OSCB Partners, Thames Valley Police, launch the ‘True Costs’ campaign today.
The campaign focuses on the link between cocaine use and child exploitation and highlights the true cost of cocaine usage.
The cocaine market in the UK is growing. This is linked to increased national levels of serious crime and violence and to drug use and dealing in the Thames Valley region. Cocaine use and child exploitation are linked; children as young as seven are being groomed into the world of drugs. Forced to move cocaine, sometimes inside their own bodies, they face violence, intimidation and sexual assault.
There is a chain of misery from production to supply of cocaine that involves violence, intimidation, sexual abuse and child exploitation. Casual cocaine users in Thames Valley who, in all other aspects of their lives may be morally and ethically conscious, could at the same time be buying cocaine from an organised crime group which has involved the exploitation of a child.
We know that most people don’t see the awful things we see, not everyone who takes cocaine knows the reality of how it is produced and supplied, and the level of exploitation associated with their ‘habit’. It is our duty to shine a light on some of the awful consequences of the trade, especially at a time when cocaine use is becoming increasingly normalised.
This link explains more: www.thamesvalley.police.uk/truecosts