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People are starting to use cocaine now almost like it's like a double espresso to give themselves a little boost
It's everywhere. You know you can get it. I mean my children can get it
This is the story of a hidden industry. It is set in Britain's capital where one in five young people regularly use recreational drugs
A lot of people to cope simple, you know and if they want to get it they go to a phone box when they get their phone out
And they ring people like me
We have agreed to conceal and disguise the identity of the dealers in this film so that we can reveal the workings of this vast undeclared business
They want what I've got. I sell it to them. They've worked hard all week and they want to relax so they phone the ticket guy
Just like Pete's out in Domino's saying guaranteed delivery in 30 minutes. But yeah it's definitely a service. Whatever hours I'm awake.
If I hear the phone ringing I'll answer it. 24 hours pharmacy
The increase in the use of cocaine has brought new clients to the ticket man from all over London
It could be nice posh apartments, it could be slum, cancer or states, getting me dull money and me 20 facts. Some people like to stay at home, have a few lines, have sex all night
Some people like to go out and socialise, club, dance
I used to have about 10 dealers numbers in my phone. I used to be able to get dealers drugs all time to the day or night, any day of the week
I've seen so many different types of people over the years. People I wouldn't have dreamed in a million years would have done it
The focus man is on his way as fast as he can run. He's tired to go to you and show you lots of fun
It's reaching epidemic proportions that it's really taken off
If someone says to you, what did you do at the weekend? I was around at Tony's house and we did a gram of coke. Most people don't bat an eyelid. Fair enough.
People are like, what the hell were you doing? This is madness. Cacain just seems to be part of the landscape now
Suddenly you'd be like, wow, exciting. The whole chopping up and getting it ready was all highly exciting
I can remember very specifically the first time I used coke, that confidence flowing through me and I can remember straight away walking into the party that we were going to and feeling on top of the world
I remember the dripping. I used to drip down back of your throat. I used to love that. I used to think that was the greatest thing and that kind of slowly coming into reality but everything being accentuated and heightened
It's an ego drug really. It makes people feel confident, attractive, alert, charismatic. It makes them into the person that they want to be
There are now over 5 million users of illegal drugs in Britain so it doesn't take much to guess how many people would be needed to produce and supply the drugs to that many users now
I'm literally talking about, depending on how you define it, over 100,000 people involved in drug dealing in Britain on any given day and over a year, perhaps as many as half a million people involved in dealing drugs
Hello, across the road. Alright mate, I'll see you soon.
A buyer wants a gram of cocaine. A rendezvous is agreed.
Hello mate, how are you? Good. Good scalp mate, you?
That's a fucking bit like me.
I'm all over it anyway. Lovely to meet you.
I'll meet you if you want to. Lovely, thank you.
We seem to be driving through leafy suburbs. Is that where your patch is?
It can be anywhere mate. It can be right into town. In leafy suburbs, it can be anywhere. Or where are pubs? They're anywhere and everywhere aren't they?
Recreational drugs such as cocaine, ecstasy or marijuana, rather than drugs linked with chronic addiction and social failure, represent about 95% of illegal drug usage in Britain.
Problem, drug users are a very small minority of all our drug users. When we look at particular drugs, and it's only heroin really, and perhaps crack, we're more than half of users of those drugs actually develop problems and need help from different agencies.
99% of cannabis users don't appear to have any serious problems with the drug affecting their lives.
We get to other drugs like ecstasy, speed and cocaine. Again, still the majority of users, probably 90 to 95%, use the drugs recreationally and never develop any problems with them, apart from occasionally being arrested by the police in some cases.
The Home Office estimates that one million people in Britain used cocaine last year. Some professional men and women consider the drug as after-dinner entertainment.
I love doing drugs. I love it. I love it.
It was great. Everybody was on drugs.
At this dinner party in a fashionable district of central London, the guests insisted on remaining anonymous. Their use of cocaine was known to friends, but hidden from work colleagues.
I take drugs in the same way that people smoke a cigar after a nice meal, because it's nice, it's fun, it makes life better. It's just like the icing on the cake.
Do you want to give you a rest?
Well, I've got three children, and I work hard. I've got a lot going on in my life, and I enjoy going out.
If I have a bit of that, it gives me energy. I go out the door, I have a lovely evening, I can stay up all night, and then I go, yeah, it's a lift.
Each dinner guest had built up a relationship with their dealer, one of mutual trust.
They are the ones who are regularly breaking a lot. They have to trust you, and you have to trust them.
That's why a good dealer that you trust, who delivers nice stuff on a regular basis, yeah, quality, is worth their waiting time.
I will ring him early, I'll tell him what I want, he'll come and see me, and deliver the stuff to me, and then he'll go off to the club saying, the stuff I need.
He's not the dealer, he's London, he wears white trainers and dodgy jeans, and he's just a normal guy that you see every day on the street. He can't speak English very well, although he's English, but you can never understand him.
He's fucked.
His main target in East London is the gay community.
If the product is not right, we tell them, and, you know, if my phone ain't right, I complain, if my credit card ain't right, I complain.
If the food in an restaurant wasn't right, I complain, you know, and if my coke ain't right, I complain.
I know this is very English, you know, if they're my class, the closer they are to me, the more I trust them.
When I contact a dealer, I feel like I'm asking him to bring me some as a favour.
It's not like he's hassling me or trying to get me to buy it, I'm going to him and I hope that he can get it for me.
Because the dealer has to trust you.
Well, sometimes it's actually quite difficult to get a hold of your dealer.
It's actually quite frustrating. It takes a number of days to actually get a hold of him.
Because they are so busy.
I have to give you a number of someone who can get that quicker.
A small percentage of them may lose their control of the drug and start becoming daily addictive users.
And we tend to find that with all drugs, there's five to ten percent of people who mess up with them.
And this tells us more about the people, really, who have trouble with the drugs, rather than the drugs themselves being problematic.
Nowadays, you can be born pain-ugly, you can be a trod.
They can make you women, if you've got a good sense of humour.
You guys can come over and tell them you're drinking, I was about to get one.
Georgie was unable to keep her cocaine usage under control.
She began snorting the drug during her teens, sometimes several grams a day.
I would start from going to bars before nightclubs, and I would take more drugs at bars.
You know, I'd have a glass of champagne, a glass of wine, whatever.
But that would be accompanied with a cigarette and a line of cocaine.
It'd end up doing a few lines, which would turn into, I'd be up and out all night, wouldn't get back until seven.
I'd then have somewhere to be at ten o'clock in the morning, and I wouldn't be able to function properly.
Raspberry coulis, and what else?
Passion fruit.
Oh, it is the most divine, tasty thing in the whole world.
If I could use, and I knew I could use, and it wouldn't turn into me using every day, I would still use.
But my problem is, is when I pick up that first drug, I can't stop.
And that's why I have to say no.
But I think to people who can stop and want to use the case, you go out and do it, go and have some fun.
If that's what you want, that's what you want to do, go and do it.
I mean, I would love to be able to say, like, this Friday I'm going out, I'm going to do a couple of grams, or I'm going to do a gram, and that's going to be it.
I can't do that.
That gram leads into another gram, that leads into another gram, that leads into more and more and more, and that's my problem.
Cocaine usage has spread from rock stars and actors to all sections of society.
In the 1970s, it cost as much as £300 a gram at today's prices.
Now the same quantity can sell for £40.
Amongst South London's housing estates, a mother of two became a dealer.
Theresa had been using cocaine for 10 years, then she saw an earning opportunity.
She started by selling to friends.
We used to just go around in a group, just mothers or friends, just normal people, regular jobs.
We used to go out on weekends, using, and then I thought, well, there's a bit of a market here.
So that's when I went out and got myself quite a bit and started selling to my friends.
If there's a few of you doing drugs, quite possibly one or two, it will get to the point where they'll think,
well, I may as well get a big lot and sell it to my friends. So, yeah, that's very much how it works.
We used to get people coming over about two o'clock before picking the kids up from school.
All times of the day, I would sometimes go out in the car and drop it off to them,
or I'd go and meet them down the road and drop it off to them down the road.
All times at weekends, I might even get a phone call at 10, 11 o'clock in the morning
if someone's been up all night on a Friday night. Have you got some more? Have you got some more?
I used to say, well, if I don't answer my phone, it means shop shop.
But if I answer my phone, then, you know, you might be in luck.
Try and turn that fucking phone on, babe. Jesus Christ. My phone's off.
Just making some wraps.
The Ticked Man is the retailer who sells to customers.
He buys his cocaine by the ounce or half ounce from a wholesaler and sells in gram-sized wraps.
The neater they are, the less chance of anything escaping.
There is a pyramid-shaped structure of dealers involved in the distribution of cocaine.
The man who supplies the Ticked Man has several similar retailers who sell directly to users.
He's higher up in the chain than me, you know. He obviously deals with more powerful people than me.
What I'd say is just an ordinary guy like myself trying to make a living.
He's not a pushover. He's not trying to give candy to kids.
Look, it's just going to flake off. Look at that.
See it? Look, can you see that?
It's some quality South American cocaine.
Look at it flaking off. Look, how can anybody have fucked with that pure cocaine?
My dealies always get, oh, this is the best. It's the best stuff I've ever had.
Look how it moves as he shakes on the wrap.
And they used to say to me, it's if it looks a bit like Mother of Pearl, if it's shiny, if it crumbles easily.
But for me, it doesn't matter. I would look for these things and still I wouldn't be able to tell.
I could only tell from taking it.
The Ticked Man had bought half an ounce of cocaine for £500.
I break that down and sell that as about 18 grams.
But if you want to know what people get, they get 0.8, 50 quid, 0.4 for 25 quid.
Does it actually get a gram?
No. They should just know. They shouldn't have to ask unless they just started snorting coke.
People buy coke off me and ask me what it weighs after they've snorted it all.
And I tell them 0.8 and they start going mad. I just think, fuck off.
Don't ever ring me again.
I wanted to be a pilot when I was young, young.
That's what I wanted to do, but I can't work for people. I can't get a nine-to-five job.
I'll always be my own boss. Never saw it in my house.
My dad never come home stressed out because the boss had a go at him.
I never saw that. I saw him counting his own heaps of cash every morning,
doing his own thing, working his own... I mean, that's all I know.
I'm not saying it's because that's why I'm a drug dealer, but my own boss,
nobody tells me what to do, when to get up, when to sleep.
It wasn't the only road that was open to me.
I could have got a job, but I tried it all before, but it's not for me.
I make enough money in what I do and encourage it, get out of it completely.
Down to the last one, so I spent £500 to turn over £900,
£400 profit within two days.
In a similar way, Teresa received an ounce a week worth nearly £1,000 from her supplier.
The ounce was given to her on trust. No investment is needed to become a cocaine dealer.
They were able to sort of give me on tick, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to get it.
I mean, for £950, I didn't have £950, but I could get £950 if it was given to me
and I could sell it and then get, you know, given the money.
Her supplier was one of the locals in the pub.
She's a regular family guy. Didn't have a job, but, you know, had a family.
Teresa says she never contaminated the cocaine, the jargon is stumped or cut.
She just divided her ounce into gram and half gram size wraps.
It's nice to sell them at 40s and 20s, so I wasn't making very much money, really.
I mean, I was making about £400.
I mean, it is a lot of money, but it's not a lot when you're actually doing, you know,
I mean, I could have been making about £800 if I'd have been stamping on it
and putting other agents into it. I could have made about £800.
Few of the dealers I met admitted to tampering with their product.
Most claimed it was pure cocaine from South America.
One dealer who did confess to cutting the drug actually does receive his gear
directly from the source, Columbia. It arrives courtesy of the Royal Mail.
They send it to my address, but with a fake Anglo-Saxon name.
So that's the way I can protect myself in an apartment that lots of people live
so I don't get any risk of getting caught the way.
I don't get for £2 a gram of coke.
I mean, I can invest 50 quid and get like £500.
You open it, you get a carbon paper, voilà, you get your bag of coke.
The carbon paper prevents scanning machines detecting the cocaine.
You open it, top quality, top ranking.
So you can cut it a little bit, at least 20% or 30% of what you receive.
And you rest the paper and you get the amount that's around 10 or 11 grams.
And then you cut it with caffeine, caffeine pills.
They are white, they are bitter as coke and in the meantime they give you a rush as well.
I think I took huge quantities of ProPlus and paid a fortune for it over the years.
So yeah, and I mean, there are lots of drugs they can use now that you can buy over the counter
that crushed up, that can give you the same type of feelings as cocaine.
You know, like ProPlus can keep you awake and if you're convinced mentally enough that you're taking cocaine
I think you can have the same effects.
And how long does it take you to sell?
Three or four days. That's the last one in a week.
So you could earn £2,000 a month very easily if you wanted to?
Yes, I could, I could.
You don't ever sell to strangers?
Never, never, never.
It's only for friends that work in bars and everybody in the bar industry is into coaxes, easy as that.
Most cocaine is bought and sold not on street corners but within an enclosed world of friends and associates.
There isn't a massive street dealing operation here, it tends to be people who know each other or directly in the clubs.
Most people tend to score though before they go out and they're scoring in the local area.
You could be in the suburbs, you could be in the provinces, you could be in a village in Buckinghamshire, you could be anywhere.
You will be able to score, you will know someone, you know someone,
his brother's friend can sort you out for the evening.
Several organisations have been set up to distribute cocaine, the fastest growing drug in London, directly to your home.
One is known as Dialagram.
The straightforward format was delivering top quality products to the door,
eliminating the kind of the sleaze element of scoring in the back of a club
and being able to buy it and being able to have it delivered to your doorstep in a courteous customer focus kind of manner.
It's door to door.
Door to door.
It doesn't even have to be a door, I'll do it to a beer gun.
I'll do it anywhere you fucking like.
I'll actually meet you on top of London Eye if you want.
With Dialagram, it's built on a customer basis.
It's a customer platform, it's a customer service.
So what is the point of delivering promptly, being polite, being nice,
exchanging pleasantries and giving them shit?
Are they going to come back? No.
Montana became a dealer when he ran into financial problems after losing his job in a marketing company.
He met an old mate for a drink.
He had a Rolex on his arm and I said, where did you get that, Taiwan, 15 quid?
He said, mate, look at the Bezel where you do it up.
And it has the icon on there, you know, that's legit.
And he took it off and I felt the weight.
I did everything by spang it with a hammer.
And then I actually said, that's the real McCoy.
My next question was, how the fuck you get the money for one of them?
So it was cagey.
Obviously, you know, these aren't things you just talk about any time if anyone.
You know, but we had a history and he said, what have you been doing?
And he, you know, I talked about my own situation and he said,
maybe there could be a mutual beneficiary situation going down.
And within two days, I was at doing the drops.
You know, everyone wants to get their shit between seven and nine, really.
All you get, like, late stragglers have already blown all their gear and one topping up again.
And I'll phone you at, like, quarter to 12, knowing that the office shuts.
How much gear you carry on you during one time?
Depending on the day, you know, obviously Friday night is the night.
You know, you could have anything up to 50 grams.
And even sometimes, you know, that could go and you have to go and get restocked.
So your turnover could be under even more.
Christmas time just gets silly.
Where did you keep the stash then?
Well, at the end of the day, if you're going to get nicked, you're going to get nicked.
So I was never really a great believer in stashing it away because otherwise,
if you put it down your pants, you just have a great big bulge.
Montana's clients are listed on Dylagram's computer.
Each evening, he is given a schedule with delivery addresses.
There are some famous personalities.
Doctors, lawyers, city tight.
Well, I do fellows, you know, but they're like the students.
You know, you could tell they're in like shared houses and they'd club together for that kind of like little party pack.
Some of the addresses you went to, mate.
You know, the only way you could get up that doorway is that if you're kind of like delivering something.
Some of the most famous addresses in London.
Montana obeyed a code of silence about the identity of his clients.
There's a kind of like a confidentiality that, you know, I'll always have to keep.
You know, this isn't a snitch program or anything like that.
You know, so we've got to be, it's got to be a little bit of loyalty.
Although, you know, they'd shock you like a fucking incident if any of them got into any bother.
The most important part of the job was staying one step ahead of the police.
The number one rule, there is only one rule. Don't get caught.
And, you know, the operation is set up so you don't know anyone.
You don't know any of your colleagues. There's no Christmas party.
There's nothing like that.
You are an individual, a self-employed delivery agent.
It's the green. It's the old sea.
The largest market for dealers is selling marijuana with up to four million smokers in the UK.
I sell ganja. Otherwise, weed, marijuana, to various sponsors in London, mainly.
West bars, pubs, clubs.
We have other smaller guys who distribute it.
And we sort of organise the flow of it.
And we try and double our money to make it worthwhile.
If we're not doubling our money, we're not really doing too well.
What we've got here is a little selection. This is pollen from Morocco.
Sort of a nice sort of gingerbread hash, I call it.
Hashish is made from a resin secreted by the flowers of the cannabis plant.
This fluffy pollen, when you heat it up, it's sticky, lots of oil, smells good, tastes great.
Smooth, no lumpy bits in it.
And second best, we have some AK-47, which is skunk.
Skunk is a specially cultivated blend of different strains of the cannabis plant and can be grown indoors.
It's very strong, everyone loves it.
It's more GM than the whole story.
The GM with this has a total different effect to the natural hashish.
The next grade is a Sensei, which is a Jamaican, as you can see.
It's very hard-compressed, totally organic, nice cool smoke, lots of fun.
This amelia is a strong, un-pollinated variety of the female cannabis plant.
Its dried leaves are packed tightly and smuggled into Britain.
Those who smoke at night, it's the lick.
Mr Green started dealing while at university.
His routine now includes carrying an electrician's tool case.
We usually have a cover story, like we've got some sort of trade or skill,
or we're doing some other job part-time, or we're working on something.
We're not just sitting around the pubs with a wad of money and smoking joints all day.
Very little tobacco. If you want to smoke cigarettes, you smoke cigarettes.
Drug dealing has one basic law of survival.
Rules aren't no new faces.
If somebody says to me, for example, he's got a friend or friend of a friend who wants to buy something,
pick his money up and bring it with you.
As you can see, lots of gunja, a little bit of tobacco.
I don't want to see your friends or their friends or whatever.
And that's how they slowly become dealers, a lot of the punters.
Stylish raw, by buying for their friends.
And then next thing, we're giving them larger amounts at better prices.
At one time, Mr Green sold cocaine, but was forced to give that up.
We started taking it ourselves, and our gunja business wasn't doing that well all of a sudden.
And things got haywire, and the sort of people who were coming to visit you were totally different.
Perfect, don't worry about it.
Spark it up.
And you slowly became a vampire.
You stayed up all night and you slept all day.
And that was bad for business?
Well, sort of.
You know, waking up fucked every morning is always bad for business.
Now that would mash anyone up.
In the late 1980s, drugs and house music burst onto the dance floor.
A generation took part in an explosion in the use of the Class A drug, Ecstasy.
Two million Ecstasy tablets are now swallowed every week in Britain.
Someone provides them.
I make a fair bit of money considering the initial outlay and that sort of thing.
So it's something you just, well, I took a risk on it.
Turns out that it was worthwhile at the end of the day.
I buy pills that save maybe a pound, pound fifty each.
And I can sell them in a club for a fiver.
So you're looking at maybe 300% profit or something like that.
And if you're selling, I look at it to say, sort of, if I buy 200%,
potentially there's at least a grand there to be made.
You got a plus one and she's got a plus one.
We went with Mitsu to a club in north London.
His nickname is short for Mitsubishi, a branding of Ecstasy pills
that is unrelated to the Japanese car manufacturer.
Mitsu is devoted to the chemical culture.
It's no secret that the dance music is seen as a whole.
Ecstasy is people's drug of choice.
That's the class A substance.
So it's a government concern that kills you.
As far as the media is concerned, it's a killer drug.
Unfortunately, the people that feel the club said we can know otherwise.
When you take the drug, it makes you feel as if that's what it's meant for.
You think, oh my god, this is the ultimate feeling.
You never get anything better.
There's a reason why people do it.
They're not junkies.
They're not addicted to it.
They just want to do it because they enjoy themselves.
Mitsu began dealing after friends started asking him for spare tablets.
They would bring me up and say, you can get it.
Can you get me some?
Friend number three, four or five.
Friend number five's mate rings up.
Oh, I'm so and so.
I don't really know you, but he says you can get it.
OK, what do you want?
Eventually, he sort of realised, well, this ain't going to be a problem for me.
If I buy X amount of whatever, I can sell it to A, B and C,
and it'll be gone within an hour.
So you do it.
And then next year, you know, shit, I've got a pocket full of cash.
Pretty easy.
I'll do it again, do it again, do it again, carry on before you know it.
You probably won't want to admit it, but you're dealing drugs.
Does that bother you?
The tag does.
The money don't.
Selling X to C tablets in clubs is apparently a simple task.
90, 95% of the people in there will be looking for drugs.
So it's just a case of generally going there for a bit, maybe have a drink.
Wait a while, you know, people bring their own, they'll use them, they'll want some more.
And then you just, you go out, ask a few people, you know, you're all right mate,
need anything, sorted, that sort of thing.
And then before you know it, you know, someone will say,
oh, yeah mate, you know, what you've got.
And then once one person's got some, someone will say to them,
oh, we're doing it, oh, the keys are over there.
Then before you know it, you've got about 15 people around you.
When we entered the club, we couldn't find Mitsu.
The bouncers had discovered his drugs and thrown him out.
The same thing had happened a week earlier.
What I had on me, 30 probably,
hid them all whereabouts in the usual place I do.
Where's that?
Really unknown.
Okay, in a plastic bag between my arse sheets.
Unfortunately, I didn't hide it quite as well and during the pad search,
something was felt that probably shouldn't be there.
So I was walking on the side, asked to display the contents.
So I pulled it out and I was like, well, okay, right,
we're going to call the police.
But the club did not call the police.
They simply confiscated the drugs.
I didn't really think they would because being in the scene for so long,
dancing scene and club scene,
you just know that clubs don't want to risk getting police involved in their nights
because, you know, they don't want to be closed down.
What is that?
It's a pellet, mate.
It comes from fucking either Colombia or somewhere in South America.
I don't know, Bolivia.
The ticket man's next consignment of cocaine was a pellet.
He said it had been swallowed by a carrier,
a mule who'd smuggled it into Britain.
The right smell, the right taste, the right texture, everything about me, you know.
The pellet contains 15 grams of cocaine, which will be packaged into nearly 20 tickets.
Oh.
MOB.
It's my strike deal as well.
Money over bitches.
Been in this game for years.
It's made me an animal.
There's rules to this shit.
I wrote me a manual.
A step-by-step booklet for you to get.
Your game on track, not your wick pushback.
Rule number uno, never let no one know.
How much dough you hold, because you know.
The Chenabri jealousy, especially if that man fucked up,
gets your ass stuck up.
Youth culture, especially rap music, often glorifies the image of a drug dealer.
The ticket man tells of fashionable parties,
where he was one of the most sought-after guests.
I went upstairs in this house.
There were loads of people there, loads of women everywhere, beautiful women.
I was like, wow.
I was introduced, as you know.
He's the dealer.
It was great, you know.
And these people coming and greeting me,
oh, so you're the dealer.
Two women come up to me.
So what's it like to be a drug dealer?
It's kind of a nice little party trick.
To pull out a few E's or some coke.
The girls will gather around you, and you'll be the man of the day.
50 Cent, one of the world's best-selling rap artists,
was a former crack dealer.
The music promotes ideas of easy money and glamorous women.
Even when drug dealing is not explicit in gangster rap,
a link is often understood by listeners.
The whole idea is like rags to riches.
You know, you bumped into the man from Del Monte,
and he gave you a package, and the next thing you...
you got rid of your rags and out comes the SL Merc.
When they get to deal with all that cash,
they realise it's a lot different to that.
Because you can't flaunt your money and things like that.
You've got to be sort of undercover, and then the police are after you,
and it's a nightmare.
It's not like you see on the videos.
Those guys are musicians, they're not drug dealers.
I'm not a flesh-hairy.
That's a jewellery.
Flash cars.
It's not really good if you're involved in that kind of work anyway.
Oh, my God.
Oh, Dill.
There's police behind us.
Turn the light off.
They're giving us money.
The ticket man passes his cash to the driver.
Give me this spliff as well.
There's a thing so quick where you've got to get them.
Stinks in here.
Otherwise we're getting nipped.
The car is full of marijuana smoke.
There's a certain precautions that we take.
We do see police, or there's police right behind us.
So it's worth me lighting a fag, isn't it?
The police van overtook us.
Their interest was elsewhere.
Personally, I used to take on board three golden rules.
You never wear a baseball cap.
You never wear sunglasses.
And you never play music.
If they pull you over, they want to know what your hands are doing at all times.
You could have a weapon, you could have a shooter.
You could be stashing stuff.
But if they've seen your hands at all times,
then they're feeling comfortable themselves.
Over 12,000 were found guilty of drug dealing
in the UK last year.
Some think the money is worth the risk.
Others believe it won't happen to them.
I'm out of work still, and it's hard to get a job
because I'm now a convicted drug dealer.
So I can't get a job now.
And it's hard.
I've got children.
I feel as if I've introduced my children to it.
So I feel extremely guilty for that.
Whereas I was 24 when I started.
My children are 16.
And they've tried it.
Hello, chicken sales.
Hello.
The Ticketman has received a large order
for seven grams of cocaine.
How are you keeping me, mate?
Sweet, sweet.
You all right?
Yeah.
That surprised me badly.
Is it?
Yeah.
It's not murder.
It's good.
It's flaking up, but it's...
It's that fake flake, you know?
Yeah.
It's not flake how I used to know it.
Do you know what I mean?
I'm not going to mind about it, am I?
You're not, mate.
If you mind about it, you get your money back, bud.
Simple, you know what I mean?
So here's a tonne de guise.
If he's not happy, you know what I mean?
All right.
What's the three quarters you want for it?
And I'm not even making a penny, bud.
All right.
Give me a bit.
All right, mate.
Sweet.
Shortly afterwards, the man who spent nearly 300 pounds on the 7 grams of cocaine rings
back to complain.
0.4 under, bud.
It can't be, bud.
It put it on the scales in front of me, bud.
It can't be.
It was about 7.6, well, 7.5.
I'll just sort that out for you, though, bud.
You know what I mean?
I ain't going to bring him up, you know what I mean?
Because I'll just give him the ump.
Well, I didn't play about a bit or nothing, mate.
You know what I mean?
All right, bud.
Is there a problem?
No.
I just said it was a bit under.
He's obviously got different scales.
Some people just, you know, if it's 6.9, you know, and it's 1.1 under, they'll ring up
and say, oh, it's 0.4 under.
It could be short, but his scales are different.
They're not as accurate.
So is it giving you any aggro?
Of course not.
Well, what do you think?
I'm off the phone earlier.
Most disputes are resolved without the violence associated with media images of drug dealing.
Violence is the option of last resort, last resort, because it just attracts attention,
like no other factor.
You have the police calling around.
You don't need it.
You don't want it.
It's not this Hollywood thing where the Colombians are going to take you out of the game.
Someone walking up with a 9mm and a silencer and doing you one in the head from behind.
If you're looking for a lifestyle where it's gung-ho and it's, you know, you like weapons,
and you like the action, go and join the army.
Sorry, mate, I'm going to have to take this.
Alan, name, Tottenham.
Yeah, I know where he is.
We'll see after.
Yeah, I've got that.
I've got that in stock.
Montana spends his evenings either on the road or waiting for a call.
Give him an ETA 20-25 to bend in North Circular.
You know, I could cover 150 miles in a day.
Sometimes you're lucky and you're going to have four drops in a row.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Do them in 20 minutes.
Other times you can get caught in traffic.
Maybe it might take you 45 minutes to get somewhere.
But they all know we get there as soon as we can.
I used to read a couple of books, you know, take them with you.
Nice little cafe, you sit out, you have a drink.
But you know when that phone goes, you've got to hit the road quick, you know.
So you can't even go to, like, the cinema and watch a movie
because I tried that once and, like, saw it as a law.
You know, five minutes in, phone rang, had to leave.
Yeah, I fancy one now, it's been a long day.
One of the main hazards of being a drug dealer
is the temptation of using one's own drugs.
Obviously, the finer you break it down, the better it goes up.
And you don't have to use as much.
This is what they refer to as chopping up.
A bit like Jamie Oliver in the kitchen, eh?
So you can see there, you actually take it down to a fine powder
that a dealer would be proud of.
As a dealer, you're going to have unlimited access to this drug.
You'd better be able to control it because if you don't,
your profits are out of the window and you'll seem to be out of business
because quickly your consumption, it will exceed your profits
for most street level dealers, that is the case.
So they have to be able to handle money, deal with a fair amount of stress
and risk taking and they need to be able to have a fairly good control
over their own level of drug consumption.
And I think for many dealers who don't make it,
it isn't the police who put them out of business, it's themselves.
An average line for your normal person.
You know, they'd probably do something about that.
Yeah.
Then when you can kind of like build up the tolerance,
maybe you get to that.
And when you can't be kind of a little bit sad,
that's what you rely on for your bang.
Green country.
Done.
The consumption of cocaine has risen fourfold in the last decade
and so the number of heavy users who develop social and physical problems
is also increasing.
There were times when I did over 15, 16, 17 grams of coke.
Basically, I wouldn't stop until I'd finished every last drop that I had
and even when I'd finished, if I could get any more,
if I could make a phone call, then I would.
Paul had a high-pressure job in the city.
By day, he worked at a large international bank.
His nights were spent snorting cocaine.
Well, I would have picked up my drugs back there
and then I walked along here past the police station
and into the pub over there to start the real part of the night.
It's not even a particularly enjoyable experience.
In the end, it's very much about you,
indoors, creeping around the flat, completely paranoid.
You'd always be up till six, seven o'clock in the morning
and then the sun would rise and you'd see the daylight
and you'd run out and then that was that kind of awful, empty feeling
where, you know, I've done it again. I've done it again.
I can't believe I've done it again.
The increased usage of recreational drugs by a generation now in their 30s
has sparked concern of a possible long-term health risk.
There is evidence that the repeated usage of cocaine in particular
can lead to addiction.
Many of them will have gone into it through the dance scene.
They would have started on ecstasy in the 90s
and found cocaine at the end of the 90s.
Typically, it takes probably five to six, five, six, seven years
before it really, really gets a grip.
Most of the people I see have been using for seven years upwards.
And it's only really in the last five or six years
that it's become really, very freely available.
My fear is that there is an explosion waiting to happen.
Society has this projection of people being pushers.
Many people in your profession playing people with drugs
who otherwise would not want them
and therefore that you have some responsibility for people's lives
and for upsetting people's lives.
Pollocks. Personal responsibility.
Why am I responsible for your fuck-ups in life?
I've gone overboard and I've been carried away
like the Charlie three occasions.
Whose fault is that? It's my fault.
It's my problem. I have to deal with it.
If you deliver them drugs and that causes them to lose their jobs,
I mean, do you not feel any responsibility whatsoever for that?
I mean, surely. No, it doesn't. Why? Why?
They phoned me up. They phoned the firm up.
We didn't phoned them up saying,
how are you doing tonight? East End is finished.
Fancy a grand. Doesn't happen.
It's been a myth around for some time that the dealers are proactive,
that they push their drugs on other people.
My experience now over 20 years has been that this isn't the case.
And the reason why they don't have to do this is that, you know,
there are so many people now taking drugs
that drug dealers really don't need to go out
to find and persuade other people about coming into the market.
And every generation of young people that comes along
is using drugs more than the previous generation.
Do you ever think one day you might look back at your life
and think, I did something wrong.
I'm not proud of what I did?
No, no, no. I wouldn't think that at all.
I made a lot of people happy.
They all parted away and they thanked me.
At this club, a warehouse in East London, drugs are taken openly.
It's a type of illegal venue that rarely attracts the attention of police.
There's little violence at these events.
The police division responsible for London clubs
was unable to provide us with an interview.
Public figures rarely encourage an informed, open debate on drug legislation.
I've come across senior police officers and politicians
over the 20 years I've done research who have privately told me
they fully support legalising drugs.
They realise prohibition doesn't work,
but as soon as somebody turns on the camera and says now you're talking to the public,
they go back to the old prohibition line,
we've got to have a war on drugs, we've got to catch all the evil dealers
and protect all the young people.
It's difficult because what can the police do?
I mean, you can't arrest everyone for taking drugs.
I mean, most of my friends now would be arrested.
I don't think there's any other area of social policy
where we would apply the same policy year in, year out,
for four decades, only to show that the problem got worse every year
and yet we still continued with it saying,
well, if we keep doing it, it might work one day.
Every day is Friday.
On that night, the ticket man sold £550 of cocaine
and he began an evening ritual.
I'm straightening the money, mate.
If you go into the bank and take £550 out of the bank,
what does it look like? Does it look screwed up
like some drunk fella just pulled it out of their front tight jean pocket?
No, it doesn't.
It looks brand new.
Even the old notes, they're straightening them.
They're doing exactly what I'm doing,
but I'm just doing it manually.
They put it through machines to do it for them.
So yeah, it's good money.
But it was a lot of risk.
You don't need to be a rocket science to do it.
If you've got a head for numbers, it helps.
If you come from a cultural background
where you've got access to the market,
maybe you're a clubber, maybe you're a dope smoker,
maybe your friends are, it's simple, really.
Worryingly simple.
You cannot deny the amounts of money that you can make out of it
over something that you haven't done before.
You cannot deny the amounts of money that you can make out of it
over something which is not a cartel.
It's not massive dealing operation.
It's just a few ounces here and there.
It racks up and you can make a profit
and you can live a good lifestyle,
and that is attractive to people.
Each evening, the Ticketman continues his routine
along with Britain's other 100,000 dealers.
To date, not much has disturbed his business.
Hello.
Hey, man. What's happening?
Yeah, what you after?
I've been involved in drugs, selling drugs now
for about eight, nine years.
It's been a long time.
I've had quite a comfortable life.
Made a few mistakes, went to jail.
Which obviously can have an effect on yourself,
if you let it, or family and friends around you.
I got through it, you know.
Still here surviving.
Doing my thing, as you say.
But I'm pretty bored.
If you wish to comment on or have been affected
by any of the issues raised in this programme,
you can visit our website at bbc.co.uk forward slash drugland.
Thank you.
