Cocaine Inc. (Bonus) - Question Time

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.

I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques.

for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's Plan for Change on the McDonald's website.

Hi there, it's Fiona Hamilton here, Chief Reporter at The Times. Thanks for listening to cocaine ink, our investigation into the cocaine business, from the coca farmers to international money laundering networks. If you haven't listened to all eight episodes, this episode will have spoilers for the whole series. So press pause on this and come back after listening to it all. And for those who have, we'll be answering your questions today. So thanks for getting in touch.

Joining me are my two fellow reporters on this series. Stephen Drill from News Corp Australia. Hey there, Stephen. Hey, here you go. Not too bad. Thank you. And here we also have David Collins, Northern Editor at the Sunday Times. Hi, David. Hi, Fiona. Hi, guys. How's everyone doing?

I'm good. Good thanks. It's a lovely wet evening here in Melbourne. I feel a little bit like I'm in London today. Well, it's a wet day here in London, which it has been for several days in a row. So how's it going in the North, David? I can confirm a hat trick. It's raining in Manchester, but it always rains in Manchester. It literally always rains in Manchester. It's just a standard day here.

Right. So I think today we're going to get straight into listeners questions. We've had some really good questions and we've had some voice notes. So let's start with one of them. We're going to play the clip to you. This is Anne in Sheffield in the north of England. Is she going to say, I really like the podcast, apart from that David Collins? He's quite annoying. How did you know the first question?

Hi guys, I've been really enjoying your podcasts and just heard you shout out for questions, so here's one for you. I've been wondering what happens to the cocaine and other things when they get seized like money and weapons. Where does it all end up? So Anne's asking, what happens to the illegal items like cocaine, cash and weapons that get seized by the authorities? Steven, I'd like to go to you first on this one. Is this something you spoke to the authorities about?

Yeah, I've actually been in a warehouse in an Australian capital city. I won't say exactly where it is because there are places all around the country where there's millions of dollars worth of cars, which are being stored. So these are criminals cars and they're the places they call them restrained. They're not seized. They've restrained until accused criminals go through the courts and then

Those cars, if they are actually found to be processed with crime, they get sold and that money goes towards crime prevention. So that's just cars, but there's also real estate that gets seized, like millions of dollars worth of houses. And then the cocaine itself, there's actually a bit of an issue with that. A lot of times they want to try and stop cocaine from getting to Australia, because it costs quite a bit of money to dispose of, like actually getting rid of the cocaine itself and some of those drugs is quite expensive.

Well, actually that's interesting because I found an amazing story in Antwerp from a few years back where they have to burn all the coke that they're seizing and they were seizing dozens and dozens of tons of coke and the gangs were actually trying to steal it back before they could get the chance to burn it all.

because it was not the quickest process. And so the authorities there were trying to thwart midnight raids by armed gangs into warehouses and they had to move all the product into high security warehouses and put on armed guards themselves. So it added a sort of another aspect to an already pretty momentous task that they were addressing.

David, yourself, when you were investigating the Sunshine and Lollipops Money Laundering Group, did the National Crime Agency tell you anything about what happens to the cash they can seize? I think it's exactly the same. It's taken under the Proceeds of Crime Act, and it can be put back into law enforcement. That's with the cash.

The cocaine, it's interesting. Someone was telling me that one of the issues with cocaine is it doesn't burn very well. I don't know if you guys have ever heard that, but apparently cocaine, like they put it in these incinerators, but it's actually quite hard to burn. So it takes a long time to do, and it's expensive as well. So the only do it at certain times when they've, I think, built up a certain amount of it that they can then put through for kind of

I think for expenses reasons. Yeah, and presumably just finding the space to be able to do something like that. It's a pretty big endeavour when you're talking about huge, huge stashes of illegal drugs.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I was reading this mad story where there was a country, I think it's Ecuador, where they'd see so much of the stuff. They couldn't literally burn it because there wasn't enough time in the incinerators in the country. They just couldn't manage the volume. So they went to the UN office of drugs and crime and said, what do we do with all this coke? And basically, the UN gave them this recipe to make it into concrete.

So the end you end up with like this like cocaine paste where you can like there's literally buildings in Ecuador apparently built with like blocks which have cocaine in them. And it's a way to dispose. I've never heard of that before. That's a new version of cocaine breaks.

OK, so on to the next question. This one is from Tabby in Sydney. Thanks, Tabby. Why do the reporters go to such dangerous places to do this kind of work and not just leave it to the police? So, Stephen, what do you make of that question?

That's a really good question. It's one that I've had to sort of talk to my family about. When I went to Columbia, I didn't actually tell my mum. I just said, I'm just going to the US, then I disappeared for a couple of weeks and told her after I got back. But we have to do these stories because it actually brings to life really what is happening with the cocaine trade and what is one of the real victims of it. And without knowing,

what these stories are. People who go out on their Saturday night and take cocaine and think, oh, it's a victimless crime. They'll never know. And look, this may not change anyone's behaviour, but if you don't actually try, then nothing changes at all.

Yeah, and also I thought what was really a very interesting aspect of your reporting, not only the human cost in Latin America and the way the trade works, but also sometimes the police put a lot of gloss on their seizures and the impact that they're having. And the reality is somewhat different. And I think without journalists going and taking risks like such as what you've done and telling those stories, we can't really leave the whole narrative to them alone.

Yeah, and that's the hard thing. It does take a lot of time and effort to get these trips going and they're hard to organise, but you do need to be there on the ground to talk to people when that's not just a press release, when you can actually speak to people directly. What did your mom say when you told her the truth?

Yeah, she was a bit confused. She's 82, so she was like, I mean, I did actually, I got a second life insurance policy to be quite honest, because I was just like, well, you never know, just because we went in helicopters as well. And yeah, she wasn't super happy. Well, I sort of was like, yeah, it's fine. But then when I actually did go, she was not super happy either. But it's going to be done. I'm sure you brought it around now. You banned from going back to Columbia.

No, I bought like lots of t-shirts. I bought t-shirts from back and really brought colorful ones from the markets there to buy off the kids. So I was all right. But yes, I think I'm banned from Colombia for a little while. And David, you went to Dubai. Can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges of reporting there and why you went there yourself and didn't just tell the authorities in Dubai what you'd found and leave them to crack on?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's the same similar to what Stephen's just said. You know, I do think with this sort of report, you've got to be there, you've got to be on the ground, you've got to be speaking to people. You know, there's a lot of reasons for that. You know, you get the truth from the person's mouth if you do that rather than through press releases or kind of through a PR office. But also it brings the story to life.

You know, you can kind of cover the story of cocaine from quite a dry academic point of view and like a policy point of view, which I always just think the power of journalism is in storytelling and telling something in an engaging way. We're not just talking about law enforcement and what they're doing in Columbia. We're hearing from them. You know, we're not just talking about corrupt port workers in Rotterdam. You know, you're with one who's telling us

And I do think there's a power in that, specifically on Dubai. I didn't necessarily feel at risk, you know, or in danger as such. It was more kind of the danger came from being identified by the UAE government.

as a reporter kind of doing undercover work. There's not many media organizations have done that sort of work in Dubai. So somebody told me earlier on it was one of our foreign correspondence. Dubai feels safe and everything's great until it's not.

And that was kind of in my head a lot. It's kind of one of those where, yeah, it's all fine. It's great tourists go every year. It's not a problem until a police officer taps you on the shoulder and says, are you recording something? You know, that was always in our mind. Yeah.

I think it really shows the importance of being there and actually probably leads us quite nicely into our next question, where we're going to stay in Australia for a question from Toby in Adelaide, who asks, did you think about glamourising crime when you were making the podcast? And is that always a risk of this kind of podcast?

So I might start this one off. I've covered crime for many years and I think that that's probably a consideration in most of the stories that we do. I've always been mindful that you don't want to glorify the people behind these crimes. But like we've been talking about, it's a balance. You've got to get the information out there. You've got to tell the stories and you've got to make the podcast as interesting and as engaging as you possibly can.

I think that's why we made a decision right from the beginning that we're not going to just look at the violence, we're going to step back, we're going to look at the business structure, how the whole business operates globally, felt that that could be a constructive way to look at the industry and see if that would offer new insight. And I thought a good example probably of that is actually David, your stuff, your brilliant episode on Ellie Edwards.

Now, you didn't go into the glorification of the gangs behind that case. It was a really carefully done episode on the terrible human cost behind their crimes. Was that something that you really took seriously as well? I mean, I think those things, as we know, you know, we've all reported on crime for a long time and it's kind of, you know, I think as long as you do it, you've always got the back of mind, you know, the victim, you make it victim-led or you always have the victims in mind.

And certainly that episode, you know, it's about giving Tim a voice. How the gangs work themselves is of interest to us, isn't it? We're talking about the structure of them and how they work economically and how they make their money. But I think, yeah, totally, you're right. It's about striking a balance. It's about not glorifying the lifestyle that comes with it. And I thought, actually, in one of the episodes where

Paul Wamsley, who was one of Liverpool's biggest drug dealers, I asked him, how many drug dealers out of 100 do you think get away with it? And he said, none, which I thought was an amazing answer, because I was just like, wow, do you really think that? He's like, yeah, none. Not seeing it always catches up. And you're always looking behind you, waiting for it to catch up. Yeah. And what about you, Steven?

Yeah, that was one of my major concerns with this because it is such a big project. And I mean, if you look at shows on Netflix like Narcos or Griselda or those sort of things, it's almost gratuitous violence. And that's what I sort of wanted to try to avoid. And one of the interviews that I was sort of most moved by was when we spoke to Jose Fernando Carreira, the police officer in Colombia, who lost his legs to a landmine. And that interview is probably one of the

best interviews I've done in my 20 year journalism career. I actually was almost moved to tears when I was speaking to him because he's just so positive when he's got every right to not be positive. He had every right to be angry and he sort of managed to sort of.

as best he could move on from it. But it just struck me. He put a pretty good positive spin on it when I spoke to him. But when I was having lunch with a couple of other police a few days later in Colombia, I mentioned that I'd spoken to him. And they actually were there that day. They were his colleagues on that raid and the looks on their faces as they explained what happened. It was just horrendous. This guy was like, watch, and it was five years later.

He was just, yeah, he said they were under heavy gunfire after the landmine went off and it went on for about half an hour following and just getting that inside into exactly what it's really like for people and for police officers there and it was just pretty humbling.

Yeah, and I think telling stories from that perspective and really avoiding the glorification and just showing that human cost is so important. I don't know if it's true of Australia. There's a real debate about this in Britain at the moment, and we see that with dramatisation of some crimes. And you get a whole spectrum, you get the kind of true crime, which really feels like it's glorifying stuff.

But then there's some really thoughtful productions. It's totally away from the drugs trade, but there was an ITN drama about the Yorkshire Ripper. It was several episodes. It barely mentioned Peter Sutcliffe until the last episode, and it was all about the victims and the police officers and the police investigation. I thought it was a really interesting narrative change, actually, and perhaps people are getting a bit sick of these things being exaggerated and glorified, and victims being

made victims over and over again in the retelling of their stories and I think that's something that we really tried to avoid here and do in a sensitive way. It's interesting, isn't it, with true crime? True crime is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as there's a public interest to it, or it doesn't go too far in the glorification. But if you can ask yourself what the public interest is, which I think we could all answer with this podcast in different ways, then that's a good test.

Absolutely. Let's jump straight into another question. We've got another voice note and this time it's from Kathy in Sydney. Hey guys, I'm listening from Australia. I really enjoyed the podcast. It's actually got me questioning a little bit this war on drugs that we're always hearing about in the media and we're hearing about it from the police too. I'm wondering are the police telling you guys anything different than what we're hearing in the public through the media about the war on drugs?

And is the media responsible for making it seem like this kind of war on drugs is the only option or that it's working? Because it kind of doesn't seem like it is. What do you reckon? So we've all covered crime for a while. We've got our fair share of contacts. Steven, do you want to take that one first?

Yeah, I think this is a difficult one to answer because the war on drugs isn't working because you can still buy drugs everywhere here in Australia and presume it's the same in the UK, but it was when I was there a few years ago.

I think one of the things that would suggest that the police are doing something in Australia is that it costs so much here. It's about $300 a gram, at least, for cocaine in Australia sometimes. Some people say they pay $500, which is about 300 quid. It's a fair bit of money, so it's restricting some of the supply and keeping those prices high, which means that people are using a fair bit less of it.

But I think we're never going to stop organized crime. There's always going to be somebody who is wanting to make cash when people are willing to pay sort of top dollar. It's about trying to reduce the number of key figures. I mean, because I would rather hundred drug dealers with a million dollars each than one drug dealer with a hundred million dollars.

And what we've seen in the last 10 years or so is that there's fewer and fewer bigger players. And that raises bigger problems of corruption and whether they can affect politics in Australia. Yeah, it's really interesting. And I mean, when I speak to my contacts in the police and wider law enforcement about the war on drugs and they're talking privately, I mean, I think they're proud of some of their operations, the way that they're utilizing technology and data and

and thinking of more complex ways to try and track gangs and thwart gangs. But there's definitely an acceptance that it really is a game of whack-a-mole and it's a problem that is infinitely bigger than the police and that until people stop using these drugs or there's some major development that that entails the trade or there's some

I don't know, breakthrough in policy that it will really be ever thus. And I do think they're very resigned to that. And that's why almost invariably when you interview someone about this stuff, they will always make that point that they can't stop it. I mean, is that your experience as well, David?

Yeah, I'd say that's pretty fair. It's slightly different to Australia, isn't it, in the cost of cocaine, a gram, say, is 50, 60 quid, which is, although it's not cheap, it's probably not as expensive as in Australia, but then it has to go a lot further, doesn't it, out to Australia, from South America, so the cost is added on. As a positive,

The one thing I do think the UK is good at is control over money because we've got quite strict money laundering laws. It is difficult to loan the money for criminals in the UK. It's not easy. They can get the drugs in. They can sell them. But what did you do with the money?

You don't even stick in cash and suitcases to go out to Dubai with it. That's quite a cumbersome thing to do, isn't it? If you could put all those millions into the UK banking system, then they would. So it's kind of in a weird way. It does show that it's working and when I speak to law enforcement,

You know, for example, banks are very good at flagging when people are coming in with large amounts of money. Just on this story, I spoke to different hat and gardens, gold dealers, just to see how tight it is. And they were saying that they don't even take, some of them don't even take cash anymore, because the banks won't accept it. I do think that we do get some of it right.

Well, absolutely. And then it's about the different radical ways, I suppose, in which that could potentially be tackled, which leads me nicely into another voice note. This one's from Sam in Ilkley in the north of England. Hi, guys. Just want to say firstly, great pod. But as I was listening, it just struck me that surely the only real way to disrupt the criminals and interrupt the money train, et cetera, is to legalize

cocaine, educate, regulate, tax, even the government can keep tabs on how strong everything is. It takes the cartels completely out the picture, just like back in the day when alcohol was prohibited and alcohol came on the scene and all that as soon as they regulated it again.

that completely gets rid of that element. It's 2024 now. They've been fighting the war on drugs since the early 70s and obviously failing. People are going to take cocaine, whether it's legal or not, so you might as well regulate it. Right. Thanks a lot, guys. Cheers, mate.

So Sam's basically addressing this issue and questioning if you can't curb demand, then is legalization the answer? And that way governments can regulate and tax cocaine while also taking cocaine out of the cartel's hands. Is the theory? We've had loads of comments and questions about legalization. What do you both think? Stephen, can I go to you first?

Yeah, it's an interesting point. I actually was having chat in Colombia with someone, a local there and they've raised to the point of, well, 50 years ago or even 20, 30 years ago, marijuana was illegal and it was also grown in Colombia and there was crop spraying and that was all a real issue. And now 24 states in America have legalized cannabis. So things can change. I think the only way for it to really work is if America

actually change the rules because if if say Columbia legalizes cocaine well the first thing would happen is that they will be banned from the banking system straight out America would say no that's not happening so it's going to be it would have to be a global change all at once and I mean God you guys can't even agree on Brexit now so I don't know if we're going to have a situation where we could agree on cocaine being legalized

Well, it's not exactly a great year of international cooperation, is it? What do you reckon, David? It's a tough one. So a few weeks ago, I was actually just in, I was in Germany writing the piece for the Sunday Times on, they've got an interesting situation where they've legalized possession of cannabis up to a certain amount. There are restrictions. But there's an issue in terms of when I was there,

You can't buy it, although their coalition government would like to sell it in shops. That's illegal. I'm not against legalization of certain drugs, by the way, because what I really like to see

is more debate and honest political debate on it in the UK, because this subject is like kryptonite. I mean, can you imagine Kear Starmer coming out in the next few weeks with a new Labour government, even with his majority saying

We're going to have a chat about legalizing cocaine. There's just no way. It's a rot, wouldn't it? I mean, the conservative middle class is, oh my God. So what I've seen in Germany is there's no point going to a halfway house. You've got to go whole hog on the law.

Because if you have a situation where you legalize possession, but buying it is still illegal, then that creates an environment for the drug dealers because they can sell more because they know people are buying it, thinking they're safe. If I'm caught with it, it's not a problem. So the underground markets will exist there because you can't buy it anywhere else. You can grow it, but you can't buy it.

So it's kind of at the moment what I saw it was like it was sort of boom time for the drug dealers because they haven't bought in that full of red meat kind of you can sell it in shops law. So I personally love to see more debate on it. I want to see the research.

And yeah, if it works, if you can regulate it, if you can tax it and make a bit of money and cut out the black market, if you can create a substance that is safe, because that's the big one, isn't it? Can you create an alternative to cocaine or, you know, is it safe, you know, if an 18 year old is it? Yeah. You know, that's what parents have won. And also where?

Also, where you draw the line, so you legalize cocaine, but if you don't legalize other drugs, then you risk the market that exists for cocaine going underground. I think there's some really big implications in terms of it may well reduce violence. It would certainly reduce the price of the product, but that would make it probably more desirable. You'd get big corporations involved. Now, they've got an incentive to increase profits, so increase use.

There's ramifications for addiction in relation to that. And I find it always interesting that people raise prohibition because of course we know that tobacco is legal, but there's a big black market in tobacco. So it's not necessarily a panacea anyway. I think it's really interesting, but I think you're right, David. We're just nowhere near there. Is it the same in Australia, Stephen? I mean, the furo that you get here, if you were going to start talking about legalizing class A drugs would just be.

That majority of you turned around quite quickly, I suspect. It sort of, it is controversial in Australia, and there's an experiment happening right now, the ACT, which is Canberra, which is where our nation's capital is. And so people who aren't from Australia, it's this very strange place, a little bit like Washington in the middle of nowhere. But it's full of very, very wealthy people, and the average wage is more than $100,000. And it's basically full employment.

In October, last year, they decriminalised cocaine and ICE and heroin. Bizarrely, they wanted to decriminalise ICE and heroin because they thought they'd be being elitist if they only legalised cocaine. That actually came out in a speech which was perhaps ill-advised.

But we don't know yet what's actually happened. So right now, if you get caught with one and a half grams of cocaine in Canberra, then you get referred to health authorities. You don't get taken in by the police. So it's really a wait and see of what will happen. Queensland and other state has said we're going to have a three strikes rule. And that's where if you get caught three times, after the third time, you might then get criminal punishments. But I mean,

It's really common in Australia. Lots of young people doing it. I don't think, I mean, I don't think it really has any stigma anymore. And that's why I think the podcast is so interesting because it's, it's really middle class now. It's more common than not. It's posh people. The usage hitting record highs in Australia. So I think there's going to be more debate about this. The Greens who are, they're not hugely influential, but they do have a voice here in Australia. They're pushing for it. So we'll see how it plays out.

We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Sophie Bambridge grows quality potatoes for McDonald's iconic fries in Norfolk.

I think McDonald's are one of the biggest supporters of British farming. They have a real commitment to British potatoes. The Sustainable Fries Fund is a collaborative investment by McCain and McDonald's to help us understand and try different growing techniques.

for potatoes so that we can understand what we can do to help reduce our impact on the environment but still produce a good quality potato. It helps enable us to try things without having the risk and cost of potentially it going wrong. The support from McCain and McDonald's is really useful to us. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.

As part of cocaine ink, we've all written articles. They go alongside the podcast. You can read them online at thetimes.com or dailytelegraph.com.au. We've had a whole bunch of interesting comments from readers, and we've picked out a few that I'd love to get your take on, guys. Firstly, an interesting comment from Times Reader James. He read David's report on the wood church estate in Merseyside, which you also go to in episode five of the podcast.

That's the estate where the Woodchurch estate gang are selling cocaine and using submachine guns in their spats with a rival estate. And James says, I live in Dolston in East London and have done so for a dozen years. The opening of the overground, the train line, improved the area and the area has certainly continued to improve. I have read academic papers about how violence has been reduced by improved public transport in American cities, just as it has been in Dolston.

We now have more upmarket shops and cafes and I put this all down to the two new overground stations which are well used. Perhaps building a station could do for Woodchurch what Dolston Kingsland has done for my area. So David, what do you make of that? How much does public transport and infrastructure impact the prevalence of these gangs?

I think it is a really important aspect and it's an interesting point of the idea that tackling these gangs and organised crime goes beyond simple law enforcement and sticking handcuffs on. It's a whole

societal thing it's the the wood church in particular reminds me of certain kind of valleys in Wales where it's like a fishbowl and it's kind of like there are kids on there when you speak to them you talked about Liverpool like it's it is Dubai it's so far away I'll never go to Liverpool which it's a few miles away over the river but they just don't leave the kind of stuck on the wood church estate with no opportunities

and I do think public transport, better links, it increases your options educationally, jobs, every single type of opportunity and chance that you can access comes by having really good transport links and the link to a place because everybody drives and a lot of these kids don't have cars.

They end up stuck there and they get sucked into gangs. So yeah, I mean, I do think I'll get in my high horse now as more of a hat is Northern editor where you can edit this out if you want. But the statistics per capita do say that the southeast of England per head has more public transport investment than people in the Northwest. So I do think there's a big gap there and more investment needs to be made.

Oh, absolutely. Stephen, with you, are there any comparisons in Australia with isolated communities and crime rates? Yeah, we have a lot of new housing estates. Australia's house prices are stupid. The system just doesn't work, and what we've done is put just more suburbs just further and further and further out. Some parts of Melbourne, where I live, can be about 100 kilometres from the city, and it's still considered

Melbourne. So you've got people who are out there, the kids that there is no public transport, there's nothing to do and there's no way to get anywhere. The buses really aren't very well used here and places parking parts at Sydney, Matt drew it. There's just no cash around so then it all starts to become a bit of a hopeless situation and all the money is funneled into the posh or eastern suburbs and kids get left behind.

Okay, we also had some interesting comments about money laundering. Several readers brought up cryptocurrencies and whether they're making it easier to move and loan to money. What do you reckon, Steve? And I mean, from what I've reported on that area in the past, it's been pretty unregulated, but perhaps things are tightening up a little bit now.

It's just the Wild West. Cryptocurrencies really are just mainly or they were set up and have been exploited by criminal groups and they do have some small footprint. They can be traced eventually because they have to be traced in some ways because you have to prove that that money belongs to you.

They just bounce around so quickly it was described to me as like being an atom like this is an electron just going around and around it moves so fast that you have to go and try and trace it through hundreds if not thousands of different transactions which makes it really hard for police. I just think there should be more regulation and I don't really see the need for them. We've got here in Australia when we watch the football as crypto.com is the main advertisement and like

I don't see the justification actually really makes me angry every time I sort of watch the footage like, why are we promoting these things? What do you think, David? Was this something that came up as an issue in your reporting as well?

I mean it's one of those areas where I'm no expert on this by the way but I mean it always comes up as one of the weaknesses if you like in the system and criminals will always as we know they will try a hundred ninety nine things and if the hundred thing works that's what they'll do and any chink in the armour if you like in the system is what they'll put the money into and crypto definitely

is obviously one of those, one of those chinks because you can transfer money so fast around to people on the other side of the world. Stephen says, you know, ownership changes so quickly. And that's the whole key with money laundering. It's to move.

The more links in the chain between the act of selling the drug and the money itself, the harder it is to be caught. So it's going to help criminals. And actually, I heard the other day that one step further now is there are kind of the underground illegal bookmakers, not sure you can even call them bookmakers, but online casinos.

which don't have licenses where you can use cryptocurrency to put bets on. So that to me, it's just another way that criminals can move money.

Yeah, and also I suppose we've been talking about international cooperation and the lack thereof in some cases, and it's hard enough to get cooperation from some regimes to track money in the traditional sense, let alone digital currencies whizzing about all over the place that can be moved so rapidly and so easily. So it does seem to present a giant obstacle at the moment.

Yeah, completely. And when you think about those legal gamblings or the black market and gambling, if you have got a million dollars punted on a horse race in Australia, the actual black market is about 10 times that much. So there's a huge area of cash moving around, and that is criminal money, that is drug money that's being moved. And because if you haven't really earned it, who cares if you lose?

So guys, we're nearing the end of our time together. Lastly, I wanted to ask you both about how you feel about the cocaine trade after working on the series. We've all worked in crime reporting for a long while. I spoke personally a little bit about my past porting on young men and drug gangs in the podcast. Why did you both want to start looking into the cocaine trade? Can I start with you, Steven?

I just wanted to really see how big this business was and look at it from the point of view of a business not just a crime because it seems like it's just got bigger than that. And from what we found, that's probably a fair, fair comment. I don't think we're going to stop the cocaine trade. It's a matter of trying to

see where it can be limited or what can be done or having that debate of whether we go and say, right, let's open the doors and legalize it. But the other issue with that is if everyone was doing cocaine, say the rates that were drinking alcohol, we'd have hospitals full of people with heart problems. It's not sort of a teddy bear drug. It is a serious drug. And that's possibly what we kind of forget. And so many people when I talked to them about the podcast, what we've done, particularly people in my age group in their 40s,

Friends of today, they're mates, husbands, blow up their marriage because of the cocaine habit. Someone else got a minute at the airport, talked about his mate and how he'd blown up his life as well. So there's a real cost to the users as well that perhaps sometimes gets overlooked. What about you, David? What was your motivation for really wanting to do a deep dive into all of this?

I mean, for me, I guess it's one of those subjects that it's always been there, but I didn't really understand, if I'm being honest, how it worked as a business. I knew that, obviously, as most people do, that cocaine comes from South America and it gets shipped over to Holland and then in the UK, but how does the price of a gram

of cocaine. How's that stayed the same for the last 15 years when everything else has gone up in price? And why don't these massive seizures necessarily hit the cartels? And I've just learned genuinely so much through both your reporting as well. I guess one of the things that I like the most about our podcast series is that

we do explain the economics of how organized crime works. And you don't get that, I don't think, in a lot of crime reporting, just because podcasts does give you a chance to do a real deep dive and get into the real content of it. Hopefully, you know, that's going to make me a better reporter going forward when I'm speaking to law enforcement or criminals, or whoever it is.

And that gets us into the big question, I suppose. Perhaps one for you first, Stephen. Having done all of this, what are your thoughts? Is the war on drugs futile? In a word, yes. We're never going to stop people wanting to get high. Just like when America tried to ban alcohol, it didn't work. It's just a matter of...

how much you try. The other comparison is if you look at the war on drugs in Mexico, which really started in earnest in 2006, that had more than 400,000 murders there. Since 2006, the violence has got so much worse because the cartels have really fought for their power.

I'm not saying there's any easy solution to the situation. It's just when there's greed and when there's money involved, people are willing to kill and there's a cost to all of this. Yeah, I'm afraid I tend to sort of take a bit of a pessimistic view about the futility of it all. What about you, David? Are you going to try and bring something positive to the table again or do you think it's all a bit futile? You know what I always say, I've just rewatched the wire.

It's about the cops and the drug dealers in the US. It's like an amazing drama series. And the series that I think is really interesting is where you've got that rogue district commander, Bonnie Colwin. And he basically, it's so futile. And he's come into the end of his career. And he's seen how they twist the stats and nothing gets done. So he just decides to make a street in his district and legalize everything.

So like, you can go down and get cocaine, heroin, whatever you want. It's all on this one street. But in the rest of the district, there's nothing. And crime stats dropped. I mean, no, it's only a TV show, but you know, he got in such trouble politically and it blew up in the, with the mayor's office and to the public, all the politicians and the police commissioner was like, this is outrageous. It's the work of one rogue commander.

But behind closed doors, they were like, but it has dropped crime 13% in his district. So, you know, what I think is that, yes, at the moment, the way we're going about it is kind of futile, but it just needs more honest debate. And that comes from first, well, it comes from people being better educated, but also it comes from politicians being brave enough to actually put this on the table.

and commission research and say, you know, we're going to look at what works, not what works to get as elected. Yeah, and I think there needs to be a change in public appetite to address this issue. And perhaps at this moment, with all the other major issues of public importance, that's going to be quite difficult. But that just means, you know, the scale of murders in Mexico are debating and all the other issues that we've spoken about. I mean, this really is a global crisis.

Yeah, completely. Is it anything else anybody wanted to add? Yeah, I'm all good. I've done my bunny call when anecdote, that's all I have. That was good. Well, that was great. Thanks so much, David and Stephen, for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Fiona. Cheers, Fiona. Thanks, Stephen.

If you haven't listened to the whole series, make sure to listen back to all the episodes they're out now. You can continue to get in touch with the team at cocaineinc at thetimes.co.uk. But for now, that's it for cocaine Inc. If you enjoyed this series, or found it helpful or informative, please do tell all your friends and family about us. And give us a review on your podcast app. It helps other people to find us.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who got in touch, and thanks so much to everyone across the world for listening.

cocaine ink was a joint investigation from The Times, The Sunday Times and Newscorp Australia. The reporters were David Collins, Stephen Drill and me, Fiona Hamilton. The series was produced by Sam Chantarasa. The executive producers were Will Rowe and Dan Box. Audio production and editing on this episode is by Martin Peralta, with original music by Tom Virtual.

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