Cocaine users may be in your workplace; are you and your organisation facing up to that?
Do you even know what the drug-user of 2008 looks like and uses? The recent quarterly meeting of Ex Police In Commerce (EPIC) heard a hard-hitting talk from the front line.
Steve Holmes stressed: "Cocaine users are normal people. You employ 200 people, relatively young, they are coming into work on a Monday morning, they are doing nothing because they have been awake all weekend using cocaine and amphetamine." Or they may not come into work at all. Or they are in a nasty temper because they are using steroids; or maybe using cocaine and steroids. "So, major problems in the workplace, because it is normal people in work, using the drugs of choice now."
Snorting kit
He is an experienced drugs detective – he joined the police as a cadet in 1969. His pay these days is partly paid by the Home Office; among his work has been on ‘drug mapping’ to look more closely at drugs markets. He warned that takers of stimulants – cocaine and amphetamines – are holding down ‘good’ jobs, going to work under the influence of drugs, and using drugs at work. He stressed that use of drugs can be by anyone, anywhere, and harder to spot and nothing to do with the stereotypical picture of a ‘junkie’. Users can take cocaine in a pub toilet, or in the gents of a football stadium or at a horse race meeting – Steve saying that cocaine use at football matches by fans is a ‘massive problem’. Evidence is a ‘snorting kit’ available on the internet of a razor blade, flat surface and other portable things needed to take cocaine if a flat surface (like some makes of toilet roll dispenser) are not to hand. Something else to look out for; the cocaine ‘bullet’ about the size of a short cigar, that the drug-user can use like an optic, or drop onto a flat surface.
Junkies
Drinking alcohol with cocaine prolongs and enhances the effect of both, Steve went on. Both makes a user nasty, obnoxious and violent. Together, they make you more violent, ‘and nobody is talking about cocaine and violent crime’. And as for blaming the ‘junkie’, Steve argued that the junkie was already a burglar before he became a burglar. And maybe as a junkie he would do fewer burglaries, as heroin makes you lazy, and it’s easier to take £10 off your mother or go shoplifting and sell produce for £10 in the nearest pub.
Steroids
And moving beyond these best-known drugs, Steve spoke of steroids, that have gone from performance enhancers for sportsmen to ‘image enhancers’ for young men, and available in gyms and over the internet. In another example of how such mild stimulants are not for the ‘junkie’ stereotype, Steve added that young women may take them, such as horse riders, for slimming. He spoke of police officers in gyms getting involved with such drugs and then being corrupted, because by using such semi-legal steroids and mixing with the criminal sellers, sooner or later the officer will be asked for a ‘favour’. Steroids, too, make a user nasty and controlling, and can lead to domestic violence.
Heroin slump
Good news is that heroin demand is in a slump all over the country; the market is flooded and the price has fallen because nobody wants it, and there are no new users. It’s costing £5 or £10 – as dealers will only take notes and won’t deal in change – and the purity has shot up. Nor has crystal meth – despite scare stories in the media, and warnings from the US date from 1990, Steve reported – really got a grip in the UK. It will only get a grip, he suggested, if ACPO and the press keep talking about it and people think it’s a drug to try. Yet, he went on, ACPO set up a working group about that drug, ‘about a problem they haven’t got’, while there is no working group about cocaine, ‘which there is a big problem with’.
Police ‘lie’
Steve did some plain speaking about the police’s work against drugs: "We talk a good talk and we lie to the press, like everybody is, but we have totally given up on drugs enforcement. Every now and then we will smash a few doors and put something in the press." He reported a police attitude of not doing something about drug crimes, and so being better able to reach crime reduction targets. He also spoke disparagingly of the police’s national intelligence model; and of regional meetings across force boundaries that however do not tally with where the cities the dealers actually are in. it was, as he confessed, a ‘moan’ about problems that nobody was talking about or interested in doing anything about. He recalled how the Met Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair had spoken of middle-class cocaine users, otherwise law-abiding, at the proverbial Hampstead dinner party. Steve wondered what had become of that. As for the ‘war on drugs’, Steve countered that the law had not won the war on burglary: "We will never win any of the wars; there will always be liars, thieves and drug users."
Dogs and protocols
EPIC members from their questions and observations were plainly alive to the many implications for the corporate security manager. How to check staff, in the workplace? Steve questioned if employers had the will to do it. The larger employers, particularly, asked police ‘sporadically’ for protocols, or for sniffer dogs; but not in general. To set up a protocol about drugs and alcohol in the workplace, or to swab surfaces to check for traces of illegal drugs, was easy, he suggested: "It’s just selling it to the company; how it’s going to impact them. Productivity will be the thing to sell it on."
In the navy
From the floor, Rod Repton (a former Derbyshire Police detective chief inspector who among other things set up his force’s drug profit confiscation) asked if drug use in the police and armed forces was swept under the carpet. Drug testing is coming to police forces; but if it’s urine, and those being tested are told in advance, ‘it’s never going to catch anybody,’ the meeting heard. There are (inevitably?!) on the internet tips on how to pass a drugs test, and you can even buy a false penis, so that you get a mate’s (drug-clean) urine and pump it out, at the right body temperature. To guard against that, the testers have to watch the urine sampler being given!? And there was food for thought: if you test staff hair for drugs – and traces linger longest in your hair – what are we to make of people who ar shaven headed?
Nothing wrong
Steve returned to his point: that 18 to 22-year-old men and women do not see anything wrong with weekend use of such drugs. They can afford it; but here Steve made a link to credit card debts. If cocaine costs £40 a gram, and the young person wants it, they will get money from their credit or debit card. In arguably his most revealing comment of all, Steve said that he had stopped asking probationer police if they were on drugs; because he was frightened of the answer.
Temp can trip up employer
What of screening and vetting staff, in the working world painted by Steve Holmes of young people seeing nothing wrong with taking illegal, mood-changing drugs, though the influences linger into the working week? Chairing the EPIC meeting was Nigel Spencer-Knott, a former Met Police chief superintendent who has since set up Who’s Really Who?, offering pre-employment screening to verify staff. Briefly, appearances can be deceptive; employment histories can be falsified; qualifications can be fabricated; identities can be assumed; references can be concocted; and professionals can be impersonated. The company website www.whosreallywho.co.uk has a page of cases, some well-known, some not so. Inevitably, drugs can come into it. A sign of how illegal drugs are like it or not an accepted (even celebrated?) part of UK 2008 came from the EPIC member who raised at the meeting the fact that the singer Amy Winehouse was on film (and newly on a national newspaper’s website) taking drugs and firing up a crack pipe. Equally, to take a case on Nigel Spencer-Knott’s website: a teacher who handed around cannabis to pupils on a school trip and whose boys went to his house, also to smoke joints. Even after the declassifying of cannabis, what would the school say to parents?! As Nigel’s website puts it: “Ignorance gets employers into trouble.”
Nigel raised with Professional Security the temp. “Often they come in at a middling level and often they aren’t screened because they are not deemed a threat; or they aren’t going to be in long enough. But in fact they are a threat, because somebody hands [to the temp] keys to the office; the entry code; their password. The big issue, I have found, where there is a maternity leave temporary assignment, if it is one of the financial team, they do get to know quite a lot of thngs about how the company is run and the very fact that he or she is an accountant would suggest this is an intelligent person.” And a temp’s fraud or misuse of corporate property can snowball? Nigel agreed. For one thing, thanks to the ‘memory stick’, it’s easy to download and take away company data.
Other evidence of the threats by temporary members of staff came at last year’s British Retail Consortium crime conference in London. Ady Houghton of frozen food retailer Iceland described how years of data mining had brought lessons about checkout fraud by cashiers. He spoke of an offender’s ‘greed curve’. "A lot of fraud starts by accident not because they are immediately trying to defraud you. They realise they aren’t challenged. It then escalates very quickly. The value of fraud can multiply by a factor of three each week. They get greedy very quickly."
