Neil Woods is a former undercover drug operative and Detective Sergeant. For fourteen years he infiltrated drugs gangs as an undercover police officer, and while brushing should-to-shoulder with some of Britain’s most violent criminals Neil realised that the war on drugs is futile.

Neil is now the chairman of LEAP UK (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition), an advocacy group formed exclusively of ex-law enforcement officials that calls for the legal regulation of illegal drugs.

UK drug policy is at the centre of this issue and is something that Neil is pushing to change, yet currently, Theresa May is unwilling to view evidence on drug policy reform according to Norman Lamb.

“It’s been causing harm in the UK for 50 years,” Neil said. “It’s an American import, it’s not the British way of doing things, it’s moral imperialism from the USA and it’s risking individual freedoms as such prohibitive laws have always caused problems, so it’s a mess.”

Neil attributes a lack of regulation to the current drug landscape in the UK.

“At the moment there is no regulation, we’ve just banned it in the bizarre fantasy that saying that’s not allowed will actually stop it. So that means that the market is not regulated, so the people who decide to sell what product to who is gangsters whereas regulation is the government deciding what product to sell to who. So, regulation is getting it under control, the current situation is out of control.”

Like Norman, Neil believes that now is the best time to push for change, following the likes of Canada.

“It’s urgent, we shouldn’t wait for the evidence to come from Canada, although I predict that that’s what politicians are going to wait for, they’ll wait for the evidence.

“It’s more urgent than that because this is a child protection issue. Children can have access to cannabis far more easily than alcohol, that’s very clear.

“The teenage cannabis market is quite violent, and any teenager will tell you that it’s easier to get than alcohol. That’s not right. You know we should be protecting our children from the drug, but we should also be protecting them from the contact with organised crime that the current situation creates.

“So, it’s urgent, county lines kids are recruited through the teenage cannabis market so a contact with organised crime [is established]. If we want to break that and protect children, we have to regulate the market.”

To bring about change and get the public on board you need to humanise the story, that way the public can understand it and therefore the government are more likely to enact change.

“The Alfie Dingley story was clear that if you humanise a story then you bring the public along with you. The public don’t necessarily understand it until you do humanise it, so it’s an important instance of how to win this situation, it’s very impactful and very important, any personal story is.

“The government is so against change for primarily ideological reasons, but those ideologies come from the United States. We’ve been swamped with American moral judgement, which is actually not the British way of thinking.

“That’s been propped up by decades of moral panic struck by the newspapers and the lack of evidence used in the newspapers when talking about drugs. There’s misinformation, bad politics, essentially the two things together.”

Home Secretary Sajid Javid has pledged to crack down on middle-class drug users who, according to police chiefs are fuelling violent crime.

“This is just a ludicrous thing to say, normal political scapegoating, blaming those other people. Whereas the situation we have is a creation of policy, we only have violence with the drug market because the drug market is prohibited and run by organised crime.

“So, the cause of it is very straightforward indeed, we have created the problem we have now, rather than facing up to that reality politicians constantly seek to blame other people, whether its homeless people using spice, whether its theoretical middle-class people using cocaine it’s ludicrous.

“There’s no evidence behind it at all, the powdered cocaine market is a tiny portion of the overall value of the cocaine market, the real value is in crack. But currently, it’s not fashionable to blame problematic crack users for that so its policy that’s created this situation and the scapegoating will continue. This week its middle-class people, next week it’ll be something else.”

Since 2010 all police forces in the UK have seen a reduction in their funding, yet drugs remain one of the key issues they must combat, and policing does not appear to be working.

“The biggest policing bill is still drugs, there’s more arrests for drugs, there’s more prosecution, there’s more investigations into them, it’s a massive part of the policing bill.

“Legalisation would make a huge, huge impact [on reducing the strain on the police.] Lots of police and crime commissioners advocated a more liberal approach and the most successful county in the UK is Durham.

“They measure outstanding in every measure consistently under Her Majesties Inspectorate of Constabularies and the reason for that is they have shifted their resources to things that actually have social harm, away from investigating drugs.”

Legalising and regulating cannabis not only removes funding from organised and violent crime but equally creates a new UK industry. Cannabis is widely available, widely used and is heavily policed.

Drugs misuse findings from the 2017/18 crime survey found that 7.2% of adults aged 16-59 had used the drug in the last year, roughly 2.4 million people. Amongst 16-24-year olds usage was reported to be 16.7%, roughly one million young adults.

Drug offences are strongly represented in arrests made in England and Wales, in the year ending March 2018, 9% of all criminal arrests were drug-related, ranking third overall. In London alone, 35,708 arrests were made between 2017 and 2018, according to the met.

“Well, it’s about making society safer for individuals and communities by taking the market away from organised crime you reduce violence and the corruption.

“It should be a health-based regulation to look after people and not for the sake of creating business. There would be tax benefits of course, but in the UK, you will not win the argument by saying that we will get tax from it.

“If I speak in front of 40 middle-class couples and say to them look we need to legally regulate cannabis because we have all this much money for your children’s schools, most of them will be offended, they’d walk out.

“The thought process to the UK sensibility is that ‘how dare you put the safety of my children down to money’ because that’s the way British people think. In America, polls show that the thing that sways people’s opinion is tax benefits, but that’s never going to work in the UK, so you have to use different arguments.

“Essentially, looking at it from a British point of view this is about child protection, it’s not about money for children.”

Neil’s time undercover felt futile and has meant that he is searching for an alternate solution to policing, which he does not think is working.

“It was futile because for every gangster I arrested it became more and more violent. The futility would be bad enough, but it’s worse than futile because it’s actually making society more violent.

“The first time I bought crack or heroin it was easy, there was no violence involved and the drug dealer said you take care. But as a result of ramping up the tactics from the police the arms race this drug war creates, organised crime is more and more violent because it’s a Darwinian situation.

“The most successful gangster is the one who is most violent, who can be the scariest. So there the ones that are most successful, so over time, the drugs market becomes more violent. That’s a result of trying to deal with this problem by policing.”