The Met Police this week celebrated a significant milestone in the fight against county lines drug dealing. A total of 1,000 charges had been brought in just over a year against criminals exploiting children and young people to sell their drugs for them. This is great news, and great progress, but sadly that number was exceeded by the number of youngsters enslaved by drug dealers just the year before, estimated by drug reform charity Transform to be 1,173.
County lines is a modern take on a method that’s as old as crime itself. An adult befriends a child, beguiles them into running little errands, doing small favours, which escalate into criminal acts accompanied by increasing degrees of threats and violence. Think Fagin and Oliver Twist, but less humane and humorous. Perhaps more Bill Sykes, but without a Nancy.
The criminal activity in county lines is the selling of drugs. The lines are phone lines, mostly multiple pay-as-you-go varieties. The counties are anywhere outside the major cities. Anywhere that has vulnerable people who use drugs in need of supplies, which, let’s face it, is anywhere. Children are forced to carry drugs and money, most often by ‘plugging’ them anally, and then putting them onto trains – or, when these emptied in lockdown leaving youngsters more visible, in hire cars or ubers – then forcing them to stay till they’ve sold the drugs, made the money, and they’re allowed back home to hand it over. Their home in the meantime will often be that of a vulnerable adult, someone with a substance use disorder, or a learning disability.
The success of enforcement from the capital’s police is a result, at least in part, of a change of tactics, pursuing the phones themselves and their adult users rather than the children doing the running. Those convicted can now be sentenced under the Modern Slavery Act, meaning their status in prison, as (usually) men who are there for grooming and exploiting children, is on the lower end of the scale.
There have been many strides forward, much money and time invested, and multi-agency partnerships strengthened in the fight to free children from this particular form of criminal exploitation. This most recent victory deserves celebration, but there’s sadly so much more that needs to be done.
Our work, as a drugs education charity, is at the demand end. The supply end will sadly, almost certainly, remain as resilient as a cockroach, reinventing its tactics and adapting its approaches as long as the demand provides it with a ready and willing market. Most of the drugs supplied through county lines are of course to older, longer term users of drugs, people whose addiction to substances has stolen so much from them over many years. Not the teenagers that are our target audience.
But if we do our job as well as is possible with these teenagers, and their parents, and teachers, then we have hope that each year there’ll be fewer young people growing up into another generation with a demand for drugs that keeps going as they grow older. Fewer lives damaged and lost, and less demand ready to be met by whatever means makes most profit for suppliers, whatever the cost to children. And so we keep going, and growing, and doing all we can, with evidence-based drugs education – wherever we can, whenever and however we can – because this matters in so many multiple directions, and we believe it makes a difference.
