“Do you wanna buy some pills mate?“
A fella in his early twenties stared at me with the eager (wide) eyes of a young entrepreneur spotting a sale. He was wearing a grubby white T-shirt covered by a baggy khaki overcoat. It was hard to understand him at first; he had the broadest of Glaswegian accents and the bass was rebounding off the sides of a giant and sweating marquee in a field somewhere in Ayrshire, Scotland.
It was the year 2000 and Moby was politely gyrating around the stage.
We silently leaned in together for a second go:
“Sorry mate?” I said.
“Do you want some pills mate?” Despite telling him to f*** off, there must've been something about my face that kept him interested.
“Are you sure? I’ve got loads!” He reached inside his jacket and produced a plastic Tesco shopping bag gathered at the neck, full of ecstasy pills and about the size of a bowling ball. I looked at the bag then looked at him. I looked at the bag. Then back at him. He was very proud of himself.
I looked at the bag again.
'That was a lot of f***ing pills,' I thought to myself. There must've been some 400-500, maybe more. I felt sorry for him; not because I wasn't buying but because at the time I was a serving police officer assigned to a special project team developing tactics on the prevention and arrest of dealers at large scale music events. I was literally his worst nightmare.
Or was I? I wasn't really.
No, his worst nightmare was the twelve undercover members of the Strathclyde Drug Squad who had just bought me a beer as their shift on the covert drugs operation finished.
Friendly bunch.
The Tesco bag and the person holding it disappeared under a pile of unwashed law enforcement. The drugs don't work folks. Well, most of them.
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