Written on: Tuesday 24th March 2009

Thanks to Operation Lochnagar, Grampian Police’s campaign to arrest anyone who has so much as smoked a joint - even if it was in a previous life - the jail has been rapidly filling up like an incontinent granny’s nappy. Now, overloaded with pish-scented junkies and dealers, it has reached bursting point. Prisoners are being shipped out left, right and centre to any jail that will suffer them, while the remaining many are left to fight it out for what little drugs, visit space and bedding can be found swilling around inside granny’s sodden pish flaps. Even the cell I share with no one but my miscreant self has fallen victim to overcrowding, accumulating bodies at an alarming rate. Unlike the junkies to have recently alighted at Craiginches from the ghettoes whence they came, my own gaggle of gouching minkers were here all along; I just hadn’t noticed them before. By day, they make themselves scarce, but by nite, once the sun has gone down and the door to my tiny cell slammed shut, they come out to play, piling out of a hole in the floor and flitting across my cell like remote control cars being operated by Parkinson’s sufferers. I am referring to The Others who inhabit Craiginches, making full use of the facilities as they coexist with the cons – the silverfish. These silvery moons previously raised their tiny heads during my last prison sentence, when, as I blogged at the time, my cellmate proclaimed them to be dirty wee beasties that could give you ‘a dose o the shites.’ Although blessed with wings, these little fuckers have no idea how to use them and are as ungainly as Bambi on ice. They multiply like Karen Matthews’ offspring and, like my two favourite fingers, are happiest when embedded somewhere damp and warm. I have taken to squashing the silverfish into oblivion with the sole of my trainers, but for every one whose innards Artex the floor, another 10 join the party. According to the maintenance man I summoned to lay sticky strips for them to witlessly affix their spazzy wings onto, the silverfish are harmless. Nevertheless, I refuse to accept uninvited visitors in my cell; the jail is overcrowded enough without these asylum seeking bastards turning up on my doorstep and protesting that they would be tortured if I returned them to their own despotic country. Torture? I’d give them torture. I took a cup of washing up liquid and poured it down the hole, followed by a kettle of boiling water and some sterilising tablets. That shut them up for a few days. I couldn’t get the silver-backed beasties out of my head however, and when issued with a literacy test paper, used to assess the lack of educational ability within the jail, I felt obliged to slip in a dedication to my erstwhile pad-mates. The test included such brainteasers as ‘Make a sentence using the following words: chips, food, favourite, is, fish, my, and.’ After some consideration, I finally managed to crack the code, and smugly jotted down the correct answer: ‘Is chips and fish my favourite food?’ Next, the worksheet notably upped the ante, amicably requesting: ‘Tell me something you are interested in using two or more sentences.’ As readers of this weblog will attest, I am not accustomed to stringing multiple sentences together. Nevertheless, I was determined to pass the test with flying colours, and, after much huffing and puffing, was able to construct the following two-sentence dedication to my uninvited co-pilots: ‘I am interested in capturing the silverfish that flit across my cell at nite and pulling their wings off. I boil their tiny corpses in the kettle to form an elixir that has aphrodisiacal properties.’
While I have been busy strengthening my erection with a little help from the silvery moons, those filthy swines at Grampian Police HQ have also been springing a collective boner over the seeming success of Operation Lochnagar. The force boast to have performed over 100 drug raids and arrested 150 people during the three-week blitz. A resounding success then, surely? Actually, no. If you examine the small print, it is plain to see that Operation Lochnagar has been an abject failure. In spite of pouring tens of thousands of pounds and hours into ridding the streets of the scourge of modern society (that’s drugs to you or I), the pigs have thus far only recovered a paltry £80,000 worth of product. To put that into perspective, the bag of weed I was found with at the bottom of that pigeon-infested close was worth £30,000 in pig prices. And it didn’t take the entire drug squad from Grampian, Tayside and Strathclyde Police to get that result – I handed it to them on a pigeon-shitty plate, because I’m nice like that. The £80,000 of goodies Grampian Police smugly boast to have taken off the streets equates to about a kilo of smack, aka fuck all. Aberdeen gets through 20 clicks of nasty a week, plus all the crack, coke, weed, pills and whatever else it can shovel into its collective system. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t do to admit to the failure of such an ill-thought out scattershot operation, so instead the police must work with what little they’ve got, demonising petty users and small-time dealers. Among the Mr Bigs to fall victim to Lochnagar were a man who was remanded in prison for passing a dealer’s number onto an undercover cop and a guy who was locked up simply because there was a text on his fone from a mate looking for pills. Scroll through your inbox and you’ll probably find a similar text somewhere from one of your mates. Best delete it quick – in fact that won’t work, will it, cos now they’ve got technology to read your deleted messages. In that case, the only thing for it is to throw your fone away, buy a new one and shop your mate to Crimestoppers. That way, you’ll be doing your bit to help rid our community of the drugs that blight civilised society. Cos drugs are BAD, remember? Sure, drugs might have played a major role in your conception (cos your folks sure as hell weren’t sober that one time they did the funky dance), and they might be the reason you found the courage to approach your future girlfriend in the club and they might also have made for some of the best nites out, festivals and lazy Sundays of your life, but if the police say that drugs are bad, we’d better believe them cos they know what’s best for us.
The few successes that the police have had in their drugs blitzkreig have been the result of ‘intelligence-led policing’, also known as grassing. The police wouldn’t know shit if it shat on them from a great height were it not for grasses singing like karaoke canaries. Junkies, strung out to fuck, dropping names so they’ll be released from custody to go and score. The jail is full of them now; junkies and grasses and grassing junkies and junked-up grasses. The pishy nappy that is Craiginches is swimming with back-stabbers, traitors and double-crossers who’ll ask their fellow con for a shot of his fone and then, when he’s not looking, stick him in to the screws for having a mobile. Among the victims of such ‘intelligence-led’ policing was a junkie who was detained even though he had no drugs on his possession. Due to ‘information received’ however – that other great euphemism for doing the dirty on your mates – the police knew he had a half ounce of smack up his arse. Determined not to let this one get away, they decided to play a game of pass the parcel; the junkie was locked in a special cell where two pigs sat with him, monitoring his every move, until, three days in, he finally relented and passed the parcel. Just think of that scene in American Pie: The Wedding where Stiffler follows the dog about for days until it excretes the ring it has swallowed. Although I have never been one for podging things up my backside (I don’t think my carrier bag of weed would have fitted in any case), I must confess that the idea of clenching one off into the waiting hand of the law amuses me greatly. The police got their shit-stained parcel but they never got the man who'd kindly excreted it for them - the judge threw the case out because they had broken the law in detaining him for three days without charge in the cells.
For all my denigrations of Grampian Police, I have no objection to them taking smack and crack off the streets, as these are the drugs that deserve to be dressed up in hyperbolic labels. They are the nasty ones that old ladies are mugged for. In my opinion, everyone should have the right to shovel whatever they like into their bodies in the privacy of their own homes, be it speedballs or Space Raiders. Nevertheless, given the thieving, granny-bashing tendencies of those with a proclivity for ingesting the white and broon, it is understandable why such substances are illegal. After years of thinking that to go undercover required simply donning a Nevica ski jacket and approaching junkies to ask if they knew anywhere they could ‘chase the dragon’, the CID are finally starting to wise up. One of the gaggle of junkies I have shared the holding cells with during my many appearances in the Sheriff Court told of passing a dirty, smelly junkie in Tillydrone who was bent double, spewing their ringer. Upon closer inspection, however, the marginally less dirty, smelly junkie relating this story to me discovered that it was one of Grampian Police’s unfinest, going incognito. You could call it dedicated police work, masquerading as one of them in an effort to inveigle users into taking pity on their ‘habit’ and passing on their dealer’s number. I call it entrapment. Another junkie recently sent one of his runners out with a quarter of smack and a dagger concealed about his person, as is standard procedure in such transactions, to sell to a couple of Irish punters. The runner came running back a few minutes later exclaiming ‘They’re fucking polis! They wis asking me who I got my stuff fae and all sorts!’ It would appear that the CID still have some learning to do. In their haste to lock up anything and anyone who’s dabbled with the D word, there have been plenty of fuck-ups along the way. With court papers, dossiers of evidence and citations flying in every direction, the overworked Procurator Fiscal’s office has misplaced warrants and mislaid evidence. Charges have been mixed up, with the wrong men taken to court for the wrong offences. A few weeks ago, a Scouser caught with nine ounces of each (smack and crack) walked free from court after his papers were lost. I wouldn’t want his squeaky voice or diminutive stature for the world, but I wouldn’t say no to some of his jammy Liverpudlian luck.
Incidentally, it is not just the police who have been looking for drugs in all the wrong places. Last week, one of the screws walked into a cell in A-Hall to be greeted by the disturbing sight of a convict bent double with his trousers pulled down. His cellmate had a Moray Cup bottle with the bottom sliced off pressed against the boy’s arse and was attempting to use it as a plunger, only instead of a sink, it was his pad-mate’s arse he was trying to unblock to remove the two ounces of smack contained therein. With friends like that, who needs enemas?