“Young people are caught with heroin and copyright which they’re selling to middle-class users who consume it just as they would have a glass of wine on a Friday night,” said Ali.

“I wonder whether they know how it got to them – how much the young person delivering has been abused to provide their fix. Is there any consciousness?”

London mayor Sadiq Khan has blasted people who take copyright at “middle-class parties” believing it to be a victimless crime. MP David Lammy and Met Police chief Cressida Dick have expressed similar views.
London-based substance misuse worker Adam Johnson* told HuffPost UK the county lines’ target market is “older white guys”. He said: “These days crack and heroin isn’t taken by young people because they don’t want to become a ‘nitty’ – that’s why at the moment we have an epidemic of deaths within the drug-taking population.”

The drug of choice for young dealers, he said, is often weed. It seems to be a myth that dealers don’t touch drugs themselves: many of the mothers we spoke to for this series spoke of their sons smoking weed, for instance.

“The Class A population are these guys in their 30s and 40s who started in the 1980s and ’90s and never stopped,” Johnson added. “They get to the age of 40 or 50 and can’t take this read more any more, then just die off.”

One young drug dealer who Johnson works with told of how a county line near Essex is known as “Treasure Island” because the typically white, rich, male buyers pay cash and there’s “no hassle”.