Former undercover drugs cop Neil Woods at his home in Herefordshire, wearing a T-shirt that reads: « Nice people take drugs. » Photo by Ian Lloyd.

During the summer of 1994, amphetamine virgin Neil Woods found himself at a bar in a sleepy village in the UK faced with the choice of swallowing 40 percent pure speed or having the shit kicked out of him by a notorious local gangster with a $1600-a-week cocaine and crack habit.

Unbeknownst to this gangster—who ran a racket stealing lockable gas caps from cars and then having the keys replicated and boosting the cars—Neil was an undercover cop. He’d been attempting to buy one of the stolen cars from the gangster and had built up something of a relationship with him through chatting at this bar. However, one mistake he’d made was to make himself out as “some sort of connoisseur of amphetamines.”

“After about four weeks of knowing him he produced this bag for me,” Neil tells me from his home in Herefordshire. “He said, ‘Here’s a present for you. I bet you’ve never had speed like this!’ Well, I certainly hadn’t, because I’d never actually had any speed in my life. But just before he produced his bag, I’d literally seen someone have the shit kicked out of them in the pub on his orders for only a $15 debt. So I thought, I’ve got to take some.”

Neil put a tiny splodge of speed on the tip of his tongue, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy the gangster. “I was a little too tentative, so he said, ‘You want to have more than that!’ He expected me to have a tolerance, so he gave me another big dollop. I could feel it burning as it hit my mouth. He charged me some money for it and I went home, but I didn’t sleep for the next three nights. It was absolutely horrific. We got the stuff tested later and it was over 40 percent pure. Normal street stuff is about 5 percent.”

MORE: http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-world-of-a-british-undercover-drugs-cop-729

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