Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

This Home Office report describes how drugs are moved from importation to street level in the UK. It seeks to improve the understanding of the ‘middle market’ drug distribution system, and the dealers who act as brokers operating between the wholesale and retail levels.

The information contained within the report was gathered via tape recorded interviews with a sample of offenders imprisoned for drug dealing offences, together with an equal number of personnel from Her Majesty’s Custom and Excise, National Criminal Intelligence Service, National Crime Squad and police force drug squads. A small number of interviews with barristers, who had experience of drug trials were also carried out

The research proves the importance of law enforcement activity aimed at the middle market drug suppliers, which is the subject of a Home Office funded Task Force involving four police forces in the Midlands.

Key findings

• Although drug markets are hierarchical, they are also highly flexible with the possibility for roles of supplier and buyer to be interchangeable at wholesale and ‘middle market’ levels.

• The ‘middle market’ drug dealers operate a multi-commodity brokerage linking what are essentially mono-commodity supply chains above them to retailers who are also likely to deal in a more limited range of substances.

• There is not so much a national drugs market, as a series of loosely interlinked local and regional markets. Cross-regional networks are in evidence, although the main basis of drug dealing operations probably remains local and regional.

• There is some evidence of ‘middle market’ drug brokers making direct contact with intermediaries to warehousing systems in mainland Europe and importing modest loads on that basis, thus leap-frogging more traditional systems of bulk importation and wholesale trade.

• Business principles are predominant in the potentially lucrative drugs market, which means that ‘violence-avoidance’ is the more general rule. Violence attracts attention and is ‘bad for business’. Violence is most usefully understood as a consequence of market dysfunction and disorganisation.

The Midlands pilot scheme launched in October 2001, which will be fully operational from January 2002, runs for 12 months and involves West Midlands, West Mercia, Staffordshire and Warwickshire police forces. The Task Force consists of a dedicated team of officers who will target cross border ‘high-level’ drug dealers, looking to seize assets of those convicted of drug dealing. The scheme is funded by £900,000 from the Confiscated Assets Fund.

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