Heaven

DAY 216 TUESDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2002

10.00 am

Mr Beaumont dismissed the charges against Chris and David as a farm worker came forward to say he’d given them permission to take the potatoes and the cabbage.

2.07 pm

As part of my preparation for talking to children about the dangers and consequences of drugs, I have a visit from a police officer attached to the Lincolnshire drug squad. Her name is Karen Brooks. She’s an attractive, thirty-five-year-old blonde, and single mother of two. I mention this only to show that she is normal. Karen has currently served two and a half years of a four-year assignment attached to the drug squad, having been a member of the force for the past fourteen years: hardly the TV image of your everyday drug officer.

She gives me a tutorial lasting just over an hour, and perhaps her most frightening reply to my endless questions – and she is brutally honest – is that she has asked to be transferred to other duties as she can no longer take the day-to-day strain of working with drug addicts.

Karen admits that although she enjoys her job, she wishes she’d never volunteered for the drugs unit in the first place, because the mental scars will remain with her for the rest of her life.

Her son, aged twelve, is a pupil at one of the most successful schools in Lincolnshire, and has already been offered drugs by a fourteen-year-old. This is not a deprived school in the East End of London, but a first-class school in Lincolnshire.

Karen then tells a story that brings her almost to tears. She once arrested a twelve-year-old girl from a middle-class, professional family for shoplifting a pair of socks from Woolworth’s. The girl’s parents were horrified and assured Karen it wouldn’t happen again. Two years later the girl was arrested for stealing from a lingerie shop, and was put on probation. When they next met, the girl was seventeen, going on forty. Three years of experimentation with marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin, and a relationship with a twenty-year-old drug dealer, had taken their toll. The girl died last month at the age of eighteen. The dealer is still alive – and still dealing.

As Karen gets ready to leave, I ask her how many officers are attached to the drug squad.

‘Five,’ she replies, ‘which means that only about 10 per cent of our time is proactive, while the other 90 per cent is reactive.’ She says that she’ll visit me again in two weeks’ time.