Devon drug dealers switch to veg

Cucumbers more profitable than cocaine

Drug dealers in Devon claim the emerging black market in salad vegetables is more profitable than dealing in cannabis, heroin and crack cocaine.

Soaring energy costs have led to the price of cucumbers, lettuces and tomatoes reaching record highs, whilst overproduction of weed, opium and coca has put a downward pressure on their value.

Devon’s druglords are taking note.

With two cucumbers now selling for more than the cost of a half a gramme of hash, and trading in salad carrying considerably lower risk of imprisonment, dealers have made the switch from narcotics to greens.

The situation has become more serious in the past few weeks, with the Telegraph newspaper recently exposing the emergence of a black market in lettuces http://bit.ly/3lWQHVw (paywall).

One cannabis farmer who has made a horticultural transformation from pot into pots of tomatoes says his costs have been slashed and the work become easier.

“I used to have to go up in the loft to water the bloody things and pay a fortune running heating lamps,” he said. “Now I grow tomatoes in a Perspex shed I got from Amazon and give the kids 50 pence a day for going in with a watering can.”

Another dealer, thought to be the capo di tutti capi of a county lines salad gang, says the nature of the customer base has changed too. “When I started out, I’d hang around street corners in my hoodie late at night selling to teenagers on pushbikes, but now you’re more likely to find me outside the Co-op slipping lettuces into the basket on a pensioner’s mobility scooter.” 

The change in narcotics’ economics has had a knock-on effect on the health service. Whilst some is positive – radiant skin rather than sunken cheeks on previously drug-addled youths, and used needles in parks and beaches replaced with organic jute bags – other side-effects are in play. As the first lesson of running a profitable drug-dealing enterprise is not to use the product yourself, GPs report an increase in Devon farmers being treated for scurvy.

One specialist in crystal meth who now sells spring onions claims the changing market is a life-saver. “I used to have all manner of exotic skin diseases from my days heating chemicals in an enclosed room wearing head-to-foot rubber. But since the council gave me an allotment, I’m a stranger to dermatology.

“It’s also a subplot in the treatment I’ve written for a Netflix series based on Breaking Bad called Growing Spuds. I’ve told them if they don’t make it, I’ll come round and gouge their eyes out with my secateurs.”

Police are not universally happy about the decline in traditional drugs-busts. A high-speed chase to detain known dealers on the M5 turned up only a van-ful of purple sprouting broccoli. Investigating officer DI Kale complained: “That haul was worth over half a million, and they’d stripped the shelves of dozens of supermarkets bare. These people need locking up.

“My sniffer dog, April, is bereft. She’s used to sinking her teeth into Devon’s ne’er-do-wells. Now she’s working her redundancy notice and is on drugs for depression.

"A kid I once arrested for possession of Class A and who is now an expert in holistic remedies wants to put her on a course of celery."

But one hardened nut job is determined not to fall for the pleasures of the salad bowl. "It's just potty," said Laprol Iol, newly released from a stay at His Majesty's Pleasure in Dartmoor. "I can't see anyone wanting to inject an iceberg lettuce, and you won't catch me trading in veg. 

"So you can stick that in your pipe and smoke it."