No laughing matter
Drugs bust with a difference
You get to see all sorts while out walking the dog.
The good, the bad and the ugly are all invariably waiting to put in an appearance along the way.
A few weeks ago the ugly side of life was being played out in a street on our usual route.
It was just after 9am and a woman was banging on the front door of a house. She was also shouting loudly in a language I didn’t recognise.
Whatever she was saying, it looked like she wanted to get inside.
A small child loitered close by while a taxi driver parked opposite the house kept his engine ticking over.
With no sign of anyone welcoming her in the woman stopped shouting, took a few steps back and then launched herself forward aiming a karate kick at the door.
There was an audible gasp from a group of pensioners waiting at a nearby bus stop as boot thudded against uPVC. Memories of Eric Cantona flying through the air and into the crowd at Crystal Palace came flooding back.
Then she did it again. And again.
After the third kick a window opened in the upstairs front bedroom, a curtain was pulled aside and a topless man appeared, waving his arms like a windmill.
He started shouting back at the woman below. I couldn’t understand a word but I knew she wasn’t finished kicking the front door.
After two more kicks, I decided it was time to resume our walk. The topless man in the bedroom clearly wasn’t going to let her in and she had retreated back to the taxi along with the bewildered young child.
Fortunately, such scenes are rare in the neighbourhood.
A noisy gang of pigeons are responsible for most of the sporadic local anti-social behaviour along with the occasional fox rifling through stray wheelie bins from time to time.
However, this time I sensed it wasn’t quite the end of the story.
Sure enough, three weeks after the ugly came the bad.
One night last week the dog and I approached the house again and saw a police patrol car parked at an angle across the driveway. The officers sat inside had either arrived in a hurry or their parking skills were a little bit rusty.
Either way, there was no sign of anyone home and by the time we reached them they were in the process of driving off.
Then last Saturday morning things escalated somewhat.
Once more accompanied by my four-legged friend, two police vans drove past as we started our normal walk. A few minutes later we reached the house where the two vans had joined two others already parked up.
As we got closer I could see the front door was no longer attached to its hinges. Inside the hallway stood a group of police officers in black uniforms.
They would end up spending most of the day there. When we checked back on our evening walk the vans were gone and the doorway had been boarded up.
Naturally, I made a few enquires.
It turned out the night before the police had received reports of “suspicious behaviour” at the property. As a result, a search was carried out and the police recovered what they later described in a statement as “large quantity of Class A, B and C drugs as well as a number of phones believed to be linked to the supply of drugs”.
In addition, I was told a 31-year-old man living at a nearby address had been arrested and charged with possession with intent to supply Class B drugs and possession with intent to supply nitrous oxide for “wrongful inhalation”.
He duly appeared before magistrates on Monday and was released on conditional bail until his next date in court.
Having seen a photo of him, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the topless man who I spotted gesticulating wildly from the bedroom window of the house a few weeks ago. Who that was remains a mystery.
What struck me most about the charges was the one relating to nitrous oxide, commonly referred to as laughing gas and routinely used as a painkiller in medicine and dentistry.
However, in recent years it’s also become used as a recreational drug with potentially dangerous side effects. In 2023 it was made illegal under the Misuse of Drugs Act. It’s officially categorised as a Class C drug.
Until now I hadn’t appreciated the extent of nitrous oxide’s entry into the world of illegal drugs.
A good example of this was revealed during a trial at Leeds Crown Court last year which ended with three men being jailed for illegally importing millions of cannisters of nitrous oxide through a string of fake catering companies.
Just over 91 million canisters were shipped into the country by trio between 2016 and 2018 despite them knowing a new ban had been introduced making importation illegal if they were likely to be used as a psychoactive substance.
An investigation by the Yorkshire and Humber Regional Organised Crime Unit found the men had set up a string of fake catering companies in the UK and Europe to facilitate importation and the laundering of up to £16.7m.
The fake firms were created as a cover because nitrous oxide was and still is legitimately used as a propellant in the catering industry to whip cream as well as an inert gas to fill snack and crisp packets.
What caught my eye in this tale was the scale of the mens’ operation.
Their total shipment of 91,350,000 canisters compared to the combined total of 3.8 million canisters used by two of the UK’s biggest coffee chains, Starbucks and Costa, over the same period.
A burst of nitrous oxide either directly from a canister or inhaled via a balloon filled with the gas is no laughing matter despite the initial euphoric buzz is creates.
Three years ago 25-year-old Natasha Woroch died when a car she was travelling in s a passenger crashed on the A161 at Belton in North Lincolnshire.
The car was being driven at speeds of over 80mph in a 30mph zone before the crash. CCTV footage showed the driver, Connor Malpas, from Doncaster, emerging from the wreckage with a balloon filled with nitrous oxide still in his mouth. He was also seen removing a removing a rucksack containing alcohol and nitrous oxide from the vehicle and giving it to another passenger to dispose of.
Malpas was initially jailed for ten years and sis months at Grimsby Crown Court in August 2024 after admitting causing the death of Natasha, who was his partner, and seriously injuring two other passengers. His sentence was later increased to 13 years and six months by the Court of Appeal after a referral by the solicitor general.
Speaking last November, Natasha’s mother Rachel Jarvis, said she felt “distraught” about young people using nitrous oxide to get high.
She added: “I just feel people don’t realise the effects of taking it, particularly whilst driving. If you could sit in my shoes for a minute you wouldn’t do it.
“I just thought at the time it might just be a passing craze and I really hoped it would be a phase for young people but clearly it’s not. It’s called laughing gas but it’s no laughing matter for us.”
After the ugly and the bad, what about the good?
Well, an arrest and a seizure of illegal drugs is a good result for Humberside Police and I will follow the case as it winds its way through the courts over the coming months.
Meanwhile, the dog and I will continue keeping an eye out on our daily walks.