THE narcotics trade provides the financial basis for almost every other form of organised criminality in this country and abroad. The scale is staggering: the global drugs market is worth UKP375 billion every year, and an estimated UKP7 billion a year in Britain alone. Britain spends a further UKP7 billion policing the drugs problem - and that's without the associated costs of imprisonment and public health and everything else.

It might not seem visible to the majority of ordinary, law abiding citizens, yet drugs and the gangsters who deal in them blight our towns and cities and dominate our criminal system. More than half the inmates in British prisons are there for drug-related offences.

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