Britain’s Drug Debate: Street Corners, Coffee Shops, and City Banks

Polanski’s point opens the door to a wider truth: Britain is already living with a kind of informal tolerance. Drugs flow. Profits circulate.

When Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, said all drugs should be legalised and handed over to public-health control, it sounded like a radical headline. But step back and ask: are drugs truly “illegal” in practice? The law says they are. Yet look at how enforcement works, who it targets, and who it quietly spares, and you see the contradictions

Polanski’s point opens the door to a wider truth: Britain is already living with a kind of informal tolerance. Drugs flow. Profits circulate. Enforcement exists, but only against some of the players, some of the time.

Street dealers versus coffee shops

The stereotype of the drug dealer is the threatening figure on the street corner: hood up, knife visible, dangerous and disruptive. And yes, police act against that. Uniformed officers can’t ignore the intimidation, the violence, the visible nuisance.

But most drug transactions don’t look like that. They happen quietly, between acquaintances, in coffee shops or living rooms. A chat over a cappuccino, a bag passed across the table with the tea and cake. Friendly, routine, low drama. That’s the reality.

The police have no appetite — and no resources — to chase every small, discreet deal. They concentrate on the visible and the violent. The rest flows on, largely untroubled.

The banks and the double standard

Now compare that with the financial system. The drug economy doesn’t just run on back alleys; it runs on cash-intensive businesses, property deals, and, above all, banks. Again and again, major banks are fined for weak money-laundering controls. Regulators have shown that billions in suspicious funds pass through accounts, flagged too late or not at all.

And yet, what happens? A fine. A compliance review. A promise to do better next time. Senior executives rarely face personal criminal charges. The government could change this. It could make repeated failures to spot and block suspicious funds a criminal offence for directors. It doesn’t.

So we are left with a system of double standards: the street dealer gets prison, the bank gets a fine.

The Chancellor’s cut

There is also the role of the Chancellor to consider. The state wants its share of every transaction — legitimate or illicit. And in practice, it gets one. The shop-window routine at the bank, the endless questions about where your money comes from, is presented as a robust defence against money laundering. In reality, it does little to choke the flow.

The system is designed less to block criminal money than to tax it once it’s cleaned. By forcing drug profits through banks, property, or cash-intensive businesses, the Treasury takes its cut via VAT, corporation tax, or even income tax once the money surfaces as wages or dividends.

That is why no one really panics about the dubious high-street outlets that everyone quietly recognises as fronts. They are not there to serve customers; they are there to launder money. The police don’t prioritise them — because they are not beating anyone over the head or frightening neighbourhoods. But the Chancellor does care, because those fronts are what turn drug cash into taxable cash.

What really makes drugs dangerous

But what about the drugs themselves? Class A substances — heroin, cocaine, MDMA — are legally labelled as the most dangerous. Yet the real risk often isn’t the active drug. It’s what happens to it before it reaches the user.

International criminals and cartels control the supply chains. They don’t care about health, only profit. To maximise it, they cut drugs with whatever bulks them out — brick dust, bleach, crushed paracetamol, animal tranquilisers. The result: low doses of the actual drug, laced with toxins that wreck the body. That is what fills emergency rooms and morgues.

Contrast that with the very rich, who can afford high-purity cocaine. Or with patients prescribed pharmaceutical-grade opioids, which are essentially Class A drugs under medical control. In those circumstances, the risks are managed. People use them, function, and in some cases improve their quality of life. The difference isn’t the chemistry — it’s the context, the regulation, the purity.

This isn’t to suggest recreational use is safe. It shortens life and carries dangers. But the truth is stark: much of the harm is caused by criminal supply chains, not the drug itself.

The limits of enforcement

So we are left with a landscape where drugs remain formally illegal but functionally tolerated in many places. Enforcement targets visible dealers, not the thousands of coffee-shop transactions happening every week. Banks move money, get fined, but keep operating. Government avoids criminalising financial misconduct but parades toughness on street crime.

In that sense, Britain already operates a patchwork legalisation — not by design, but by default. The contradictions undermine trust and effectiveness.

If legalisation came

Would Polanski’s vision fix this? Not overnight. Legalisation could take profits out of criminal hands, allow quality control, and integrate treatment into the system. But it would also require a huge shift in resources: regulators to oversee the market, clinicians to manage addiction, and police to keep organised crime from mutating into other fields.

Done well, it could save lives and shrink criminal profits. Done badly, it could simply layer a taxed, regulated market on top of the black market.

The real questions

The real issue is not whether drugs are dangerous — they are. The issue is whether Britain’s current model is rational. A system that throws one man in prison for selling a wrap in a pub car park, while fining a bank for laundering millions in cocaine profits, looks skewed. A system that tolerates coffee-shop deals but clings to criminalisation at policy level looks incoherent. A system where the Chancellor quietly benefits from laundered profits looks hypocritical.

If politicians want to be credible on drugs, they have to answer two questions. First: do we want to reduce harm, or do we want to look tough? Second: are we prepared to apply the same standards to the institutions that enable the trade as to the people on the street who sell it?

Until then, the debate will stay stuck between radical calls for legalisation and the everyday reality of quiet deals, laundered money, and a public-health crisis created less by drugs themselves than by the way they are cut, sold, and ignored.