This book covers the facts but also the real life truth behind drugs. It is a really informative read into a disturbing topic. Recommended.

An excellent authoritative and well-written book which makes a significant contribution to the 'war on drugs.' wars don't usually last as long as this one and no evidence that the good guys will win.

A brilliant book on the origins of the war on drugs. Touching on racism, the media and international relations, this was a real eye-opener of a book that I know I'll be talking about for years to come.

This is gives a truly horrific insight into how the drug trade came about.
It is really frightening, but a great read.

I was totally transfixed by Drug Wars. It was incredibly well written and brilliantly researched. I sit on a Stop & Search civilian overview committee. We look at video footage from randomly selected Stop & Searches to ensure procedure has been followed and the member of the public hasn't been chosen by racial profiling. So I was horrified beyond belief when I read about what used to happen. Is it still happening today? Well, it would seem not in my borough but I would never say "never". My eyes have been well and truly opened thanks to this informative and educational book that I would highly recommend.

I received this book as a review copy through Netgalley. Not my usual choice of reading but the cover and title caught my eye. I am definitely glad they did. The book gives a historic insight into the war on drugs through the ages. Not purely from a punishment aspect but measures that were put in place to assist and support users with addictions.. Some worked and some didn't however what was most concerning was the fact that the majority of schemes failed due to the lack of local support and financial backing. What was most interesting was how people of all different backgrounds got dragged into the world of drugs. I thought the book was a great read and will definitely read more on the subject.

Absolutely fascinating and eye opening, Drug Wars details the often surprising history of Britain's attitude to the drug trade, from the time when drug addiction wasn't a serious problem to the messy, corrupt, violent situation we have today.

Covering a broad swathe of topics from dealers to junkies to the police to the tabloids and more, this book makes a compelling argument for the decriminalization of drugs and a return to the liberal pragmatism that previously shaped our approach.

A must read for anyone interested in the history of drugs, crime, or simply wants to know how we got to where we are today.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

This is a genuinely terrifying book about how bad decisions have repercussions for generations. The mess that is UK drug policy is laid out in a factual, almost academic, way while telling shocking stories of corruption, ineptitude, deprivation, and crime. The author is well placed to tell the story and he tells it well. There is a full history of how the "drug wars" moved from people going into Boots at Piccadilly Circus to collect their heroin to criminals carrying out armed robberies purely to raise the monte to get into the drug "business". It is a harrowing tale and Mr Woods warns that:-

"... one person can never put it together. You only ever have one piece of the puzzle. But, unless everyone sits round the table and shows all their pieces, the picture never comes together. But - no one round that table trusts each other, because the others might be corrupt as well. So the full picture never forms, and the corruption just grows."

The scale of the problem is frightening. Mr Woods says "The money was suddenly astronomical. Suddenly it's not your local copper getting corrupted - it's senior management. There's just no way to control that. If they admit that there are 250 corrupt officers at the Met and try to take them out, each one of them knows five more, and suddenly the whole force is finished."

I hadn't realised that the "moralising, abstinence based model of prohibition by law enforcement is something that has been forced upon us." Europe took up - with some coercion, the American model. Now our prisons are full of people who have committed crime in some way connected with drugs.

This book should be read by anyone interested in the way decisions have unseen consequences, and anyone interested in current policy around drugs. It is also of interest to people who read true crime as there are some truly shocking scenes described - including the mess that was the investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Really enjoyed the content of this book. Very interesting to read about the history of the drug trade

Wow I ripped through this in no time; what a cracker of a book and really interesting too as well as quite terrifying!!i could read books like this all day look, gives a fascinating insight into the drugs world and all parts of it, police, drug dealers and users as well as the drugs scene. A seriously good read I was quite gutted when the book finished!!!!

A look into the underworld and drug related crime and how prolific it is on every street. Not for the feint of heart but a book that people should certainly read. That joint you're rolling may seem harmless, further up the chain there's a war going on and people are suffering and dying. The laws need to be changed, legalisation would curb the vast majority of damage that's being done.

Gripping, Gritty and on your doorstep.

Informative, scary, enlightening, sad and much more.
A wonderful insight into the background to Britain's drug culture and the war the authorities are fighting against it.
A very detailed account by a former British police officer, extremely well written.
Would recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in learning more about this subject matter.

As an ex prison office,I have had many discussions with people involved in drugs,be it taking them or dealing them. I really enjoyed this book as it gives you an insight into the background of where drugs come from and how they get on the streets. Very informative.

An interesting and a sobering read. Should be prescribed reading for all police trainees and politicians

This is the second book by Neil Woods, a former undercover police officer, and JS Rafaeli, a journalist and writer with Vice. Their first title, Good Cop, Bad War, was an account of Wood’s career infiltrating drug gangs around the country and why in the end he concluded the war on drugs was futile. I reviewed that book, awarding it the full five stars (see here: https://bit.ly/2LnwTqW) not least because it takes some guts to admit that the endeavours of one’s career have in effect been a colossal waste of time.

So, to Drug Wars, their follow on. This is a more cerebral book, in that it is an historical account of how we as a society got to the situation we are in, rather than the author’s experiences as an undercover officer. Woods and Rafaeli trace the origins of the war on drugs in Britain, placing this in the wider international context, particularly the drug war’s origins in American moral crusades.

The war on drugs has clearly failed. That much is so obvious the observation seems almost superfluous, yet those who support continued prohibition – and there are many who still do – seem unable or unwilling to accept it. What Drug Wars makes tragically clear however is not just that it was a failing endeavour right from the beginning, but that it never even needed to be fought, things were fine as they were. Nowhere is this clearer than in the section of the book that touches on heroin.

The fact is that for years the Britain had a small, yet stable, population of heroin addicts. In 1959 there were just 62 known heroin addicts in the UK. By 1964 there were 342. These were medics who started dipping into the medicine cabinet only to become addicted, ex-military and sailors who discovered the drug abroad, romantics who went looking after reading Cocteau, De Quincy, Kerouac and Burroughs. This is an important point, they weren’t kids off council estates lured by horrible dealers, because there weren’t any dealers. Why? Because once someone was an addict, they could just go to a GP and get heroin for free. This might sound like madness but giving addicts heroin was a pragmatic and entirely rational policy. It meant they had no need to steal to support their addiction, no need to sell their bodies, and crucially, no need to sell heroin to others to fund their habits. Prior to the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971 – possibly one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation ever to enter the statute book – the UK heroin population had grown to approximately 1000 addicts, but this was a slow and gradual growth, nothing like the explosion of addiction that would follow.

Even after the passage of the Act, this British System survived for a while, but eventually, after years of relentless pressure from the Americans it was to end. The result? The instant creation of a lucrative criminal marketplace. Where before there was no point in drug cartels smuggling heroin into the UK – a lot of risk for little reward, when one’s customer base would abandon you for the NHS as soon as they got hooked – now, the business case for doing so was obvious. The resulting explosion in addiction, the violence, was inevitable. There were later attempts to recapture sanity, notably in Liverpool where the British system was brought back to life with marked success. But once again it was destined to be destroyed by the cant and faux moralising of War on Drugs brigade and the tabloid press

Other parts of the book tell the story of Operation Julie – a comical exercise in persecuting harmless hippies, which would be funny if it hadn’t ruined lives and the rave scene of the 1990’s when MDMA made teenagers loved up and gangsters extremely rich. But for sheer vividness of all that is wrong with the war on drugs, it was the section on heroin that was most powerful to me.

Finally, the authors demonstrate how the war on drugs has perverted and undermined the very criminal justice system tasked with tackling it. Here we meet Frank Matthews, the pseudonym of a former Met police detective and undercover officer turned whistle-blower. Frank served in some of the Met’s most sensitive units, not least that responsible for witness protection. He describes in graphic detail the corruption and ineptitude he saw there, wrongdoing that aided criminals and endangered those they were charged to protect. Indeed, the details are so shocking that it’s difficult to believe, for if they are even half true, UK policing is rotten to the core. Just how could it be possible, what’s caused this rot? The answer is clear: the drug market is so lucrative, the profits so great, that organised crime has corrupted the very institutions who’s task it is to control them.

Drug Wars is a powerful and depressing read, but it’s also a hopeful one. All over the world the signs are that people and societies are finally starting to see sense. From Portugal, to Latin America, people are saying that enough is enough, that prohibition has failed. Even states in the United States, that bastion of moralising conservatism, have legalised cannabis. For so long, the UK has refused to budge, despite our history of trying to do things differently, but just this week the government has reluctantly agreed to medical marijuana. Things can change, we can do things differently, we don’t have to fight this pointless, utterly pointless, war.

This is an important book, essential reading, and I really can’t recommend ot enough.

Drug wars tackles the facts and real life truth behind drugs. The users, the dealers and the gangsters and the police. Both an informative and disturbing insight.
A Netgally ARC copy

Drug Wars is a well researched and fascinating insight in how Britain got to the problems it has with drugs and criminality.

The authors clearly know their subject and manage to keep the read interesting

I can almost guarantee that this book will challenge your understanding and any pre-conceptions that you have

Thoroughly recommended

A fascinating and informative read. This book has obviously been very well researched and thought out. This book gives some of the history of drugs and tells of the transition of drugs and drug users up to modern day. The information given is backed up with facts and put together in a readable way. I read this book as someone interested in history and I wanted to know some more about the world of drug taking as I read a lot of crime novels. I found it interesting and fascinating and would definitely recommend it.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A fascinating and terrifying look into the drug wars in the UK. Well written and very informative work of non fiction from police, dealer and user points of view. Definitely one to read for anyone interested in the current state of the drug wars in the UK. Thanks to Net Galley for my copy. Reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and Facebook.

"An observation van is running surveillance on a high-level Bradford gangster. Suddenly the van is surrounded by men in balaclavas and tied shut. Out comes the can of petrol. It is set alight and the two cops inside barely escape with their lives. This incident is never reported. The gangsters clearly have informants inside the police and alerting the public would undermine the force. Everyone shrugs it off – with so much money in the drugs game, corruption is part and parcel of the whole deal".

Wow, this book is brutal but so engaging. Sometimes it's difficult to find non-fiction that excites and is unputdownable, but this was exactly those things and more. It focuses on the drugs war currently taking place in the UK from the perspectives of those in the know - the police who are actively fighting a losing battle by trying to stop the illegal selling and use of these drugs, from the sellers who are increasingly also part of gangs, and the drug users. It discusses the history of the drug trade and how it grew to the big beast it is today. It also highlights the incredible lengths that dealers will go to in order to protect their turf and the sort of things users will do to get their next fix. You frequently hear about dealers killing rival dealers for exactly that reason and we all know that junkies think nothing of commiting daylight robbery to obtain money to pay for drugs. It really is a sad state of affairs, and this book illustrates just how savage this world can be.

"Drug Wars" is an unforgettable, difficult and distressing read and a lot of the stories actually shocked me. It's a very dangerous and crazed world. As i've always thought, to lower the amount of users you need to get to the bottom of the issues in their lives that drove them towards these substances. Only then will we make a breakthrough.

Many thanks to Ebury Press for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.