Cocaine

Set in the decade of the nineties, this novel follows ten years in the life of Jack Ropell. Ropell was actually born in Yorkshire, but his parents moved to Canada when he was eleven. At twenty two he loses his younger sister to drugs while he is away from Quebec, Canada, at university in England. Driven by this and the continuing strife between his French mother and his Spanish/English father,Jack decides to stay in England when he graduates and join the British Customs and Excise.

After two years in the job Jack gets to join the anti-drug squad and begins to find out what the real world is all about. The story follows his part in trying to prevent the ingress of drugs, in particular cocaine/crack, into Britain.

During this decade cocaine production in Colombia was becoming professional and several Colombian drug barons were making more money than many countries or big corporations. National Police forces were struggling to contain the flood of cheaper and cheaper drugs into America and Continental Europe.

This story is a fiction, but only in the characters involved. The actual story, the pain the suffering and the casual, but extreme violence used by the drug cartels against anyone who opposed them, is probably understated. One thing is for certain. it doesn't matter if you are a supplier, distributor, user or a lawman, sooner or later when cocaine is involved, it will ultimately become a matter of life or death.