Some justice (2/3)

Dear Mixmag

My younger brother was caught with ten Es at a house party that got raided. He had no record at all and had never been in any kind of trouble. He was charged with intent to supply and received a sentence of four years. Paul, Leicester Hundreds of clubbers have been caught with small numbers of pills and are now in jail. In 1996, nearly 4,000 people went to prison, convicted of posession with intent to supply. Half of them were sentenced to more than one year. That number is likely to rise in 1999 as police direct their attentions away from users towards dealers. If you're buying a few pills at a time to sort out your mates, that means you. When Tracy's dealer was nicked, he told the police he had sold her some pills. Officers raided her house and discovered 18 Es. Tracy was found guilty of possession with intent to supply and was sentenced to three years in prison. Her car was confiscated and she had to pay £2,500 in legal costs. "I thought when I came to be sentenced, the judge would see the situation for what it was," she says in a letter to Mixmag from HMP Askham Grange in York. "I was a hard-working girl who liked to go clubbing on a Saturday night with my friends and 'lose myself' to some serious dance music for a few hours, not bringing any harm to anyone else." "The sentence has cost me a lot," she says. "I've had to sell my house. My husband has divorced me. I lost a really good job. My mum and dad don't understand recreational dance drugs. They think I'm in the same category as smackheads. They just don't understand the difference." Understanding is about the last thing clubbers can expect from the British legal system. Most of the magistrates making decisions about sentencing know nothing about dance culture and have no understanding of different types of drug use. To them, a clubber with a bag of pills for some mates is as evil as the mythical heroin peddler hanging around school gates trying to seduce children into addiction.

It is horrifying just how random the sentencing for possession of drugs is. Tracy's three-year sentence is the same as that received by a professional drug smuggler, a Frenchman, who had been smuggling drugs by the kilo-load across the English Channel. Mixmag reader Mo is in prison with him at HMP Birmingham: "The guy was caught with five kilos of cannabis, one kilo of heroin and loads of amphetamines," writes Mo. "I think if he'd been a clubber he would have got at least eight years for that amount." Clubbers who are not professional dealers tend not to know the law on drugs. They tend not to know their rights, and they don't know how the odds can seem stacked against them. Rise clubber Smiley Mark, for example, is in HMP Ranby, serving 30 months for possession of 90 pills which he had bought in bulk to supply his friends. When he was arrested, he said the pills were E, hoping that cooperating with the police would help. Test showed that the pills contained no MDMA or other Class A drugs, but he was still convicted of intent to supply Class A drugs. "If I'd said nothing in the interview, I'd be out by now," he says. "You wouldn't believe the amount of lads in here for serving time for silly amounts," Mark says. "I just hope you can gather information to show the way the law discriminates against clubbers."

The situation is about to get worse. The Government has pledged, through drugs czar Keith Hellawell, to direct police attention away from drug users and towards drug dealers. Police are set performance targets, and in order to meet these they will have to arrest more drug suppliers. But that can mean, if you're a clubber stopped in the street with a few Es, the police now have an extra incentive to charge you with intent to supply. "Police have to make their numbers look good," says Steve Rolles of pro-reform campaign group Transform. "Sentencing is not just down to the quantity of drugs involved or the social class of the criminal. It now reflects Home Office fads about how drug policy is evaluated." So before you agree to sort some pills for your mates, ask yourself one thing: do you want to be another casualty in the Government's War On Drugs? n Many thanks to all the Mixmag readers in and out of prison who helped with the research for this article