Hell (22 page)

‘But I’ve never
taken a drug in my life,’ I tell him, ‘I don’t even smoke.’

‘I knew that
the moment you walked in,’ he said.

‘How can you be
so sure?’

‘The first
thing I check is the pallor of the skin – not bad for sixty-one,’ he says,
displaying that Irish charm again. ‘Then I look at the nose, followed by the
lips and finally the arms, and it’s clear you’re not a potential customer. But
I’d be willing to bet there’s something you need Del Boy to supply you with.’

‘Bottled water, still, preferably Highland Spring.’

‘How many
bottles do you order from the canteen?’

‘Four, maybe five a week.’

‘Don’t let the
screws find out.’

‘Why not?
I pay for them.’

‘Because while cannabis and cocaine remain in your bloodstream for
a month, heroin can be flushed out in twenty-four hours.
If it wasn’t you,
Jeffrey, the screws would assume you were a heroin addict trying to show up
negative whenever you were called in for a Mandatory Drug Test, and it’s all
the fault of Ann
Widdecombe
.’

‘How can it
possibly be Ann
Widdecombe’s
fault?’

‘Because it was
Widdecombe
who first
brought in the MDT.
That single decision has turned some cannabis
smokers into heroin addicts.’

‘That’s quite a
quantum leap,’ I suggest, ‘and some accusation.’

‘No,’ says
William, ‘it was inevitable, and it only happened because
Widdecombe
knew nothing about the drug culture in prisons.

How could she?
Neither did you, before you were sent to
Belmarsh
.
And worse, no one seems to have explained the problem to
Blunkett
either, because both are indirectly responsible for an unnecessary rise in
heroin addicts, and even in some cases their deaths.’

‘Hold on,’ I
say. ‘That’s accusing
Blunkett
and
Widdecombe
of manslaughter and cannot be either fair or
accurate.’

‘When you take
an MDT, they test you for marijuana [cannabis], cocaine, crack cocaine and
heroin,’ continues William, ignoring my comment. ‘It’s a urine test, and your
sample is sent to an independent laboratory and then returned to the prison a
week later with the result.’

‘I’m with you
so far.’

‘Marijuana can
show up in urine for as long as twenty-eight days. You may well have smoked a
joint three weeks ago, even forgotten about it, but it will still come up as
positive on an MDT, which is not the case with heroin. Because if you drink
pints of water immediately after taking the drug, you can clear any trace of
heroin out of your system within twenty-four hours, which means you won’t test
positive.’

Pay attention, Home Secretary
.

‘If the test
comes back positive for marijuana, the Governor can add
twentyeight
days to your sentence and take away all your privileges. Twenty-eight days for
one joint,’ says William. ‘So in prison some marijuana smokers who are on short
sentences turn to heroin as an alternative because there’s less chance of their
sentence being lengthened. Result? They often leave prison as heroin addicts,
having never touched a hard drug on the outside. Fact: a percentage of them die
within weeks of being released. Why? Because the heroin in prison is
considerably weaker compared with the gear you can get “on the out”, which causes
them to overdose when they inject the same amount. This is a direct result of
government legislation.’

‘So what would
you do about it?’ I ask.

‘The Mandatory
Drug Test should be for Class A and B drugs only [heroin, cocaine], not for
marijuana.
*
This simple decision would cut down the desire to
experiment with heroin among twenty per cent of the prison population and would
also save countless lives. If any your officials are stupid enough to suggest
this isn’t true, Home Secretary,
tell
them not to rely
simply on statistics, but to spend a few weeks in prison where they’ll quickly
find out the truth.’

‘I presume,
however, it is true that drugs are the direct cause of our prisons being so
overcrowded?’

‘Yes, but it’s
a myth that heroin is the main cause of street crime. Crack cocaine is just as
much of a problem for the police.’ I don’t interrupt. ‘Crack cocaine,’ William
continues, ‘is for
crackheads
, and is far more
dangerous than heroin. If you take cocaine you are immediately satisfied, and
can be on a high after only one dose, and as you come off it, you may well fall
asleep. If you take
crack
cocaine,
once you’ve run out of your supply, you’ll do anything to get your hands on
some more to prolong the experience. It’s the crack-cocaine addicts that rob
old ladies of their handbags and young girls of their mobile phones, not heroin
addicts; they’re more likely to beg, borrow or shoplift. The problem the
government hasn’t acknowledged is that Britain is now the crack-cocaine capital
of Europe, and if you want to set up an award for European drugs city of the
year, you wouldn’t have to look any further than Bradford. That city would win
first prize, year in and year out.’

‘Do you have a
solution to the problem?’ I ask.

‘We should go
down the Swiss route,’ William suggests. ‘They register addicts, who can report
to a doctor and immediately become part of a detox
programme
and get their fix of methadone or
subitrex
. The Swiss
recently held a referendum on the issue and the public voted overwhelmingly in
favour
of the registration of drug addicts and tackling the
problem head-on. Result: street crime has fallen by 68 per cent.’

Well, what do you know,
Mr
Blunkett
?

‘Do you also
want to learn about the National Health detox
programme
?’
asks William. I nod. ‘If you’re a heroin addict “on the out” and report your
addiction to a local GP, it will take you eight to ten weeks to get yourself
registered. However, if you commit a crime and are sent to prison, you don’t
have to wait, because you’ll be put on a detox
programme
the following morning.’ William pauses. ‘I’ve known addicts who’ve committed a
crime simply to ensure they get themselves into prison and onto detox
overnight.’

What about that, Home Secretary?

‘And worse,’
William continues, ‘most of the addicts “on the out” who go as far as getting
themselves registered, fail to turn up ten weeks later to begin the course,
because by then they’ve either lost interest, or are too far gone to care.’

Enter the Secretary of State for Health
.

William looks
around the room at the fifty or so workers packing their little plastic bags.

‘I can tell you
every one
in this room who’s on drugs, even the gear
they’re on, and it often only takes a glance. And you’d be surprised how many
of your friends “on the out”, even one or two of those who have been condemning
you recently, are among them.’

‘Taking
cannabis can hardly be described as a major crime,’ I suggest. ‘My bet is it
will be decriminalized in the not too distant future.’

‘I’m not
talking about cannabis, Jeffrey.

The biggest
crisis the government is facing today is the rapid growth of heroin addicts. I
can name three lords, two Members of Parliament, and two television
personalities who are on Class A drugs. I know because a member of my family
has been supplying them for years.’ He names all of them. Two I already knew
about, but the other five come as a surprise. ‘In theory they should all be in
jail along with you,’ he adds. Check on all the young criminals coming into
prison and you’ll begin to understand it’s a problem that few people,
especially the politicians, seem willing to face up to. ‘On your own spur
alone,’ he continues, ‘five of the lifers are on heroin, and still getting the
skag
delivered to them every week.’

‘How do they
manage that?’ I ask.

‘Mainly during
visits,’ he says, ‘mouth, backside, ears, even secreted in a woman’s hair.
Because of the Human Rights Act, prison searches are fairly cursory.’

‘But this is a
Double
A
Category high-security prison,’ I remind him.

‘That’s not a
problem if you’re desperate enough, and there’s nothing more desperate than a
heroin addict, even when he’s locked up in the segregation block.’

‘But how?’
I press him.

‘Don’t forget
that most A-cats are also remand prisons, and so have prisoners coming in and
out every day. If the new young criminals didn’t already know, it wouldn’t take
them long to discover the economics of supply and demand, especially when such
large sums of money are involved. A gram of heroin [a joey] may be worth forty
pounds on the street, but in here it can be split up into five bags and sold
for a couple of hundred. At those prices, some prisoners are willing to risk
swallowing a bag of heroin just before they’re taken down; then they simply
have to wait to retrieve it; after all, there’s a toilet in every cell. And,’
he adds, ‘my brother Rory can swallow a lump of heroin the size of a small
eraser – five hundred pounds in value – hold it in his throat and still carry
on a conversation. As soon as he’s safely back in his cell, he coughs it up.’

‘But despite
your brother’s unusual skill,’ I point out, ‘if, as you suggest, sixty per cent
of inmates are on drugs, you’ll need more than the odd prisoner who’s willing
to swallow a packet of heroin to satisfy the demand.’

‘True,’ said
William, ‘so stay alert during visits, Jeffrey, and you’ll notice how much
transferring of drugs is done by kissing. And whenever you see a baby dangling
on its mother’s knee, you can be sure the little offspring’s nappy will be full
of drugs. That’s how the visitor gets it into prison. The kissing is how it’s
transferred from visitor to inmate. And there are still a dozen or more ways of
getting the gear in, depending on which prison you’re sent to. If you ever spot
someone coming into jail wearing an Adidas tracksuit, look carefully at the
three stripes.

If you unstitch
just one of them, you can fill it with five hundred pounds’ worth of heroin.’

My only thought
is that I have an Adidas tracksuit in my cell.

‘My brother
Michael,’ continues William, ‘discovered that in some prisons
Waterstone’s
have the book franchise, so a friend of his
would select an obscure title, fill the spine with drugs, and then ask
Waterstone’s
to donate the book to the prison library.

Once it had
been placed on the shelf, Michael would take it out. Amazing how much heroin
you can get into the spine of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
.
But in my last nick,’ William continues, ‘the
Sun
’s page-three girl was the most popular method of getting the
skag
in, until the screws caught on.’

‘The page-three girl?’

‘You do know
what a page-three girl is, don’t you, Jeffrey?’ I nod. ‘Most A- and B-cat
prisons allow an inmate to order a morning paper from the local newsagent,’
continues William, ‘and because you’re locked up for twenty-two hours a day,
they even deliver them to your cell. One enterprising dealer “on the out”
supplied the entire prison’s needs, by sprinkling any orders all over the
page-three girl in the
Sun
. He would
then cut out another copy of the same photograph and seal it carefully over her
twin, making a thin bag of heroin. He ended up supplying a grand’s worth of
heroin a day to one prison, with an officer unwittingly delivering his wares to
the customer direct. He was making far more with his built-in customers than he
could ever hope to make “on the out”.’

‘But how did he
get paid?’

‘Oh, Jeffrey,
you’re so green. On every spur, on every block, in every prison, you’ll find a
dealer who has a supplier on the outside and he’ll know your needs within hours
of your being locked up.’

‘But that
doesn’t answer my question.’

‘You make an
order with your spur dealer,’ continues William, ‘say a gram of heroin a day.
He then tells you the name and address of his supplier, and you select someone
“on the out” to handle the payments. No standing orders, you understand, just
cash. In your case you could have your supply delivered under the
Scarfe
cartoon in the
Sunday
Times
.’ I laugh. ‘Or under the stamps on one of those large brown envelopes
you receive every day. You’d be surprised how much cocaine you can deposit
under four postage stamps. You watch the screws when the post arrives in the
morning.

They always run
a thumb over the stamps, but you can get a lot more in via the envelope.’

‘But they
always slit the envelopes open and look inside.’

‘I didn’t say
inside,’ said William. ‘You may have noticed that down the right-hand side of
most brown envelopes there’s a flap, which, if you lift carefully, you can fill
with heroin and then seal back down again. I know a man who has
Motor Magazine
sent in every week, but
it’s under the flap of the brown envelope that he’s getting his weekly fix.’

‘As soon as the
buzzer goes, I’m going to have to run back to my cell and write all this down,’
I tell him.

‘How do you
write your books?’ William enquires.

‘With a felt-tip pen.’

‘Lift the cap
off the bottom and you can get about fifty pounds’ worth of crack cocaine
stuffed in there, which is why the screws make you buy any writing implements
direct from the canteen.’

‘Keep going,’ I
say, having long ago given up sealing any plastic bags, but somehow William
manages to do that job for me as well.