News / ‘It’s the Wild West now’ – former undercover police officer calls for drug reform
Activist Neil Woods says drug dog charity are ‘actually part of the problem’
CHARITIES like Dogs Against Drugs “should be stopped” because they are causing more harm than good, according to a major activist on drug reform.
Neil Woods spent 14 years as an undercover police officer, infiltrating some of Britain’s most dangerous drug-dealing gangs, before leaving the force and pivoting to become one of the UK’s biggest advocates for the controlled sale of drugs like cannabis.
Woods is in Shetland this week to speak at a Shetland Greens event at Islesburgh tonight (Friday) about the war on drugs, and the futility of the current prohibition laws.
Speaking to Shetland News earlier in the week, Woods said initiatives like Dogs Against Drugs are “literally irrelevant to the drug market” and stated his belief that sniffer dogs “need to be eradicated”.
“They’re [Dogs Against Drugs] actually part of the problem,” he said.
“They are not reducing the size of the market, not impacting the demand, so therefore it’s having no impact.
“I know why people support it, because they’ve seen the harm drugs cause – I understand that.
“But there are many examples of people dying at festivals from swallowing their drugs because they’ve seen the sniffer dogs and feared being caught.
“People coming off the ferry and seeing those dogs there, or coming through the airport, it’s an accident waiting to happen. That’s an unacceptable risk, it should be stopped.
“There are ways of saving lives that are based on evidence, and the money that goes into those dogs could be spent on evidence-based methods of saving lives.”
Woods began working as an undercover police officer in 1993, and said he had doubts “fairly early on” about how successful and ethical the work was.
“The trouble is when you’re in a team of hard-working cops who have an end goal of catching the bad guy, you stay driven, and you stay driven as a team,” he said.
“It’s very difficult to voice or act on doubts, so I pushed them to one side. And always I was thinking the end justified the means.
“I realised I was causing harm to vulnerable people, people who were using drugs problematically and needed help. I knew this, but I still carried on doing it because I decided the end justified the means.”
However in 2007, 14 years after Woods started infiltrating drug gangs, he said it “eventually dawned” on him that no matter how successful the operations were, they were still not preventing the spread of drugs through communities.
“The impact is always extremely negative,” he told Shetland News.
“You get rid of a gang, you create a gap in a market, especially in an urban area.
“The result is an increase in violence, because you create a gap and it’s fought over. The result is an increase in consumption.
“If two gangs come in and they’re not competing with violence, they compete with price. When you get price wars as a direct result of police success, consumption goes up.”
Woods is in Shetland after being invited by Green councillor Alex Armitage to speak at an event entitled Keeping Shetland Safe?: Exposing the War on Drugs.
A two-time author, Woods has made a name for himself as a public speaker across the political spectrum and in countries round the world, as well as a board member for Law Enforcement Action Partnership (Leap) in both America and the UK.
He called Armitage, who has also advocated for a reform of the current drug laws in this country and works as a paediatrician, “one of the intellectuals behind drug policy in Britain”.
The former police officer thinks it will take a “courageous politician” in government to push for drug change – and he said in Shetland “you have a courageous politician” in Armitage.
He thinks there has been an “accelerating shift” in the last decade towards drug reform.
“Many politicians don’t realise they are behind the public now,” Woods said.
“Change can come very, very quickly. What we’re talking about is control, taking control away from criminals.
“It’s the Wild West now, there is no control. Criminals decide what drugs can be sold to who, and how old they are.
“This is about protecting children with age restrictions, and quality control. We just need the political will.”
“The majority of the British public have had enough of the war on drugs.” – Neil Woods
He pointed to the success of the introduction of legal cannabis in North America, saying that underage consumption had dropped in every state in the USA and Canada that had brought it in.
“That’s solid, solid proof that legal regulation protects our young better than prohibition,” he added.
“We need to get a move on, because it will come, but we need to get a move on because the sooner we can do it the sooner we can cripple organised crime.”
Woods is also strongly critical of Police Scotland announcements about drug seizures. He calls them “evidence of long-term failure, not evidence of success”.
He was talking on a day that Police Scotland proclaimed it had seized £8 million worth of drugs from the beginning of May to mid-June.
“Every single year there’s a new record seizure,” Woods said.
“Every single year seizures go up, but hang on – isn’t that evidence of the market increasing?
“Any senior police officer needs to be asked – will this reduce crime, will this reduce drug crime, will this reduce overdoses?
“The answers are no, no and no. Police need challenging when they claim these things as successes.
“We’re trapped in this propaganda loop where people are led to believe the current system works. It takes a community to say no, let’s look at the evidence and let’s see what works best.”
Woods said he was “mocked” and “isolated” by fellow police officers after daring to challenge the idea that the current drug laws were not working.
After becoming a drug reform activist, Woods took part in a 2013 article for Vice magazine – and said he received “masses of hate mail” in response.
“I was a whistleblower betraying secrets, letting the side down, all that kinda things.
“Then I published my memoir Good Cop, Bad War, and since then I’ve only had messages of support.
“The movement within policing against prohibition is massive now. There are many, many senior and rank and file cops in Scotland who support reform.
“The reality is the majority of the British public have had enough of the war on drugs.”
Woods will give a talk about his time in policing and his views on reforming the current drugs laws at tonight’s Scottish Greens event from 7pm-9pm at Islesburgh in Lerwick.
He pointed people towards the Anyone’s Child campaign, which was created by families advocating for safer drug use. The charity will mark its 10th anniversary next week by marching on parliament to call for an urgent review of the Misuse of Drugs Act.
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