Pubdate: Sun, 16 Oct 2005
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: Denis Campbell

REVEALED: BRITAIN'S NETWORK OF CHILD DRUG RUNNERS

The fullest survey yet into the UK's crack and heroin trade shows it is
fuelled by children and teenagers in search of a quick fortune.

Joe had just celebrated his 15th birthday when his father asked him to join
the family business: selling heroin and crack cocaine. With time on his
hands after being excluded from school, and keen to please his dad - a
veteran drug dealer - Joe agreed.

'I was bored and thought it was cool to help my dad out [selling drugs].
He's always bought us quite a lot, so I wanted to help,' says Joe, now aged
17.

He has been acting as a 'runner' for two years, carrying small bags of
heroin or rocks of crack from his father to 30-40 buyers every day and
returning with pocketfuls of ?10 and ?20 notes.

With a grim inevitability his father also recruited Joe's younger brother
Daniel once he turned 15. Daniel said: 'I had nothing to do. My dad asked
me. It's easy money. I like it. I can buy things now and I get girls.'

The brothers are now entrenched in the ?6.5 billion-a-year UK illicit drugs
trade, carrying out dozens of daily drop-offs to addicts. It has been a
lucrative decision for both boys: they are each paid ?150 a week for selling
and distributing 200 bags of heroin and 200 rocks of crack between them.
Their father pays them from his ?3,000-?4,000 weekly proceeds.

For Joe and Daniel, brought up in a bleak, deprived part of a major British
city, with little formal education and few career prospects, running drugs
is now their life.

'It's people like me and my brother. We've got nothing else, so why not?'
says Joe. 'I know it's wrong, but what else is there for me?'

But they are not the only child foot-soldiers in Britain's flourishing black
market in illegal substances - and they are not the youngest. The number of
children and teenagers working in Britain's drugs industry is growing,
according to a shocking new study of drug dealing.

An in-depth, 20-month investigation by a team of criminologists and drugs
experts from King's College London - including, for the first time,
testimony from scores of dealers themselves - has found that:

. Children aged 12 are selling drugs.

. More young people are becoming runners or spotters for dealers.

. Many truant from school in order to keep their clients supplied.

. Many are drawn into the trade by a close relative.

. Teenagers in areas rife with drugs often admire dealers, envy their income
and aspire to emulate them.

. Adult dealers increasingly enlist them as runners and lookouts because
they believe their age makes them less likely to be caught.

Indeed, teenagers in some rundown parts of British cities are so desperate
to get into the drugs trade that they offer to work for free in order to
gain a foothold, according to research by the four academics led by
Professor Mike Hough, director of the Institute for Criminal Policy Research
at King's College.

Their forthcoming report, commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,
carries extra weight because, uniquely, drug dealers themselves - 68 in
total - have revealed who gets involved, why they do it, how they spend
their proceeds and how they avoid getting arrested.

The report concludes that: 'From our interviews we found that young people's
involvement in all our drug markets was on the increase.' Initiatives to
keep teenagers from becoming sellers were not working, they found.

Evidence from more than 100 police officers, probation officers, drug
treatment specialists and community workers in the four urban areas of
England studied, as well as 200 local residents in each place, bore out the
dealers' testimony - including the shocking revelation that 12-year-olds
were involved. In each place, heroin and crack cocaine were the most
commonly consumed drugs.

The authors agreed to keep the exact locations secret and persuade the
dealers to talk in detail about the realities, rather than mythologies, of
their trade. But they say that most cities in Britain contain areas very
similar to the four they examined.

'They are as young as 12. The early to mid-teens are involved as runners.
There's a quick turnaround of runners if some are arrested,' one police
officer told the researchers. Explaining their motivation, a community group
worker said: 'A lot of them see the money. If you come from a single-parent
background and can't afford very much because you have six brothers and
sisters, and you can get an extra ?150 a week, you wouldn't say no. They are
the runners.' Or, as one dealer put it: 'Dealers ask them to run, young
people want to run, and they get money - everyone's happy.'

The researchers were repeatedly told that teenagers craved the fast cars and
designer clothes lifestyle associated with drug dealers. 'The young men we
spoke to wanted to be successful and free from money worries, but they also
thought that the chances of success in the legitimate economy were
non-existent, but that in the illegitimate economy they had everything to
play for,' they concluded.

Of the 68 drug sellers, 52 were male and 16 female; the youngest was a boy
aged 12, the oldest a 53-year-old man. Twenty had begun selling drugs before
turning 18. Thirty-six had left school before the official age of 16; 28 had
spent time in a young offenders' institution for 15 to 21-year-olds; and
over half had spent part of their childhood at a children's home, with a
foster family or in secure accommodation.

'Given such troubled backgrounds, it is easy to see why some teenagers start
selling drugs - as a more exciting and rewarding alternative to slogging
away for hours in a fastfood restaurant or supermarket, and a way of earning
two or three times more money,' the report reveals. Some are young men aged
17 or 18 who have at least one child.

As one 17-year-old said: 'I can't sign on, can't get a job and I need to
raise money. I asked a dealer if I could do it and he said yes, so I just
started doing it. I have a daughter.'

Drug experts said that the report's findings were stark. 'These findings
about young people's growing role in the drugs trade reminds me of when
crack hit New York in the Eighties. It was estimated that it created jobs
for 100,000-150,000 young people, working as runners, lookouts and gofers,'
said Harry Shapiro of Drugscope, the UK's leading drug information charity.

'The stark economics of life in the sort of deprived urban areas where drug
dealing is endemic, that are found in most of the UK's larger conurbations,
is that 12 to 15-year-olds with limited employment opportunities, apart from
perhaps a paper round, have the opportunity to earn sums which would be
impossible for them in other circumstances.'

The 60-page report is grim reading. It reveals how council flats are taken
over and turned into dealing dens; tenants are bullied and bribed into
allowing drugs to be sold from their homes; up to 200 addicts a day visit
these places, and spend up to ?1,000 a week on their habit; and how the
price of crack and heroin has fallen. Dealers also feel they have little to
fear from the police.

Its findings raise a whole series of difficult questions about the
effectiveness of current anti-drugs strategies, especially police efforts to
stem the apparently free flow of Class A drugs. Revealingly, many of the 68
drug sellers said they viewed dealing as less risky than other crimes.

'The sellers in our study were largely unaffected by the police,' the
authors note. While dealers 'took measures to avoid being arrested, the
threat of imprisonment was not real enough for them to desist from selling'.
The police's job in catching dealers has become even harder because mobile
phones mean most sellers now operate from flats and send runners to deliver
the gear and collect payment, rather than on the street, they note.
Crackdowns only displace, not remove, the problem. Supply lines are only
briefly interrupted.

Given that a Cabinet Office strategy unit report on crack, heroin and
cocaine this summer estimated that users spend about ?4 billion on them, it
is easy to see why some of the dealers in this new study were earning as
much as ?20,000 a week, though the average was a more modest ?7,500. Runners
are making an average of ?450 weekly, though some rake in as much as ?4,000.

This study also challenges many of the popular notions about drug dealing.
For example, rather than being loathed as parasites the researchers found
that drug dealers sometimes 'command at least tacit support' from local
residents and are 'tolerated to some degree'.

The authors conclude that this is partly because these communities have an
'ambiguous relationship' with the local police and, controversially, partly
because some people in areas where dealers come from and operate themselves
'benefit' directly or indirectly from their activities.

Hough and his colleagues identify several such advantages. First, drug
dealing gives local people opportunities to earn money working as runners,
drivers, lookouts, door watchers at dealing houses and guards looking after
dealers' drug supplies. Second, the easy availability of stolen goods, which
around half the dealers interviewed accepted in lieu of cash, lets people in
poverty buy items cheaply that they could otherwise not afford. Third, some
residents receive cash handouts from relatives involved in drugs, enabling
them to pay for their rent, weekly shopping, buy Christmas presents or pay
for car repairs.

Lastly, the authors also found that an area with high levels of drug dealing
may well also have less 'ordinary' crime - car theft and burglary especially
- - because dealers use their influence to ensure they don't happen, so the
police have less reason to visit the estate. Shapiro confirms: 'Drug dealers
want to protect their own turf and wish as far as possible not to attract
the police's attention, so they may have their own enforcement procedures to
keep other sorts of crime down.'

The King's College team believe the authorities need to accept that
enforcement tactics alone will never halt the drugs trade. Instead they
should hire ex-dealers to educate young people about the less glamorous
realities of their former trade and run a drug-specific equivalent of the
prison 'buddy' scheme for dealers returning to the outside world, to help
them avoid returning to the drug trade.

Best of all, they say, would be preventing teenagers from getting involved
in the first place by investing in youth outreach workers to identify and
help the sort of vulnerable young people who do start selling drugs, stop
relying on shock tactics to deter youngsters, and give them an alternative
to the dead-end existences that let them see drug dealing as more rewarding.

As the report reveals, it is not an easy task. 'I spend my money on
everything: clothes, cars and women. I swear to God, I try to live like [rap
star] Diddy,' explains one young dealer. 'I just love it, I just love it.
I'm still young. My cousins are all settled down, but I go out from the
Wednesday night to the Saturday and just kill it with eveything, drink, the
lot.'

Until the alternatives to drug selling are more appealing than ?200-a-week
menial jobs in Tesco, McDonald's and the like, the number of teenagers ready
and eager to play their part in Britain's biggest, murkiest and most
damaging underground trade is unlikely to fall.

*The names of some dealers have been changed

Drugs in Britain: The facts

11m people in England and Wales have used illegal drugs.

4m people a year take a banned substance. 500,000 use Class A substances
such as cocaine and heroin.

35.6 per cent of 16 to 59-year-olds have taken illicit drugs.

?10 bn is the annual economic cost of drug misuse, including treatment and
drug-related crime

500,000 Britons are thought to be drug addicts.

141,000 people receive treatment from drug misuse agencies and GPs.

18 is the average age at which people start using drugs.

6,406 drug-related deaths were recorded between 1997 and 2001 in England and
Wales: 369 from cocaine, 145 from ecstasy and 5,188 from opiates. In the
same period alcohol killed 25,000 to 200,000 and tobacco was involved in
about 500,000 fatalities.
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