poledriver
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2005
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London, This Is What's Actually in Your Cocaine
London is the cocaine capital of Europe. According to a report from 2014, the city has a higher concentration of coke in its water system than anywhere else on the continent; we're literally pissing away three times more of the stuff than Milan. British police have even stopped testing bank notes for traces of the drug, because within weeks of entering circulation you can guarantee they'll have been shoved up a nose and scraped along a CD case.
Cocaine is everywhere – except, it seems, in the one place you expect it to be: cocaine.
"The streets are awash with white powder, they are not awash with drugs," says Lawrence Gibbons, Senior Operations Manager for Drugs at the National Crime Agency (NCA). "We analyse everything seized from an ounce upwards – the weight street dealers typically buy at – and we are regularly seizing huge quantities of substances which have zero traces of cocaine. An ounce at the moment is never more than 22 to 25 percent purity, and after that it is cut again before it hits the street. Dealers and customers genuinely don't know what they're buying, and that is the danger."
Plenty of casual users truly believe their guy gets the best stuff, especially those who employ nifty marketing techniques, like offering £50 or £90 bags to choose from. But, say experts, the UK cocaine market has long since collapsed to the point where no street level dealer can truly know what they are selling you. So convincing is the mimicry and so effective the cutting, one forensic expert who assesses seizures across the UK claims he has only seen "one or two single grams" of cocaine in the last two years that have tested at higher than 70 percent purity, expensively bought or otherwise.
The collapse in cocaine purity is credited to importers' enterprise with products normally found beside a dentist's chair. Around 2007, they discovered cocaine could be heavily cut with cheaply bought benzocaine – a dental anaesthetic that mimics coke's numbing effect – in place of glucose, the previous cutting agent of choice. Benzocaine can be bought as an identical looking powder for around £12 per kilo from China, and can then be cut into cocaine at a ratio as high as 10:1 or more. Yesterday, two men from South Wales were jailed for conspiracy to sell cocaine; they had aroused suspicion after buying 12 blenders from Asda to mix together four blocks of blow with 5.8 kg of benzocaine.
Gibbons says, "If you go back to pre-2007, cocaine purity was reasonably high, but it was always cut with inert substances like glucose. However, there was only so far you could cut cocaine with glucose before the numbing effect – the 'Kojak test' you see detectives do on-screen – would dissipate. Dealers started using benzocaine or phenacetin, as they look like cocaine and have the same numbing effect, so they were able to cut harder to spread their product."
You might argue that the NCA – a national law enforcement agency – would say anything to stem the tide of drug use. But even independent testers claim that the nation's party drug of choice is teetering at near anaemic levels.
Cont -
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/london-theres-no-cocaine-in-your-cocaine-940
London is the cocaine capital of Europe. According to a report from 2014, the city has a higher concentration of coke in its water system than anywhere else on the continent; we're literally pissing away three times more of the stuff than Milan. British police have even stopped testing bank notes for traces of the drug, because within weeks of entering circulation you can guarantee they'll have been shoved up a nose and scraped along a CD case.
Cocaine is everywhere – except, it seems, in the one place you expect it to be: cocaine.
"The streets are awash with white powder, they are not awash with drugs," says Lawrence Gibbons, Senior Operations Manager for Drugs at the National Crime Agency (NCA). "We analyse everything seized from an ounce upwards – the weight street dealers typically buy at – and we are regularly seizing huge quantities of substances which have zero traces of cocaine. An ounce at the moment is never more than 22 to 25 percent purity, and after that it is cut again before it hits the street. Dealers and customers genuinely don't know what they're buying, and that is the danger."
Plenty of casual users truly believe their guy gets the best stuff, especially those who employ nifty marketing techniques, like offering £50 or £90 bags to choose from. But, say experts, the UK cocaine market has long since collapsed to the point where no street level dealer can truly know what they are selling you. So convincing is the mimicry and so effective the cutting, one forensic expert who assesses seizures across the UK claims he has only seen "one or two single grams" of cocaine in the last two years that have tested at higher than 70 percent purity, expensively bought or otherwise.
The collapse in cocaine purity is credited to importers' enterprise with products normally found beside a dentist's chair. Around 2007, they discovered cocaine could be heavily cut with cheaply bought benzocaine – a dental anaesthetic that mimics coke's numbing effect – in place of glucose, the previous cutting agent of choice. Benzocaine can be bought as an identical looking powder for around £12 per kilo from China, and can then be cut into cocaine at a ratio as high as 10:1 or more. Yesterday, two men from South Wales were jailed for conspiracy to sell cocaine; they had aroused suspicion after buying 12 blenders from Asda to mix together four blocks of blow with 5.8 kg of benzocaine.
Gibbons says, "If you go back to pre-2007, cocaine purity was reasonably high, but it was always cut with inert substances like glucose. However, there was only so far you could cut cocaine with glucose before the numbing effect – the 'Kojak test' you see detectives do on-screen – would dissipate. Dealers started using benzocaine or phenacetin, as they look like cocaine and have the same numbing effect, so they were able to cut harder to spread their product."
You might argue that the NCA – a national law enforcement agency – would say anything to stem the tide of drug use. But even independent testers claim that the nation's party drug of choice is teetering at near anaemic levels.
Cont -
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/london-theres-no-cocaine-in-your-cocaine-940
