UK Border Force recently seized tonnes of cocaine, which had a street value of $4.2 million (£3.2 million).
Over 3.7 tonnes of cocaine hidden within containers of 20 banana pallets were intercepted at Southampton Docks, off the southern coast of England.
The shipment arrived from Columbia on the 17th of March, where Border Force Officials, alongside the National Crime Agency (NCA), inspected the pallets and found five containing wrapped packages of white powder.
The mysterious powder tested positive for cocaine hydrochloride – which is used to make crack cocaine.
The UK’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, praised the seizure, saying: “This is the largest seizure of cocaine in the UK since 2015. It should serve as a warning to anyone trying to smuggle illegal drugs into the country that we are out to get them.
“A key focus of our Beating Crime Plan is disrupting the supply chain and relentless pursuit of the criminals peddling these narcotics, making the drugs market a low-reward high risk enterprise.
The police and Border Force have my 100 percent backing to use all available powers to stop devastating drugs from coming into our neighbourhoods and destroying lives.”
But not everyone believes that such aggressive criminalization of drugs is the best way to combat the harm that they can cause.
Ray Lakeman, who sadly lost both of his sons to an MDMA overdose in 2014, has since campaigned for drugs to be legalized in the UK.
Speaking in 2021, Mr. Lakeman said: “My boys died six years ago, and since then, 25,000 people have died from Class A drugs in the UK, over 4,000 a year. It’s more than people die on the road.”
He further commented on Patel’s celebration of another large drug bust, as he continued:
“She’s crowing, ‘We’ve seized this, it will slow everything down.’ That’s not the story. The story is that there is a demand for cocaine, there is a demand for these drugs, and freezing it is not going to stop it.
It’s a product, people actually want it, and unless governments understand that, you can never stop it. If people want it, they’ll find a way to get it, and people will find a way of providing it.”
A drug liberalization group, called Transform, published a book that outlines how the government could sell drugs, such as cocaine or ecstasy, in pharmacies.
By making these drugs available to purchase over the counter, limits and warnings can be placed on the drugs, and specially trained chemists can be employed. Transform also proposed that if illegal narcotics were to become available as an over-the-counter product, there should be no advertising or branding.
Although there are undoubtedly challenges surrounding the legalization of drugs, many, such as Ray Lakeman, argue the current criminalization policy does little to deter people from using illegal substances, which is evidenced by the continued number of drug-related deaths in the UK.
But it seems very unlikely that the UK will follow in the footsteps of Portugal, which decriminalized drugs back in 2020, as the Policing Minister, Kit Malthouse, expressed that the government had ‘no plans’ to legalize drugs.
Speaking in 2021, Malthouse said:
“Illegal drugs can devastate communities and destroy lives, and the government has no plans to legalize them – we must prevent drug misuse in our communities and support people through treatment and recovery.
We have recently announced a £148 million ($194 million) package aimed at dismantling the organised criminal gangs who encourage this terrible trade, helping those in drug treatment and recovery therapy to stop drug-related crime, and dealing with the significant health-related harms drugs pose.”
