, with its hedonistic club scene and Colombian gang links, that has become Europe’s tusi heartland. It’s also where most British drug users are likely to first encounter the drug. “Tusi’s just started to pick up over the last year in the UK, but it’s big all over Ibiza,” Danny, a British drug dealer who operates in Spain, tells me. The pink powder is openly sold, alongside cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and weed, on Ibiza’s main strip in San Antonio, as well as on social media apps like Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram — usually indicated by a pink colored emoji such as a heart or a purse.

In Ibiza, ambulance services now report they are at risk of collapse due to drug-related callouts from clubbers. In July a woman traveling from Barcelona was arrested at Ibiza’s main airport after being caught with a suitcase stuffed with 1,000 grams of tusi. During a crackdown last year, Spanish police arrested a gang of Italian-led criminals based on Ibiza linked to a €25 million stash of party drugs, including 21 kilograms of tusi, stored in 21,000 gram-sized bags. 

But tusi is not just limited to Ibiza. Claudio Vidal, national director at Energy Control, a Spanish drug-harm reduction NGO, said that the drug is now “integrated into the drug repertoires” of young people going to nightclubs, raves and music festivals across many parts of the country, including big cities such as Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia. Vidal said around one in five young adult drug users asked by Energy Control said they had used the drug over the last year. Domestic production appears to have increased in Spain, with drug gangs often importing ketamine from India and MDMA from the Netherlands. In December, Irish mobster John Gilligan was arrested after police seized an alleged tusi lab and 600 kilograms of drugs at his home near Alicante. 

In contrast with Colombian tusi, Spanish tusi seems relatively consistent in its makeup. Tests of 470 samples purchased in Spain between 2020 and 2024 found ketamine and MDMA present in over 90% of samples. Increasingly, ketamine and MDMA have been the only drugs found in tusi, with over half of samples in 2024 including just the two drugs. The third most common drug was caffeine, found in just under half of the samples. On average, most samples had around twice the amount of ketamine than MDMA, and around twice the amount of MDMA than caffeine. Other drugs were only very occasionally present. Cocaine, for example, was found in just 2% of the samples, and unlike in Colombia, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines were extremely rare. Almost all the samples were pink, although very rarely some were colored blue or yellow. These results chime with the content of samples of UK-bought tusi handed into the Welsh-based drug tasting service Wedinos in the last year. 

Tusi is expensive and buyers appear to be prepared to pay a lot of money for the fact it’s pre-mixed and pink. In Spain, tusi usually costs around the same as a gram of cocaine (€40-€100, depending on where you are). But this is roughly double the €30 a gram for ketamine and MDMA, tusi’s main components. Partly because of this, the rising popularity of tusi has left seasoned drug experts baffled. 

“Most people who regularly use party drugs would not buy this product,” says Al Bryant, head of content at UK charity Cranstoun. “A drug mixed like this is a blag, an excuse to put the price up, and could increase risks.” 

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Even though tusi is a more consistent product than its reputation presumes (it does not, as many “explainers” say, contain fentanyl), the mix of ketamine and MDMA does present a risk for users, says Ram. “Ingesting both drugs together will impact your body in different ways. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic and sedative, while MDMA is a stimulant with euphoric and mild hallucinogenic effects. Risks increase when you don’t know the mix of drugs taken, the purity, with effects often being exacerbated with consumption of alcohol. Users have also reported an altered perception of time, which can lead to dosing more regularly than intended. It is also a bag of unknown combinations of unknown quantities of different drugs that could be a huge risk to one’s health and wellbeing.” 

Vidal says in Spain the main negative consequences associated with tusi have been related to ketamine. “Some people, after repeated doses, enter a sedated state, or begin to experience the psychedelic effects of ketamine when they don’t want to or are not prepared for it. In this context, anxiety or panic attacks are the most common reason for emergency room visits related to tusi use.” According to Barcelona’s main hospital, the number of drug related emergency cases linked to tusi quadrupled between 2023 and 2024, although the drug still accounts for a small proportion of drug casualties. Vidal says that the long-term effects of ketamine are dependence and bladder damage. Not that this seems to be stopping its inexorable rise. It’s bright, it’s Instagram-friendly, it’s pre-mixed and it’s created by combining cheap man-made chemicals imported from around the world. 

“Everyone just wants everything immediately,” one former psychonaut told me. “Maybe the phone-scrolling generation might have a dopaminergic association with immediate highs without care for content or quality. I guess drugs roll with the times.” 

*Names have been changed

In the early hours of 15 August 2007, six young Italian men got into their cars after celebrating an 18th birthday at Da Bruno, a pizza restaurant in the city of Duisburg in western Germany. 

Out of the dark, masked gunmen sprayed their vehicles with 70 bullets, then shot each victim in the head, including the youngest, Fracensco Giorgi, aged 16. In the pocket of the dead birthday boy, Tommaso Venturi, police found a half-burnt image of Saint Michael.

Italian investigators brought in by the German authorities knew what the scorched picture indicated. An image of the saint is partially burnt during initiation rituals into the ‘Ndrangheta, a powerful, 10,000 strong, mafia network founded in the southwest Italian region of Calabria 160 years ago. During this gangster baptism, which marks a rebirth and a lifelong pledge of loyalty, initiates are told:  

“Before the family, parents, sisters, brothers, comes the interest and honor of the society.
 From now on, the society will be your family.” 

The shooting, it transpired, was the result of a simmering 16-year feud between two powerful clans from San Luca, a hilltop commune in Calabria and birthplace of the ‘Ndrangheta. What perplexed the public and the authorities was why this ultra-violent gangland scene had played out, of all places, in Germany. 

Amid the public outrage and a flurry of police anti-mafia activity, what the authorities failed to realize was the extent to which the ‘Ndrangheta had been able to embed itself in the country. Germany wasn’t just a place of refuge for mafia misfits — it was a hub of activity, and Duisburg was a bloody red flag. 

Today, almost two decades after the Duisburg shooting, the ‘Ndrangheta has grown to become one of the largest criminal conglomerates on the planet, with a presence in more than 80 countries across Europe, North America, West Africa and Australia. Described by Interpol as “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” the ‘Ndrangheta are involved in a range of criminal activities, including drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion and corruption. But it is Germany which hosts the world’s largest outpost of the Calabrian mob, after their homeland in Italy. 

But it’s the way the mafia has done this that is such a pisstake. The ‘Ndrangheta’s expansion into Germany has largely come on the back of a large portion of parmesan cheese and charm. A network of mafia-run Italian restaurants, from pizzerias and trattorias to gelato shops and cafés, has become the backbone not just for labor rackets and extortion, but in helping to flood Europe with cocaine, even as mobsters use the profits to infiltrate society and establish power in the business world. 

How this has been allowed to happen in one of the world’s most stable and efficient democracies is the subject of a book by Zora Hauser, a criminologist specializing in the mafia from the University of Cambridge. Hauser says this mafia creep has been “made easy” by the German authorities, whose failure to root out the Calabrian mafia in their midst has created a ticking time bomb for law, order, and even democracy, in Germany. 

But why did the authorities fail so blatantly to understand what was happening? Why has the presence of the mafia in the country been overlooked and downplayed for such a long time? These are questions worth asking, because Germany is not alone in facing the rising threat of gangland infiltration. Across Europe’s biggest democracies, after all, organized crime groups are slowly gathering power. 

***

When the first Italian guest workers started arriving in Germany in the Fifties, like many immigrants they were initially distrusted. By the Seventies and Eighties, though, this animosity had dwindled, with an influx of Turks a new diversion. Meanwhile, Germans discovered Italy as a holiday destination with tasty food and good weather, and the number of Italian restaurants and gelato stores in Germany boomed. The Italians went, says Hauser, “from being ‘knifers’ and ‘mafiosi’ to representing good and well-integrated foreigners”.

But as more Italians moved to join family and seek careers in Germany, along came members of the Italian mafia, most notably the Calabrians, who built up businesses and became involved in street drug dealing, theft and extortion. The ‘Ndrangheta’s franchise-like structure — whereby clans set up outposts abroad after gaining approval from a central committee of senior mafiosi in Calabria — made it easy for its mafiosi to venture out of their homeland. Crucially, by the Nineties, compared with the more notorious Cosa Nostra from Sicily and the Camorra from Naples, the Calabrian mafia was far better placed to quickly and efficiently expand their criminal networks abroad. At this time, both in Sicily and the US, the Cosa Nostra was busy fighting an all-out war with the Italian state and the FBI, from which it would not recover; the Camorra was too chaotic and feud-prone to expand so prolifically.   

As luck would have it, the ‘Ndrangheta’s expansion abroad dovetailed with the rise of the international cocaine trade. 

In 2017, after the end of Colombia’s civil war, South American cocaine traffickers decided they needed a fresh market for their product. Mexican cartels had monopolized and saturated the US market, so they turned their full attention to pumping the drug into Europe, where organized crime groups were only too pleased to help out. In a typically bold move, one of the first things the ‘Ndrangheta did to boost imports of the drug from South America was to help build a new port, at Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Plus, their growing presence in countries in northern Europe, near the continent’s busiest shipping ports in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, left them perfectly placed to take advantage when the steady stream of cocaine coming across the Atlantic turned into a deluge. 

Since then, Europe has overtaken the US as the world’s largest cocaine market, boosting the coffers — and the power — of crime networks including the ‘Ndrangheta, Albanians, Serbs, Moroccan-Dutch, and Irish. Milking the profits from smuggling a drug that costs $2,000 a kilo in Colombia and at least $40,000 a kilo as soon as it lands in Europe, these gangs deal in multiple tons of the stuff. Annual seizures of the drug at Europe’s borders grew from 60 tons in 2014 to 320 tons in 2022. The profits are mind-boggling. 

Europe’s cocaine blizzard has created a rise in addiction, gangland violence and corruption. In Germany, where estimates put the number of ‘Ndrangheta clan members at between 1,000 and 3,000, the country’s excellent strategic position has enabled the mafia to turn it into a logistical drug smuggling hub, using the profits to infiltrate the country by stealth, infecting it from the inside out. 

***

Diners at the Leonardo Da Vinci restaurant in Wesseling, a small city outside Cologne, could never have known, but behind its unassuming facade of red awnings, pot plants and and terrace dining, lurked a money laundering and cocaine smuggling hub run by the ‘Ndrangheta. As customers ate their carbonaras, cocaine-loaded cars were being driven into Da Vinci’s car park, stored upstairs before an onward travel to Milan. 

These mob-run Italian restaurants, gelato stores and cafés have always been a crucial part of the ‘Ndrangheta’s strategy in Europe. And it is in Germany where this tactic looms largest. This is not the odd restaurant. In some parts of Germany, it’s tricky to buy a pizza without accidentally helping to fund the next shipment of cocaine. A clan based in Erfurt, a city in the central state of Thuringia, has established a near-monopoly of the city’s Italian eateries. Police linked the mafia there to 23 Italian restaurants, cafés, and gelato stores — in a city the size of Luton. 

Behind the pizza ovens and spaghetti bolognese in scores of eateries in Germany, the charm of Italian hospitality is being cynically used by the mafia as a cover to launder money, smuggle cocaine, engage in racketeering and get close to those in power. 

“It’s hard to believe the mafia infiltrates democratic life through the corner pizzeria — but that’s exactly the point: hiding in plain sight,” Hauser tells UnHerd. “The goal is full integration. Winning over the community, reaching into politics.”  

Often, it’s presumed that businesses run by criminal gangs are shells with few customers. But in Germany, they can be the most popular joints in town. A restaurant in the central state of Hesse, whose owner had been involved in drug trafficking, extortion and murder, was the center of public life. It hosted evenings run by the local newspaper, small concerts and events for the elderly. Luigi, the long-standing clan boss behind the restaurant, applied jointly with the local mayor for EU subsidies to restore an old building in the town center. 

The underworld seamlessly mixes with the upperworld. “While the [criminal] business still relies on intimidation, coercion, or, more generally, the constant flow of illicit gains,” says Hauser, “to the outside, it presents a friendly façade, exemplified by good food for honest prices, a warm welcome, and a taste of the Italian ‘dolce vita’ that so fascinates German society.” 

Behind the smiles, though, comes the threat. Hauser spoke to a German businessman who ditched plans to open an ice cream shop in his local town after a ‘Ndrangheta messenger told him there was no space for two gelato stores in the neighborhood, adding that they knew where his children went to school.  

When Hauser traveled to neighborhoods infiltrated by the mafia, and talked to locals about the gangsters arrested in their midst, many thought that she and the police must be mistaken. The mafia had gained so much trust that neighbors and customers refused to believe what they read in the news. Why? Because they had a romantic, nostalgic, movie-inspired view of the mafia. A neighbor of one clan boss, who ran a local pizzeria and was arrested by police special forces, told Hauser that if he really had anything to do with the mafia, then why had the police not intervened earlier? 

Perhaps because the local authorities had also been sucked in.  

‘Ndrangheta mobsters in Germany have been quick to befriend people in positions of power. Politicians and civil servants are deliberately wooed to increase gangster’s social capital, their influence and to help — wittingly or not — shield them from the law. Right from the start, people in positions of authority have had their heads turned by some of these relationships. When police in the late Nineties intercepted the phone of a ‘Ndrangheta member, who owned a restaurant in Stuttgart, they were surprised to find that he was in direct contact with a man he called “my minister”. This turned out to be Günther Oettinger, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union in Baden-Württemberg. Instead of investigating further, the authorities warned Oettinger about the phone surveillance. A public inquiry into the scandal found the politician had not committed any crime, but concluded he might have been “unwillingly and unknowingly used by organized criminals” to further their business. 

A former mayor of Erfurt told Hauser that though he had heard that Luca, a local restaurant owner, had links with the Duisburg massacre and was a member of the mafia, they became friends. He held his re-election party in Luca’s restaurant. “We decided to do Bella Italia,” he told Hauser. “Italian music, federal ministers came and spoke, I was there. We did this as our election rally celebration, and they could profit as well, there were so many people, they were queuing!” 

When a special commando unit entered one of the Erfurt clan’s restaurants as part of a murder-related investigation, the police bumped into their direct superior, the State Minister for Home Affairs, having a meeting over pizza with the Governor of Thuringia. The search was halted. An investigation by journalists found there was no mention of the incident in official records. 

In another restaurant round the corner, phone surveillance caught a district judge telling a mafioso restaurant owner suspected of drug trafficking that his restaurant was under surveillance — before giving him the name of a good lawyer. “This is what differentiates mafias from other criminal networks and explains their unique resilience over centuries,” Hauser tells UnHerd. “It is hard to overstate the importance of the link between the mafia and people in power, because it ultimately guarantees them protection.”

***

It’s a mistake to measure the threat of gangsterism just by the amount of blood spilled. While the Calabrian mafia used to operate with a gun behind its back, after the heat from Duisburg the clan in Germany decided to keep their pistols in their pockets. 

When in 2013 a ‘Ndrangheta boss heard that two of his men had got into an argument and pulled out their guns in Melsungen, a spa town in central Germany, he was furious. A police phone intercept recorded his reaction: ‘What is this circus? Getting out a weapon on the street?!.. I am telling you now and I will not tell you again! Melsungen must be like a church!’

A deliberate policy to put profits before murder, to make it easier to blend in with the legitimate world, was adopted. Avoiding the kind of brazen violence that has necessitated state crackdowns on organized crime networks across Europe, has been crucial to the Calabrians’ expansion abroad and their success in the cocaine trade.

Nicola Gratteri, a mafia prosecutor,  said in 2023 that the ‘Ndrangheta in Germany is now “more interested in cash than blood… the mafia is here to buy cocaine and reinvest the money to buy hotels, restaurants, and pizzerias.” 

This is far from saying Europe’s major cocaine traffickers have become impotent. Quite the contrary. According to Europol’s latest organized crime threat assessment, published in May this year, drug trafficking “has a high potential to destabilize EU society, given its association with… corruption, and infiltration in the legal economy.”  The report found that 80% of organized crime networks in Europe also ran companies in the legal economy. 

Slowly, then, organized crime is infecting Germany’s institutions and economy. Police officers and officials are increasingly being investigated for corruption and having links to organized crime. In an ongoing trial which started in May this year, a court has heard how the chief public prosecutor involved in one of Europe’s biggest ever cocaine seizures at Hamburg’s port is alleged to have been on the payroll of the same network of traffickers he was supposed to be investigating. 

***

Why have the German authorities been so blindsided by the Italian mafia — who, after all, have something of a reputation? 

For a long time, Germany’s authorities seemed to consider gangsterism to be something that affects poorer, less stable nations around the world, like Albania or Colombia. The ‘Ndrangheta was allowed to operate “virtually undisturbed,” says Hauser, owing to a mix of incompetence and complacency. She suggests this lack of know-how has resulted in weak organized crime laws; an anti-money laundering framework so bad it has failed to reach EU standards; and a perversely high bar for prosecutors to prove a suspect is a member of a criminal organization. 

“The rise of the ‘Ndrangheta is symptomatic of how vulnerable Germany is to organized crime more generally,” Hauser explains. “Calabrian mafiosi are by no means the only crime groups active in Germany, nor is this presence a new phenomenon. The notable aspect is how long it is taking for Germany to wake up to reality.”

Law enforcement across Europe has been stepping up operations against the ‘Ndrangheta. In 2023, for instance, Operation Eureka revealed how clans in Germany teamed up with Albanian and Latin America crime groups to smuggle 25 tonnes of cocaine in under three years. But German authorities themselves have so far failed to convict any ‘Ndrangheta members in Thuringia, a state in which the ‘Ndrangheta has thrived. 

In fact, they have been suspiciously bad at this. 

During Operation FIDO in the 2000s, the German federal police successfully planted an undercover detective within the Erfurt mafia organization to target eight key clan members. But in 2002 the investigation was suddenly halted without arrests or explanation — a decision that is now the subject of an inquiry by the state parliament. 

Then, in 2019, at a secret meeting in Rome, Italian mafia investigators gave Thuringian state police a list of 70 suspected members and associates of the Erfurt organization, including a list of restaurants and companies they were linked to. Yet bizarrely, no further action was taken. “German authorities… have never acted upon the evidence that they have collected over the years, to the point that a parliamentary inquiry is now investigating a possible case of negligence,” writes Hauser.

This nefarious mix of collusion and negligence fuels mafias the world over. If the money is flowing and the authorities are doing nothing, it’s in no one’s interest to kick up a fuss. And the more mafias integrate, the less suspicious they appear. 

***

Organized crime conglomerates such as the ‘Ndrangheta loom large over the future. At a time when the drug trade continues unabated, and nations are becoming less collaborative and institutions are hemorrhaging trust, crime groups are stepping in to further expand their networks and use the cover of legitimacy to gain more power. How powerful they actually are is a mystery, because the less you look the less you find.

When police from Europe, the US and Australia accessed hundreds of thousands of messages sent between 2019 and 2022 – sent on encrypted mobile phone systems used by gangsters to arrange everything from cocaine deals to executions – what surprised them most was how much they had underestimated the capabilities of organized crime. 

Amid a sea of mundane gangster chat, a treasure trove of intelligence revealed that the scale of the cocaine business, from the UK and the Netherlands to Switzerland and Sweden, was far bigger than they had estimated. But, crucially, the hacks revealed how international crime networks were far more interconnected and collaborative than law enforcement officials had ever imagined. In Europe’s biggest democracies, in countries seen as being “too civilised” for organized crime to become a big threat, gangs are laundering billions in cash, corrupting senior officials, becoming major youth employers, and are shooting witnesses during trials. 

In Spain, the country’s chief economic crimes investigator was arrested after he was linked to a secret stash of €20 million and a gang that smuggled 13 tons of cocaine into the country. In Antwerp, there is so much cocaine being seized the authorities cannot incinerate it fast enough, so it’s being stolen back by the traffickers. Across the border in the Netherlands, which some of its police have called a “narco-state”, the impact of organized crime is being highlighted by frequent incidents of violence, including the execution of a journalist and a lawyer during a gang trial.

In France, a report last year by senators warned the country was becoming “submerged” by drug trafficking and the corollary of exacerbated violence. In Switzerland, drug money is having a growing influence on the legitimate economy, from money laundering to protecting mafias such as the ‘Ndrangheta. In Sweden, where wars over cocaine profits have sparked record gun murders and bombings, crime networks have resorted to recruiting and radicalizing hundreds of teenagers to carry out a spate of gangland killings.

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Closer to home, meanwhile, the UK has become a continental hub for Europe’s cocaine industry and a target for investment by the ‘Ndrangheta and other crime groups. Cocaine money has empowered a new generation of British gangsters, enabling them to disguise themselves as entrepreneurs. Amid this blizzard of profit, every hour inner-city children are being recruited to swap school lessons for a career selling crack and heroin in trap houses in rural and seaside towns and cities across the country. Meanwhile, an endless series of Albanian gang-run cannabis farms staffed by slave labor in suburban homes and abandoned churches, police stations and banks pump out cheap cannabis so the profits can be used to import cocaine.    

Like several other organized crime networks, the Calabrians are on the up, according to those charged with fighting them. “Ndrangheta operations are now extensive across Europe,” Samuel Heath, communications director at Interpol, tells UnHerd. “Over the past few years, we have seen a significant increase in the scope and reach of ‘Ndrangheta: they’re operating in more than 40 countries and continuing to grow.”

If you want to see what the future of gangsterism looks like in a Europe which chooses to face the other way, look at Italy. There, even though mafia-related homicide is very low, the mafia is reaping the rewards of decades of entrenchment, and its grip on society is tightening. Every month, a city council is disbanded, which is the state’s measure of last-resort when there is evidence that the mafia has such a high level of influence over institutions that the whole municipality is deemed to be under its control. Between 1991 and 2020 there have been 351 such dissolutions in Italy, together affecting more than five million people. Calabria saw the most of any region in Italy, with 123 dissolutions. This is control without the need for gunfire or garrotting.

“Virtually no big infrastructure project, political campaign, natural emergency, from earthquakes to Covid subsidies, international event, sporting occasion, including the whole management of the San Siro football stadium in Milan, moves forward in Italy without the mafia trying to get a cut,” says Hauser. ”If no action is taken, this is where we end up.” 

How the Italian mafia, fueled by the cocaine trade, has used pizza restaurants as a way to expand its influence in one of the world’s most robust democracies is just part of a wider story about the relentless spread of worldwide organized crime. It’s also a warning. 

The intermittent noise of gangsterism — a bloody street execution or an innocent caught in crossfire — naturally hits the headlines. Yet all the while, its more clandestine activities continue to rot societies from the inside, degrading the public’s right to hold power to account. 

In hard times, their illegal wealth acts as a vortex of temptation to recruit the young to work on the criminal shopfloor, and to flip business owners, police and politicians. Furthermore, falling trust in mainstream political parties and institutions, complacency and rising extremism has opened the back door to criminal groups who want to get closer to power. Gangsters are useful to corrupt insiders because they can carry out deniable crimes at arms length on behalf of politicians or businesses. In return, they get impunity and favors. Together, the billions of dollars generated by organized crime and corruption each year acts as a vampiric-like leech on societies, widening inequality, making it harder for democracies to help citizens and make life better. Looking the other way is not an option.    

Stories about drugs have always been used to sell papers. They’re usually the perfect mix of the forbidden, the immoral and the shocking. These days they’re clickbait. The British media has re-published the same two stories — “what to do if you suspect your neighbours are smoking weed” and “how cocaine can make your skin rot” — thousands of times since 2017, because they never fail to get traction. But the tales of “woke coke” provide an extra twist: they serve as culture war missiles aimed at the metropolitan liberal elite.

The problem with these stories, like many others lobbed around in the war on drugs, is that they are mainly bullshit. Woke coke doesn’t really exist. It’s largely a media invention based on the fact that occasionally a dealer might try and claim their powder is whiter than white, to give them an edge in a competitive market. But you’ve got to be fairly gullible to believe that Barry from Bermondsey or Snow_Flake on Telegram have really been to Bolivia to ensure their wares are 100% ethical.

The only tangible evidence, to date, offered by the media of fair trade coke being sold outside of South America has been an advert on the dark web posted in 2013. I’ve been investigating the drug trade for 20 years, and I’ve only heard of one case, now five years old, where a UK dealer had convincing proof his powder was ethically sourced from a small group of cartel-free Peruvian farmers. Bona fide ethical supply chains like this are extremely rare, especially in Europe: virtually every grain of the 117 million grams of cocaine consumed in Britain each year will be the usual rain forest-damaging, cartel-linked product. That’s just the nature of the industry.

“Organised crime groups invest direct with Latin American sources and control domestic wholesale,” says Tony Saggers, the former head of drugs at the National Crime Agency. “Why would they be interested in ‘woke coke’ concepts when they’re already shifting hundreds of kilograms to a market disinterested in the consequences?”

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Most of the ‘evidence’ regarding woke coke, then, comes from unsubstantiated claims made by dealers, and parroted by users to journalists. But the reality is, newspapers aren’t that bothered about whether ethical coke actually exists. The real point of these stories is to have a go at hypocritical liberals who buy organic shoes but are happy to snort a drug that — whether or not it’s fair trade — stems from an illegal, inherently exploitative industry.

These liberals also stand accused, by the media, of boosting the obscene profits of the drug lords, because they are paying through the nose: the ‘ethical’ stuff, at around £200 a gram, is up to four times more expensive than your average gram. Of course, by this logic, it’s okay for people who don’t profess to care about ethics to buy as much coke as they want — because, in the culture war, the worst of all crimes is hypocrisy.

“The notion of woke coke exists for one reason: to label certain users as immoral,” says Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That’s Changing How the World Gets High. “Is it OK for rich, right wing drug users to buy coke drenched in the bloodshed caused by prohibition?” Not really. So why are the liberals who purchase what’s marketed as “woke coke” getting all the flack?

The woke coke story is not a one-off. It’s a more recent companion to the “woke coke killers” narrative, which informs us that “middle-class drug users are behind London’s murder epidemic — but don’t seem to care”. Liberals who pride themselves on being ethical, the story goes, are getting high on cocaine while the young black boys who deliver grams to their door are knifed on the streets. Tory politicians have been issuing soundbites criticising these naive metro liberals for a few years now: in 2018, for instance, Justice Secretary David Gauke echoed other senior politicians, police chiefs and the Mayor of London when he said that middle-class people who used cocaine “should feel a degree of guilt and responsibility” over street stabbings and murders in the capital”.

But again, the facts just do not back the spiel. Murders by and of vulnerable young black teenagers in London are rarely about the drug trade. If they are involved in it, these kids will not be selling powder cocaine pulled out of their bums to the middle classes; they are far more likely to sell crack and heroin on highly exploitative urban to rural ‘county lines’ drug networks.

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But then, county lines is also the fault of middle-class cocaine users — according to received wisdom repeated ad nauseam by politicians, crime chiefs and journalists over the last few years. If everything you know about the drugs industry comes from HBO’s The Wire, then it sounds about right that middle-class drug users are, via a domino effect down the drug chain, responsible for the deaths of impoverished teenage drug runners. But it’s completely inaccurate. County lines customers are addicted, semi-homeless crack and heroin users, not dinner party snorters. In fact, the whole idea that cocaine is a drug of the privileged set is about 30 years out of date.

There’s a precedent for vilifying progressive, privileged drug users. In the Sixties and Seventies, the growing popularity of drugs such as cannabis and LSD within the counterculture movement was viewed with horror by the authorities and the media. Musicians, hippies, artists and Left-wingers were monitored like hawks by the drug squads. Harsh sentences and high-profile busts of people such as John Lennon were used as warnings that Britain, the land of the pissed, would not tolerate this outlandish, anti-social foreign drug culture.

Now, the media and authorities have the Left-wing, metropolitan elite in their sights again. As Sajid Javid said two years ago as home secretary when he was talking about middle class drug users: “They may never set foot in a deprived area. They may never see an act of serious violence, but their illicit habits are adding fuel to the fire that is engulfing our communities.” Since Brexit, referencing woke coke users has become another way for the Right to emphasise how un-British the urban liberal Left are — how completely out of touch with the real world, and with the lives of the working classes (and another way to conceal the fact that they’re no better.) “Woke coke” is just a salvo in the culture war, a source of endless media content and and cheap tricks for politicians.

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Using drugs does, inevitably under prohibition, fuel organised crime and murder. And recreational drug users with well-paid jobs have more power to exercise choice over what they buy — illegal or not. So they’re fair targets for the police and government, who are well aware they cannot stop drug supply, and therefore have to try and reduce demand. The best way to do this is to dissuade people from taking drugs.

Culture war point-scoring aside, the Tories are now formalising the strategy of guilt-tripping Britain’s army of 870,000 cocaine users into ditching the drug. Dame Carol Black’s independent review into Britain’s drug problem, published last week, confirmed that the Government is preparing a publicity campaign aiming to discourage use of cocaine. It’s not going to be easy. A series of anti-cocaine TV and magazine adverts made by the Home Office featuring Pablo the Drug Mule Dog in 2005, the joint Colombia-UK “Shared Responsibility” campaign in 2008 and the National Crime Agency’s Every Line Counts campaign in 2015 have all failed to dent the meteoric rise of cocaine use, especially among young people, in the UK.

A study by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University published in May looked into why this could be. It found that even when cocaine users are told about the damage the drug trade causes, they tended to deflect responsibility. They might claim, for instance, that users only play a small part in the harm caused by the cocaine trade, compared to criminals, police and politicians. And the lead author, Professor Harry Sumnall, points out that, in general, “we defend our behaviour to ourselves and others by establishing our moral credentials or building up moral credits”. He says: “Cocaine is not unique in this regard, it’s factored into consumer culture. So it’s OK, for example, to buy a smart phone made with exploitatively-mined rare earth metals, because we made that charitable donation to dig wells in drought areas; it’s fine to take that polluting but convenient domestic flight because we shared that petition on Facebook about climate change; it’s fine to buy a gram or two on that special occasion because everyone knows of our volunteering work.”

“Our findings suggested,” Sumnall concludes, “that media campaigns that focus on personal responsibility of use are unlikely to have the anticipated effects.” Stories about the hypocrisy of “woke coke”, though clickbait gold, won’t do any good.

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In fact, they might actively do harm. In deceitfully linking the use of powder cocaine to the epidemic of teenage homicides and the county lines drug trade, these stories are just adding to a pile of disinformation. And this can lead not just to confusion, but to dark places. In countries where the drug war narrative has gone haywire, anti-drugs rhetoric has been used as a proxy weapon against the people. In China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran and the Philippines, where the threat of drugs is exaggerated by the authorities, people who use and sell them are painted as anti-social subhumans, tortured and executed. In the US, the war on drugs started as a moral crusade, but ended up becoming an excuse to arrest, jail and kill black people.

These examples are extreme. But there’s a shadow of this rhetoric in the UK, where the constant flurry of “woke coke” stories trickled into the last London mayoral campaign. Conservative candidate Shaun Bailey used the fake narrative of recreational drug users killing young black men to try to win votes. He promised that, Big Brother style, every employee in the capital would, in order to stem gang violence, be regularly tested for drugs, including cannabis.

With every over-egged, “too good to check” story, the reality of Britain’s drug problem is ever more obscured. There are very reasonable concerns about the ethical nature of getting high. But as we continue to linger in a prohibition world, it’s best to cut the spin. You never know where it may take you.

Around 25 minutes later, during which time a neighbour in pyjamas had trundled her bins out for collection and another had unlocked his bicycle and cycled off, the boys were back. They looked agitated. One of them hid the machete under a car and they walked off. Later, I found out a boy had been seriously wounded half a mile away and taken to hospital. Luckily it had not been fatal.

Some are not so lucky. This year has seen a flurry of street killings of teenagers — one every fortnight in London alone — most often by other teenagers.

Three days into 2021, Olly Stephens was  stabbed in a Reading park. He was 13 years old, as were the girl and one of the boys charged with his murder. The other boy was 14. A few weeks later, Keon Lincoln was stabbed to death in Birmingham, at the age of 15. Two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder. On February 18, Drekwon Patterson, 16, was chased and stabbed to death by a gang of youths in Wembley. On April 23, Fares Maatou, 14, was fatally stabbed in the head with a machete while in his school uniform. He was outside a pizza restaurant in East London, at 4pm. Again, two boys, aged 14 and 15, have been charged with his murder.

The list of children killing children gets longer by the day. Just last week, two teenagers were arrested after a 16-year-old was stabbed to death outside a school in Luton. On Thursday a 17-year-old was killed in Streatham, south London and on Friday, a 15-year old was stabbed to death during the school run in Hayes, west London. A 15-year-old has been charged with his murder.

Yet amid all this bloodshed, little is being done. Since street homicides involving young people started escalating in 2018 — most notably among black, working-class Londoners — politicians and media-minded crime chiefs have given us the usual spiel: it’s drug turf wars, middle-class cocaine snorters, rap music… But while these explanations may sound good, they are wafer-thin on evidence.

The Home Office now has a Serious Violence Strategy, London’s Mayor has a Violent Crime Task Force, and police in many cities have stepped up stop-and-search for weapons. But, just like the last time there was a panic and a clampdown (a decade ago), the deaths keep on coming.  This time, though, the people involved in the killings are getting younger.

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Amid this blood-soaked landscape, youth worker and writer Ciaran Thapar’s new book, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City, stands out. Thapar is at the front line of this most recent rise in street killings, supporting young people at risk of joining gangs in Brixton, south London. He is immersed in his neighbourhood, where he builds trust and friendships over time, and his book is partly the product of this. Cut Short follows three teenagers and a community centre manager he knows and looks at the knife crime phenomenon from street level, rather than top down.

For the boys he meets and works with, the threat of serious violence looms large from the moment they walk out their front door. A wrong look, a wrong answer, and in a split second they’ll be in a life or death situation. Jhemar, whose older brother is stabbed to death during the course of the book, compares picking up a knife before going out to putting on a pair of shoes. Most kids do not carry knives with the intent to kill; they carry them with the intent to save their own lives.

Territorial feuding is partly to blame for the violence. When one of the boys, Carl, is shot at, it’s because he was “standing in the wrong street”. According to Thapar, the “hyperlocal and ever-shifting” feuds are turbocharged by social media. Shaming, beefs, abuse, rivalry — even the Zombie knives and machetes — are glorified 24/7 on Snapchat and IG. But in London in particular, these territorial wars are rarely about defending drug turf, as it was a generation ago. A former gang member tells Thapar: “It’s less about money now and it’s more about emotions. It’s more mindless now.”

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Nevertheless, a The Wire-style drug turf war narrative is pushed by everyone: from London mayor Sadiq Khan and Met Police chief Cressida Dick to successive Home Secretaries and the otherwise clued-up Labour MP David Lammy. It’s super convenient, because it allows them to deflect responsibility away from the real reasons teenagers are killing each other and onto people they say are fuelling the drug trade, in particular “middle-class cocaine snorters”.

Yet it is duplicitous to make this link. The teenagers being killed in London are far removed from the powder cocaine trade. Apart from cannabis, the drugs they are most likely to end up selling, sometimes out of London on “county lines”, are crack cocaine and heroin, mainly to semi-homeless, addicted drug users, not the middle classes. Even if everyone did stop snorting coke, teenagers locked out of mainstream jobs would still be recruited to sell crack, a far more lucrative version of the drug.

Besides, when you look at individual teenage homicide cases, it’s clear that the vast majority are not killing each other over business. It’s about insults, bullying, resentments and arguments. Once these would have ended with a black eye — now they end in the morgue.

In 2018, I interviewed Jason (not his real name), who had been relocated to a secret address by Operation Trident (the Met Police unit set up to tackle gang violence involving black offenders), after he was run clean through with a machete when he was 17. It was a surprise to his family and doctors he survived. “No-one fist-fights anymore,” he told me. “It’s hard not to get involved, most kids your age carry a knife or machete, so you have to.”

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What's driving so many kids to 'go country'?

By Max Daly

There are many examples of petty beefs turning into deadly clashes. At the Old Bailey last month, a jury heard that Kayjon Lubin, 15, was stabbed to death last December in Beckton, east London by two 17-year-olds who believed he had taken their e-scooter. In September, a teenager who was 15 at the time was jailed for stabbing to death another 15-year-old, Baptista Adjei, on a packed bus in Stratford, over a Snapchat argument. Osman Sharif, 16, was hacked to death with a meat cleaver in a Tottenham street because of a row over some laughing emojis. Syed Jamanoor Islam was stabbed to death by a 16-year-old in Mile End in a feud that started with eggs being thrown by the victim’s brother as a joke.

But whatever specific incident sparks the individual killings, the truth is that these teenage deaths mark the end point of a process, a grim assembly line. On the whole, the victims and perpetrators involved, as academic reports into youth violence have always told the government, have similar backstories. These are not just any children, they are children who have usually suffered continuous trauma and have been rejected, shamed and belittled all their lives: at school, sometimes at home, by the police and even, as their neighbourhood becomes gentrified, by the well-off homeowners who fear passing them in the street.

They are known to social services from a very young age. They live in council housing in deprived areas. They have been excluded from school and have ended up at a Pupil Referral Unit. Many have experience of the care system, have been victims of abuse, and have absent fathers. In London, an overwhelming proportion are black, mixed race or from other ethnic minorities. Jason told me: “When I was younger no-one showed me respect. To get respect I turned into a monster. I’ve witnessed a lot of people die. It’s a normal thing. I’ve lived in care, I’ve lived everywhere, and most places I get looked at like something is wrong with me. So black kids have to be tough.”

As Cut Short points out, if the Government was sincere about tackling these deaths, it would be looking into the “trauma, fear and exclusion of young people”, it would drill down into “how unsafe and alone” they feel, and seek to expose the “failures of the state to care for its citizens”. But why bother, when you can solve the problem in one fell swoop by, as one MP stupidly suggested at a House of Commons briefing attended by Thapar, by “blunting the end of knives”.

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By James Bloodworth

They might live in claustrophobic neighbourhoods made worse by the intrusive and violent world of Snapchat, but these kids aren’t stupid, and what is happening in the political world is not lost on them. Tony, who runs the local community centre, described by Thapar as a “tiny island amid a sea storm”, says he believes that the nationalism and xenophobia around Brexit, and scandals such as Windrush and Grenfell, make young people in areas such as Brixton “feel like they don’t belong … it sends the message: you are not wanted”.

Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder — when faced with the Government’s abdication of responsibility for them — whether black working-class children who have led highly traumatised lives really are not wanted. I have no idea whether Jason has managed to escape the clutches of gang life. Or whether he is still alive. But what he told me should be beamed onto the walls of Parliament — along with the testimonies from Cut Short: “Most teachers told me I would end up dead or in jail. I got told I was worthless. It breaks your spirit. A lot of black kids get their spirit broken. Schools give up way too early, they kick you out from an early age. No school I’ve ever been to has helped me … Youth clubs are good. Even two hours talking to people, it’s support. But they shut down youth clubs and instead they spend all the money on a week-long knife crime clampdown.”

Cut Short ends with an appeal to the Government to treat youth knife crime violence as a public health emergency — just like Covid-19. It also calls for society to help out. “Start with something small. Walk into your local community centre, youth club…drop your defences. See what happens.” Given the subject matter, the book is surprisingly hopeful. By the end, with the help of various mentors including Thapar, the three teenagers are able to jump off the conveyor belt and create new chances for themselves — getting into university or making music. People have actually spent time with them; they have given them the confidence to step away from such a dangerous life.

Every time we hear about another child being stabbed to death, it should stop us in our tracks. We should hear the sound of a tolling bell each time. It should serve as a reminder that this death, this family’s grief, and this teenager sentenced to life behind bars, are all symptoms of a society that simply does not care enough. We might comfort ourselves by thinking that these children, who lie bleeding to death on the streets they grew up on, are different, that they are not like us. But they are our collective responsibility. Until we accept that this violent epidemic is a reflection of something toxic at Britain’s heart, it will only get worse.

He showed me a Snapchat post on his phone. The missing boy’s friend had reproduced the police mugshot, but typed above it was “MAN’S GONE CUNCH!!!”, alongside a short video of the missing kid waving a wad of bank notes in a flat in Norwich.

Two months later a social media appeal for another missing north London boy, aged 14, eventually found him “doing cunch” 100 miles away on a council estate in Boston, Lincolnshire.

“Cunch” refers to “going country”, the phenomenon where gangs from Britain’s major cities, empowered by mobile phones and plentiful drug supplies, are sending young runners out into the sticks to sell crack and heroin to a sprawling provincial customer base of addicted hard drug users.

The police and media have labelled this “county lines” and County Lines is the name of a visceral new film depicting the horrors of a job thousands of inner-city teenagers are doing right now in rural towns, cities and coastal resorts across the UK. Instead of sitting in school classrooms, children as young as 11 and 12 — in the film it’s 14-year-old Tyler — are taking on a job that makes Fagin’s pickpocketing racket in Oliver Twist look rather quaint.

And this is what County Lines, written and directed by the former youth worker Henry Blake, portrays in such shocking reality, featuring a boy from a poor, broken family groomed into selling drugs in a nameless coastal town and experiencing things no one his age should ever have to.

“Going country” might appear a good option for teenagers with no money and no hope who yearn for £120 trainers, respect and all its trappings, but it’s not a role for the squeamish. If you get caught with the stash there will be little sympathy from your boss or the courts, which is why kids like Tyler have to get their stash cling-filmed, smeared in Vaseline and “plugged” up their backsides.

Where do they go to when they get to these towns or cities they’ve only heard about from the lower league football results? To add a layer of security against the police and rival gangs, county lines crews ‘cuckoo’ the homes of entrenched heroin and crack addicts, using these often dingy council flats as “trap houses” — a base from which to sell, in return for throwing tenants free scraps from their stash.

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By Ian Birrell

Days and nights are spent “on call” on burner phones dishing out deals, in stinking flats, lashing rain and in dark alleys and dog shit parks, in Britain’s bleakest corners, from faceless commuter towns to the gentrified coast, from Oxford and Cambridge to the Cotswolds. One 15-year-old county lines dealer told me about the Devon flat he worked in 300 miles away from his home in Liverpool: “There was mould up the walls. I pulled out a plant that was growing out of the fucking wall! I had to do all the cleaning myself. I had to burn weed to take the smell of crack smoke away.”

Forgotten kids serving up pockets of psychoactive escapism to a neglected army of the addicted.

Not all these teenage dealers are being coerced into selling hard drugs in the middle of nowhere. In the bigger scheme of things they are all being exploited, by those above them in the drug pyramid who are far less likely to get stabbed or jailed. But they aren’t all innocent victims forced into slavery. Some of them can’t wait to get involved, and that’s the most worrying part.

Some, bullied and abused for most of their lives, take it all out on their customers with taunts and violence. In return, they get mugged or even killed for their stash by drug users or rival gangs, or arrested and jailed, further entrapped by a drug supply rap and the criminal fraternity of the convicted.

The money is better than McDonald’s, but the future is not as peachy as the underground music videos make out.

“I did have empathy for these boys: they were kids, but they never talked about normal teenage things,” a sex worker who allowed a London gang to sell drugs from her home in Southend recently told me. “They were mentally drained. They used to lie on my settee and sleep with the phone by their head, working 22 hours a day. A couple of times they would have a treat, like buying a new pair of trainers. They were putting on an act, trying to pretend they were the big boys, but they were young kids.”

Some of them, usually the clever ones with an eye for business and an adeptness for second-guessing others, will avoid the bear traps and slowly rise to the top, finally being able to afford the BMW, the diamonds, the girls and the glances they always dreamed of. Others — maybe helped by a parent or youth worker — will escape. But most end up on the scrap heap, even further locked out of the mainstream economy than they were at the start.

Crucially for those outside the drug game, the county lines phenomenon does not just impact young urban drug sellers. It is transforming the parts of Britain where they have set up shop.

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny McCartney

Sleepy provincial drug scenes have been injected with fresh, cheap, reliable supplies, which means more petty crime to find the money for drugs, more addiction and more fatal overdoses. Across the country, local train stations, housing estates, church graveyards and high streets have seen a rising presence of city drug gangs and open air drug markets. Local police forces, who previously might have had to deal with doped up “user-dealers”, have had to direct already sparse resources to fighting a new, well-oiled, professionalised threat and a conveyor belt of recruits arriving from the big cities.

As well as cuckooing homes, city gangs protect themselves by employing the natives to do their dirty work — whether it is local teenagers to help sell drugs or addicted customers to rent out dealing cars and drive them from spot to spot. It’s the franchise that cannot stop expanding.

County lines is now a media buzz phrase. To the newspapers, every person convicted of drug dealing, even if it’s some old coot selling weed out of his back window, is now a ‘county lines’ dealer. Yet while the phrase has become some kind of clickbait, very little is known about why, in one of the richest countries in the world, selling crack and heroin miles away from home has become a regular job for thousands of teenagers who should be in school learning about osmosis and Martin Luther King.

If you believed senior criminal justice officials, MPs and the mainstream media, the finger of blame points squarely at two culprits: evil drug barons and middle-class coke-snorters, especially those who have dinner parties, drink fair trade coffee and are vegan. One entraps and exploits the workers, the other enables the trade with their thoughtless, hypocritical indulgence.

But blame is often deflection. This stuff about cocaine snorters — of whom most these days are working class, but politicians don’t like telling off builders — fuelling county lines profits sounds intuitive. Yet it’s bollocks, because the powder cocaine and county lines markets are not connected. Even if every British person stopped snorting cocaine, the crack cocaine and heroin market — which accounts for half the sales of the entire UK drugs market — would carry on regardless. Cocaine-snorters are not harming young British drug runners, but in a world where prohibition hands the drug trade into the hands of organised crime, they are partly responsible for the drugs war bloodshed in Latin America.

In terms of the evil drug bosses, of course, there are some nasty people involved in the highly-profitable crack and heroin business. As Top Boy and The Wire did before, County Lines does a good job of portraying their cold cruelty and the ultimate expendability — or “acceptable loss” as the film calls it — of the young drug trade recruits who are jailed or killed. That being said, Britain’s drug trade is not as deadly as the authorities make it out to be. The number of homicides caused by actual drug turf wars in the UK is proportionally tiny compared with the highly lethal nature of America’s business.

What really lies at the root of the county lines phenomenon is why British children are so desperate to do this job. Luckily, the ‘why’ is something that those who’ve actually done this job have been happy to relay to me. And it does nor reflect the simplistic, black-and-white world being painted by the authorities.

County lines teenagers I’ve spoken to don’t mention evil drug bosses or middle-class coke buyers; instead they talk about two competing drives: the desire to be someone and the shutting down of that opportunity.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Never has there been a time when everything you can’t have is incessantly shoved in front of your face 24/7. The poorer you are, the more potent this is; it’s 1980s rampant consumerism projected 100-fold through a social media prism. It’s all about quick fixes, appearance, power and money. If you don’t have it, you need it.

Though there are exceptions, which the media loves to go on about, most of the children working county lines come from impoverished backgrounds, from communities set adrift by a thousand austerity cuts. These kids might be unloved but they are not stupid: selling drugs offers a way out of the trap, an escape from a bad education, racism, claustrophobic living and hopelessness.

In her excellent report into drugs and violence published last month, Dame Carol Black rightly turned the spotlight on the Government for the rise of county lines. “There are strong associations between young people being drawn into county lines and increases in child poverty,” she wrote: “the numbers of children in care and school exclusions… against a backdrop of falling local government budgets…and cuts to young people’s services.”

County lines, whose origins I traced back to a line running from Brixton to Brighton in 1999, is the latest successful business model in the ever-entrepreneurial drug trade. But its currency is the social conditions created by successive governments, which have not only delivered a customer base of 300,000 addicted heroin and crack users, but a willing workforce of children who serve them up, who reason that the best way they can get ahead in life is to risk their life selling drugs to a queue of lost Gen Xers out of a shithole flat in the middle of nowhere.

I’m hoping that the overriding message people take home from County Lines is not about how profit obsessed and exploitative the drug gang leaders are, because this is no surprise, but how profit-obsessed and exploitative governments have led us to this unique situation. Charles Dickens would be gutted. Because County Lines is a reflection of a fucked-up country, a manifestation of widespread neglect that Britain thought it could get away with, except it’s come back to bite back us where it hurts most, in Middle England’s own back yard.