The Moment It Stops Feeling Like a Choice

At the start, it was practical. I’d lost everything, house, business, good name. So I flew to South Africa, bought twenty pounds of weed from witchdoctors for a couple of hundred quid and brought it home in a suitcase. A way to get my business back on its feet after Thatcher had screwed it.

After the first run, I knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. It was going to take longer than I’d told myself. Nothing dramatic. Nothing permanent. Just something to bridge a gap. So, I made another. Then another. Changing products as I went. That’s how it begins, not with commitment, but with adjustment.

Two years later I was in jail. That should have been the end of it. For most people, it would be. For me, it did something else. It made it clear I was already all in. Not in the way people imagine, no drama, no declaration. Just a quiet understanding that had already been crossed, and there was no point pretending otherwise. What surprised me wasn’t the chaos. It was its absence. Or rather, the presence of a different order.

Outside the law isn’t anarchy. That’s what people are fed. It’s structured, selective, and in many ways more honest than the straight world. The rules are different, but they’re there. In “society”, hard work doesn’t move the needle. Access does. Position does. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. That’s the part that doesn’t make it into the media versions. So, I left the party. I told myself I wasn’t hurting anyone.

That the game was rigged. I was just refusing to play by rules that weren’t designed for me. Those ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They settle in slowly, until they stop feeling like justification and start feeling like truth. Looking back, there were signs. I remember offering the screw a tip on the way from the jail to the station. Not generosity. Something else. A small gesture that said “Fuck you. ”Inside, I remember playing Scrabble with a stockbroker.

Same background. Same boarding schools. Different path. We agreed, without much discussion, that jail wasn’t so different, just less discipline. While I was there, I recruited three couriers and found my next partner. That should tell you something. There’s a point where it stops feeling like imprisonment and starts to feel like freedom. Where the decisions you make feel less like choices and more like progress. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to cross a line. You realise, slowly, that it’s somewhere behind you. From the outside, it looks like punishment. From the inside, it feels like freedom.

If you think it starts with a decision, you’re already looking in the wrong
place.

� Start at the beginning

� Join the reader list

Join me on my first smuggling run,

 Read next → Trust Was Always Conditional
 Read next → Why I Wrote This Series
 Start the story → The Alchemist’s Hotel
 Author → Simon McCoy