I suspect that those figures don't include the wide range of 'alternative' cannaboids like Spice that are widely available, can be obtained legally (until recently) and probably can still be ordered from European countries (as its not illegal to possess, only to supply it).

The 8.5% sounds about reasonable, when you consider its in the last year. But I think its a bit generous.

Of course, 725,000 people using cocaine in the last year, even if they only used one gram roughly equates to 36,250,000 pounds spent on cocaine alone (at user level).

Obviously not every one pays fifty quid a gram, but then most people probably also don't use only one gram a year either.

4228kg of cocaine was seized in the UK last year. Distribution wise, that would be cut about five times, before reaching the end user.

Which is 21,140,000 grams of cocaine with a street value of 1057,000,000. And that's what is seized. I don't know what the estimates are of the effectiveness of the Police and Customs are blocking cocaine coming into the country but lets be exceptionally generous and say 25% (probably closer to 10%, but 25% to allow for the higher focus on hard drugs).

That would still mean that the UK cocaine market alone was worth around 3bn. Even at 50% that 1bn in criminal proceeds distributed through criminal gangs.

These figures are for powder cocaine. Another 42,000 kilos of crack cocaine was seized the same year.

That year seizures for cannabis totalled 30,493 kilos and 393,702 plants. To me that suggests that a lot more cannabis is being smoked that the estimates let on (as that's around 2bn in cannabis, excluding the plants, if the seizures accounted for half of all drugs in the UK).

"One Nation Under God, has turned into One Nation Under the Influence of One Drug"
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