So you've had your fun day out in Croydon. You've visited the Whitgift Centre, rode the tram, watched the Palace game, and before you know it, 4.20's rolled round. Got a buzz for the sticky icky? Well, the Croydon Guardian has published an article telling you just what to do.
Masquerading under the rubric of "investigative journalism", the newspaper sent a reporter to see how easy drugs are to come by on the mean streets of CR0. The budding (geddit?) Seymour Hersh was able to get "sorted" (apparently a street word meaning "to come into possession of illegal drugs") in a mere fifteen minutes.
Judging by the paper's rather picaresque tale, it seems everyone in Croydon's a dealer: the first person they ask, a woman standing outside a post office, is able to provide a £20 block of cannabis resin just a quarter hour later. Before long, our plucky reporter's being offered heroin, too. Job done, the paper reported the woman to the cops.
After the laughter, the tears: drug offences have risen considerably over the past year, and despite successful crackdowns on dealers and factories, it remains an enormous problem for the borough. So good on the Croydon Guardian for highlighting how bad things are.
Oh, and as for the resin solicited in this sting: it was apparently destroyed "according to instructions from police". We can't help but wonder if our old friend Paul Smith, aka the cannabis cop, has managed to get his grubby mitts on it.
Image of Croydon's NLA Tower from Homemade's Flickrstream
