Nearly 1,500 people have been arrested in England and Wales in a week-long operation against so-called county lines drug dealing networks.

Police say they have started focusing on senior figures controlling phone numbers used to sell drugs.

Officers are also using modern slavery and human trafficking laws to prosecute gangs exploiting vulnerable children.

Some 139 county lines were closed, and almost £2m of Class A drugs, including cocaine and heroin, seized.

County line gangs are urban drug dealers who sell to customers in more rural areas via dedicated phone lines.

They have become central to the trade in illegal substances across Britain and the way they operate is often accompanied by serious violence. 

Gangs in cities operate phone lines advertised in other towns and rural areas to supply drugs, while remaining at arm’s length to reduce the risk of arrest.

Police say new tactics have enabled them to drive the expansion of ‘county lines’ drug dealing into reverse, and have vowed to eradicate it from the country’s worst-affected area.

County lines – whereby drug-dealing gangs from cities expand their operations to other areas – had been growing every year, with rural areas such as Norfolk plagued by drugs from London and serious violence. Gangs had become so comfortable they were sending out “Happy Christmas” messages to their clients.

Under the tactics, escalated during the coronavirus lockdown, officers go after those controlling the lines from London via their pay-as-you-go mobile phones rather than just chasing the runners sent to rural areas.

In Norfolk, the runners are usually teenagers who transport drugs in clingfilm wraps within their body. Cash is taken back to London in the same way.

So far, 30 out of 75 lines in Norfolk have been shut after those controlling them were traced and arrested in London, police say, with the closed lines responsible for half the drugs sold. Det Insp Robin Windsor-Waite, the officer leading Norfolk police’s efforts, told the Guardian: “It is a massive rollback.”

Norfolk is the area in Britain with the highest number of recorded crimes linked to county lines, with hotspots in Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, and police say they have rewritten the rule book on how to tackle it.

Windsor-Waite said: “As those controlling the networks are commonly based outside the county, they may have a feeling of impunity, believing they’re beyond our reach and being careful not to attract the attention of their home force. To successfully tackle county lines criminality, we need to arrest the controlling minds rather than the mules and street dealers.

“In the majority of cases, the arrest of the line controller terminates the line – and the risk associated with that line. Prior to this operation there was a degree of resignation to the continued exponential growth of county lines within Norfolk. The outlook has been transformed and our ambition is to completely eliminate the county lines business model from the county.”

The tactics have led to arrests being made in London since December. The Home Office provided extra money for the Met to act on intelligence.

Since November, 146 London-based alleged county line holders have been charged with selling class A drugs such as crack and heroin across Britain – in Scotland, Surrey, Kent, south Wales, and Devon and Cornwall, as well as Norfolk.

County lines is a drug distribution system in which criminal networks funnel hard drugs from cities to towns and rural regions across the country.

The police investigation first focused on phone lines, sifting through hundreds of thousands of pages of call data. With this information, they were able to identify the individuals involved.

Of the 16 convicted, 10 pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to supply crack cocaine and heroin. They were also charged with one count of participating in an organised crime group, which would remain on file.

Those found guilty included line holders, who managed the lines from London and directed younger members of the gang to “cuckoo” addresses in the south-east where they would conduct the sale of drugs. These properties often belonged to local drug users. This method of operation was typical of county lines, the Met said.

While there has been recent focus on children being used to transport drugs across counties, the investigation did not find any exploited young people connected to the gang. The police did, however, identify a number of vulnerable adults.

The phone lines operated by the gang each had a different name. The National Crime Agency estimates that one county lines phone can generate £800,000 a year.

Between August and November 2018, officers identified the gang were running five county lines: the Si, which ran from London into Bognor Regis in Sussex; the AJ, which operated in towns and villages on the borders of Berkshire, Hampshire and Surrey; the Pepsi line, which ran between London and Medway in Kent; the Jeezy, which ran between London and Medway; and a local line that was responsible for the sale of crack cocaine and heroin in south London.

The murder of 14-year-old Jayden Moodie on Tuesday night highlights how youth violence continues to devastate the lives of young people, families and communities in London. Jayden’s death marks a new low point as he is the youngest victim to die on London’s streets so far this year.

We don’t know whether Jayden was himself involved in gangs or if his death was gang-related. All we know is that he was struck by a vehicle while riding a moped, then chased by a group of three men and stabbed to death in what police believe was a targeted attack. However, Jayden was killed in Leyton, part of the east London borough of Waltham Forest where the threat of gangs and gang violence looms large.

Last year, we published the results of a study looking at gangs in Waltham Forest, that provides some context for Jayden’s murder. As one of the many areas in London affected by rising youth violence, Waltham Forest has been at the forefront of gang interventions ever since the ground-breaking Reluctant Gangsters study was published in 2007. 

A decade ago, gangs in Waltham Forest were organised around postcode territories that young people defended from outsiders. Gang membership was a physical and emotional commitment – exhibited through gang “colours” and a real sense of local pride at being visibly present on the street.

Our research highlighted that gangs in Waltham Forest today view turf differently; less as symbolic hallowed ground, and more as a marketplace. Gangs are now more focused on profits, not postcodes. Two factors were responsible for this evolution: the ready availability of illicit drugs and the rise of social media.

Gangs had come to reject outward signs of gang membership as “bad for business” because they attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement agencies. They instead grew up and moved on to develop lucrative “county lines” operations in new areas where they were unknown to police.

County lines are predicated on an exploitation of people, not places. Leveraging young people’s boredom, poverty and lack of future prospects, gang elders cynically lure children into the drug trade with false promises of more money and status that rarely materialise, then entrap them through debt bondage and other coercive means. County lines have been linked with an increase in stabbings involving known drug dealers as victims or suspects, partly because grievances in illicit drugs markets cannot be settled through legal channels.

Public Health England is launching a review into the “growing problem” of prescription drug addiction.

NHS data suggest one in every 11 patients in England is being prescribed medication that could be addictive, or difficult to come off.

This includes sedatives, painkillers and antidepressants.

PHE wants to avoid a situation like the one in the US, where there’s been a massive increase in addiction to opioids.

The review, which will take a year, will cover:

• sedatives and anti-anxiety drugs known as benzodiazepines and z-drugs (zolpidem and zopiclone)
• painkillers called opioids, pregabalin and gabapentin (the latter two are also used to treat epilepsy)
• antidepressants

While antidepressants are not addictive, some patients experience difficulties when they try to stop taking them.

Prescribing of “addictive medicines” – sedatives and painkillers – has increased 3% over five years, GP data for England suggests.

Public Health Minister Steve Brine said: “We know this is a huge problem in other countries like the United States – and we must absolutely make sure it doesn’t become one here.

“While we are world-leading in offering free treatment for addiction, we cannot be complacent.”

Director of drugs, alcohol and tobacco at PHE, Rosanna O’Connor, said: “It is of real concern that so many people find themselves dependent on or suffering withdrawal symptoms from prescribed medicines. Many will have sought help for a health problem only to find later on they have a further obstacle to overcome.”