Author: Philip Bean
ISBN No: 1 903240 36 0
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Willan Publishing, Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT. Ring 01884 840337
Year of publication:
Brief:
Drugs and crime are bound together - any security professional can quote you anecdotal chapter and verse.
Drugs and crime are bound together – any security professional can quote you anecdotal chapter and verse. A new study by Philip Bean won’t help security managers deal with drug-related crime, but it’s your best bet for understanding it. The very title, Drugs and Crime, suggests a link between the two, and Bean opens by saying: ‘An out of control male drug user is likely to commit 80 to 100 serious property offences per year’. But is it that simple – stop drug addicts and you stop crime? Maybe not, says Prof Bean, a Loughborough University criminologist. If some drug abusers say they are forced to burgle and shoplift to pay for their habit, how come many club-going ecstasy users do not? This is a highly impressive, realistic book covering all the bases – how the UK criminal justice system deals with drug offenders (the latest bright idea, drug treatment and testing orders, won’t work, Bean says), the global trafficking and laundering, the policing of drug markets, and use of informers. Traffickers corrupt everybody in their path from police (and presumably security managers) to bank tellers and port staff. The drugs trade generates £73b a year. Bean explodes the idea that legalising all drugs would end the trafficker violence – traffickers would simply try to undercut legal supplies, or distribute cigarettes or counterfeits.
Relevant to security managers is Bean’s quoting of Roy Clark’s writing on corrupting of UK police officers – or rather the change from a successful, honest police officer being in control of the informer and offender, to the offender being in control of him (seldom a her). Drugs, corruption and informers seem to go together, Bean notes … something for security managers coming across any drug abuse on their patch to scribble on a Post-It note to themselves. Bean impressed me so much, his optimistic last chapter – ‘we do not have to live with high [substance abuse] levels any more than we have to live with high crime rates’ – heartened me. ‘Just say no’ campaigns, fines, probation and prison don’t work, Bean says. Treatment, testing and supervision of the addicts who burgle again and again only to fuel armed dealers’ in-fighting on inner city streets might work. Yet treatment might turn drug-using thieves into non-drug-using thieves. Inner cities are decayed already. This book on drugs is sobering indeed.
