Drug wars at Brit festivals as wily dealers hack radios, flog ‘disco burgers’ & hide ‘Cornetto’ pills in TIME CAPSULES

WITH Creamfields and Reading & Leeds festivals this weekend, unscrupulous dealers are gearing up for a bumper bank holiday flogging dangerous drugs to young revellers. And they’re going to shocking new lengths to try to meet the demand. Dealers are gearing up for a bumper weekend flogging drugs to people are festivals Credit: Alamy Cheshire Police this week unearthed a huge haul of drugs buried beneath the Creamfields site Credit: PA Between fortress-level security and the prospect of a heavy prison sentence, the risks facing dealers are high. But with research showing that as many as half of festivalgoers take illegal drugs, the potential profits are simply too big to be passed up. At Creamfields in Cheshire, a huge stash of illegal drugs was found buried beneath the festival site just days before 80,000 revellers made their way to what is one of the UK’s premier dance music events. Among the haul uncovered by Cheshire Police were large bags of MDMA and ketamine, as well as more than 200 canisters of laughing gas. Bags of ecstasy pills were also found stamped with Cornetto logos, while others were printed with the words “It’s coming home”. They were uncovered during proactive sweeps of the area when search officers came across ground that had been disturbed. Speaking to The Sun, Superintendent Andy Blizzard, who is leading the policing operation, explained the drugs had likely been buried by someone with knowledge of the festival site who then planned to dig them up when the festival was underway and sell them on. “When you get to Creamfields, you walk through an initial search gate where there are drug detection dogs, enhanced searching, and police officers on site to deal with anyone found in possession of drugs,” he said. “This, we would assume, is a way to try and circumnavigate that. After getting onto the site, they would go and try to dig up those items that had been buried there in the weeks before the festival was set up.” Creamfields, like other festivals, is held annually at the same location, the Daresbury estate near Warrington. It means that dealers looking to bury these time-capsules of drugs only need to look at previous years to understand the layout of the festival and know where they should put it so that it ends up on the inside of the festival perimeter. And though the estate is private land, it also contains a number of public footpaths that dealers are able to exploit in order to access the area ahead of the Bank Holiday weekend. “We get reports in advance of the event taking place of people walking through the location, say someone acting suspiciously with a spade,” explained Superintendent Blizzard. “Because it’s the 20th anniversary of the event, residents and police are quite aware of what could happen, so we get a lot of reporting coming through Crimestoppers.” No arrests have yet been made, but others in the past have been prosecuted for bringing drugs into Creamfields, including 21-year old Lucas Greene last year and Luke Moran, who was jailed for two and a half years. Burying drugs that need to be found with a map marked ‘X’ is far from the only way they are being smuggled into festivals, though. Among the haul were ecstasy tablets decorated with the Cornetto logo Credit: PA Cheshire Police are now estimating the street value of the haul found, and are investigating who buried it Credit: PA And if anything, the tactic is considered somewhat “old-school” , given how aware police are of it, according to Professor Fiona Measham, Chair in Criminology at Liverpool University and the founder of drug harm reduction charity The Loop. “More recently it used to be that DJs took in a sizable amount of drugs, because they weren’t searched,” she told The Sun. “But now artists are searched and they will have pretty similar entry requirements and restrictions to the general public in terms of searching and sniffer dogs.” Instead, she explained, traders’ vans are now the key way drug dealers attempt to smuggle their wares into festivals. The largest festivals, such as Glastonbury, will host more than 1,000 different vendors, ranging from food stalls to merchandise sellers. Even smaller festivals will still see hundreds of trader vans and shops pitch up to sell to the tens of thousands of punters. Dealers will target them with cash to persuade them to act as mules and get their drugs through security. “They just don’t have the capacity to search every inch of every van,” Prof. Fiona explained. Both artists and the public are subjected to the same searches Credit: Getty Hundreds of traders head to festivals around the country, and cannot all be searched to the same standard Credit: Alamy “They might have sniffer dogs going around, but you’ve also got so much more opportunity to hide things in places like kegs and storage containers. “Some people live in vans and will drive on site with them, while others, like food vans, will have all their equipment, and they can never search every single millimetre “The dealers may approach them and offer a cut of the money, or the dealer may have an informal relationship with the trader. “They’ll be people looking to make a bit of extra cash. It might include selling burgers. It might include selling ‘disco burgers’.” That’s a play on the common nickname for ecstasy pills, ‘disco biscuits’ – but while some traders may sell drugs from their vans, the majority smuggling in drugs are simply acting as mules. Once in, the dealers will take back their drugs and attempt to sell them by wandering around the festival crowds, hunting for people who look like potential customers. “It’s a real cat and mouse game, between the dealers, and the police and festival security teams. “Organised crime groups and dealers will become more creative and innovative, police cotton on, and they come up with a new way.” Festivals remain a popular rite of passage for many, with nearly 30 per cent of 16-18 year olds heading to their very first one this summer, according to new research from Vodafone. While the vast majority will make it home without incident, every year still tragically sees an average of five drug-related deaths at festivals across the UK, with MDMA the substance most commonly linked to fatalities. The risks are heightened by the fact that as many as one in six of those taking drugs at festivals are not regular users, and may thus be more vulnerable to things going wrong, explained Prof. Fiona. “It’s their big weekend out, their splurge of the year, if you like,” she explained. “They will be less familiar with drug markets, and their tolerance may be lower.” As part of her work, Prof. Fiona often stands with security teams where they are on the lookout for people trying to smuggle in drugs through the main entrance, often buried in bottles of toiletries, or inside bodily orifices. Two men were jailed for trying to smuggle drugs into Creamfields in cans of cider Credit: Cheshire Police Andrew Rankin, 25, pleaded guilty to trying to bring in the drugs, which had a street value of £13,000 Credit: Cheshire Police Other methods she has seen tried, only to fail, include hiding drugs inside a resealed pot noodle, and a perfectly reassembled can of shaving gel. Also at Creamfields, two 25-year-olds were jailed in 2024 for attempting to smuggle MDMA and ketamine onto the site inside cans of Strongbow Cider. “Some people have two sets of drugs – something minor that they can hand over if the dog finds it, and a bigger secret stash that they can keep,” she added. Sometimes, however, dealers do not opt for secrecy at all – and instead opt for tactics more normally seen in a warzone. Speaking to The Sun, CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals John Rostron explained how the security team at one unnamed festival in the south had their radios jammed while one of the entrances was stormed. “All the radios went down and started playing a song instead,” he said. “Nobody knew what was going on, everybody was running around, trying to call each other, but of course phoning is not as effective as using radios on a festival site. The song finished, and then it went back to normal. “During that time, at one of the gates, a group of young people had stormed through, and they hadn’t been able to radio for help. “Initially it was thought that it was a bunch of people just trying to get in for free, but it later emerged it was an operation to bring drugs onto the site.” However, when the same tactic was tried the following year at a festival in the north, the team was ready with backup radios and the gang failed to get in. Far from operating in isolation, explained John, festivals will readily share information and intelligence with each other about the tactics they have seen drug dealers attempt. “Festivals also do a lot of what they call tabletop exercises,” he added. Red pills, believed to be ecstasy, were also recently uncovered at creamfields Credit: PA Many revellers try to sneak in drugs by hiding them in toiletries Credit: Getty “You roll out scenarios, make things up, and work out how you’re going to respond.” Stricter security at the gates of festivals, complete with well-trained sniffer dogs and thorough searches can also have unintended dangerous consequences, added Dr Fiona. “One of the consequences of people not bringing in their own drugs is that they are pushed into the arms of the dealers on site. “From my research, we know that dealers on site are twice as likely to mis-sell than ‘neighbourhood’ dealers – there’s no way for buyers to punish them, as it were, if they are sold something bad. “You instead have dealers who are there just to rip people off. They may be ripping people off with something harmless, say selling vitamin tablets. “Or they might be selling cheaper drugs, cut with other even more harmful substances, instead.” The Sun has approached Creamfields and the organisers of Reading and Leeds for comment.