"40 years ago, America declared a war on drugs." "So far that war has cost trillions of dollars, and more American lives than in the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam combined." "Four decades on, the war on drugs shows no sign of letting up." "I've come to America's second city, Chicago... famous the world over for its hospitality, its sports teams and its iconic skyline." "But as with most major cities, Chicago has a dark underbelly." "The one thing the tourist brochures won't tell you is that Chicago is statistically the most racially and economically divided city in the whole of the United States." "It also has over 100,000 gang members, who control a narcotics trade worth over $1 billion a year." "But there's one drug in particular that seems to be taking a grip of the Windy City." "Its low price, availability and its ability to cross the economic and racial divide that is turning Chicago into the heroin capital of the United States." "There are over 50,000 heroin users in Chicago." "And I want to find out why the drug is spreading from the inner cities to the suburbs." "But gaining access to this dark world isn't going to be easy." "However, I'm hoping that Professor Greg Scott from Depaul University, who has been studying the problem for ten years, can help." "The reason we've come to Chicago, mainly, is because the problem here is sort of getting out of control." "Why is it that Chicago has such a high amount of people using heroin?" "If you look at the kind of dope we have, right, it used to be called China white." "When China white hit the streets of Chicago, it replaced black tar heroin." "It's a little piece of black tar." "How do you inject that?" "China white, it's really easy to use." "It looks like cocaine." "And you can inject it." "You can snort it." "In fact, it's less caustic on the nasal passages than cocaine is." "Many users, for instance, whose veins have collapsed, or kids who are just getting into it, will liquefy it, take the syringe point up and shoot it up their nose like nasal spray." "(Sniffs ) Easy." "So the drug's consistency, that alone, explains a great deal of the variation between Chicago and other places which have different forms, like black tar." "ROSS:" "It's accessible, it's addictive, and it's also becoming socially more accepted." "Yeah." "The average addict is shooting five to six... ln Chicago, that's the average." "Five to six $10 bags a day." "Now, that doesn't get them high, right." "They're not getting blown away." "It's not this sensationalised stereotypical deep nod." "Most addicts who are living at or around street level are using only so they can stave off." "It's called "keeping your sick off"." "Right?" "I mean, when you first started using dope, in your first few months, you got a real rush." "I mean, you felt good, and there's no other feeling like that." "It's been compared to a 30-minute orgasm." "That's probably the best that I've heard yet, right?" "And many people will say, many addicts will tell you, that they spend the rest of their career..." " Trying to reach that again?" " To revisit, to recapture that moment." "Heroin users live in a secretive world that is strictly off limits to outsiders." "Greg has been working with these addicts for over ten years, providing them with support and help." "The small community he's taking me to has an average of over 60 overdoses a year." "GREG:" "We're in the West Side of Chicago." "We're going into a place called the Brickyard." "It's an actual functioning business." "It's a salvage brickyard." "But for the past 20 years, it has been one of the largest encampments of homeless, precariously housed drug injectors, crack smokers, prostitutes." "And they make their living by begging for change, panhandling, maybe doing odd jobs." "Most people look at a place like the Brickyard, and they see a problem, they see an eyesore." "For the folks here, it's the last remaining solution in their life." "It's like they've adapted to this pretty harsh environment." "They've built shanties, they have property rights and rules about using and not using." " There's laws?" " Yeah, there's laws." " So it's a functioning society?" " lt is a functioning society, yeah." "And nobody embraces capitalism more than these folks." "MAN:" "Since we're in Chicago, you take this right here... ln this city of Chicago, as soon as you buy your dope, and you put it up, so you don't go to jail or Illinois Department of Corrections." "Otherwise, they'll lock you up with residue even." "So when I get shook down 30 times a week, they never get nothing from me - ta-da!" "ROSS:" "How much can you make panhandling in a day?" "I've got spots where l can make $60, $50 or $60 in an hour." " An hour?" " An hour." "I'm averaging 110 a day where l go." "But the more money we make, we spend it just as quickly." "Yeah." "You just do more stuff." "You pretty much stick to heroin, and cocaine if money allows it." "Right. lf there's extra money." "Right." "The heroin comes first, because I get physically ill if I don't have it." " ROSS:" "You get pains." " l get the bends." "Believe it or not, being a heroin addict is a full-time job, ain't it, Steve?" "I was about to get a 9uick lesson from Jerome about the problems addicts face when shooting up." "After constant use, veins collapse, which means it can take a painfully long time to find a suitable vein." "And until they see blood coming back into the syringe, they will not shoot the heroin." "Some people can fucking do it right away." "Some people it takes for ever." "To me, you gotta go through 30 minutes of fucking trying to hit yourself." "Why don't you just snort it?" " But it's just that initial..." " Kick." "Damn it!" "You got it right there!" "There's a few people I know, they shoot right there in their neck." "To me, that's..." "I can't do it." "First time I shot dope, it was instant love. lnstant." "It was the ultimate high." "You couldn't get any better euphoria in the world." "And a friend of mine, rest in peace, he didn't want me shooting up." "And I said, "Come on, man." "Let me try it." "Just one time."" "He's like, "Rick, you do it one time." "You're gonna keep going."" ""No, come on!" l was like, "Smoke your weed." "You smoke it and leave."" "Soon as I did it, it was like..." "This is it." "This is the high I've been looking for." "So, mate..." "you're, you're dripping a bit." "Yeah." "You've just put one in your arm, and now you've put another one in." " Can you feel the second hit?" " Yeah." "I feel it, but I don't feel it like that first shot." "You know what I'm saying?" "That first shot's your kicker." "Without being an addict, it is difficult to understand the desperate need these people feel to get high, or stave off the sickness of withdrawal." " Pam, wanna get me on my foot?" " Yeah." "Yeah, let's do that." "However, what became apparent very 9uickly was that nothing stands in the way of a heroin addict and their fix." "JEROME:" "Go, go." "Shoot it up." "That's money right there." "Oh, I blew it just at the end." "PAM:" "No, it didn't blow." "Oh, that hurts when you do it in your foot, because it's painful at the end." "PAM:" "You can't see from over there." "And so... I still don't have it." "Hold on." "OK." "Phew!" "As we're about to leave the Brickyard," "Jerome, one of the addicts, suddenly collapses." "GREG:" "Could you grab me his jacket?" "Greg immediately prepares a heroin antidote called naloxone." "As a leader of an outreach programme, it's not the first time he's been in this situation." "Easy." " ROSS:" "Standing by with some stuff?" " Standing by with naloxone." "Which is the antidote to all opiate overdose." "The same thing happened about ten days ago." " When you were there?" " Yeah." "It happened at the needle exchange." "Hey, Jerome, welcome back." "It's Greg, your friendly post-seizure water guy." "There you go." "(Chuckles )" "Give me a hand." "I must ask you a very sensible question." "You're mixing crack with heroin." "You've been told that that's not gonna do you any good." "Why are you doing that?" "Separate it by a couple of hours if you can, you know." "Try to separate the crack from the heroin." "It'll help you out a little bit." "Speedballs are fun, but you know... (Chuckles ) You're prone to seizures, my man." "Why didn't you administer the injection that would have taken the heroin out of the system, effectively?" "His breathing was excellent and his heart rate was absolutely fine." "It was a little high." "But we only administer naloxone when there's a respiratory issue, because an overdose is nothing more than the brain, the heroin telling the brain to forget about breathing." "The antidote, narcan or naloxone, basically reminds the brain to tell the lungs to breathe." " And his breathing was great." " So there was no need to administer it." "That level of addiction that I've seen today is something that's completely shocked me, and something I really wasn't exactly prepared for." "And their openness about admitting where they are." "There are other people that have heroin addictions who can live relatively normal lives." "But these people that we've met today are ultimately at the bottom of the pile." "I think that's the... lt's wrong for me to be judgmental and say that this is incredibly sad, but it actually is incredibly sad." "Just a few blocks from the Brickyard," "Greg takes me to another significant area for addicts." "GREG:" "This is where drug world meets suburbia quite literally." "This expressway, the 290, is referred to as Heroin Alley by many of the locals." "We're going to meet a guy named Freeway." "He came from the suburbs, a good upbringing, a good family." "About 12 years ago, lost his daughter and his wife in the same 24-hour period." "By intention, dropped out of society, ramped up his use of hardcore drugs." "Now he makes his living on this corner doing all sorts of things." "One of the main ways he makes his living is by serving as a broker between the West Side suburbanites who have way too much to lose by going into these drug neighbourhoods, and getting arrested or getting beaten up or robbed." "So he really makes a big bulk of his living by copping the drugs." "He's also got a good deal going because he gets drugs for so many suburbanites too afraid to do it themselves that the dealers give him free drugs." "Freeway takes us to his home, a tiny tent." "He's joined by his friend, Tony." "They're about to inject their first fix of the day." "I'll be amazed if I hit it myself." "It's so hard to hit in the morning." " D'you have a problem hitting your veins?" " Yeah." "The first five years wasn't too bad." "Look at that!" "Only in the movies, guys!" "Only in the movies!" "Ooh, that's pretty good." "Morning!" "Ooh, that's good." " Can you feel it going in, yeah?" " Oh, yeah." "What does it feel like, even though you've been doing it for 15 years?" "What it is for me is five minutes ago we had to walk up that hill, and it's a small hill, but it's like Mount Everest when you're dope-sick." "I mean, it's not easy." "So everything is very hard to do." "Are you still getting high?" "90% of the time it's not about getting high." "It's just trying to be normal." "But they don't understand that after a month or so you don't get high." " You don't have fun." " TONY:" "It's a way of life." "Have you seen an increase in the amount of people coming in from the suburbs and buying heroin?" "By, like, 80%." "Where's your wife?" "She, she, she was a heroin addict." "She stood by my side." "We were both junkies." "But since she has Medicaid..." "She...she got onto Soboxin pills, and that's a medicine that she takes, so she doesn't get withdrawals from heroin." " To get the sickness?" " Right." " Have you got any children?" " Yes." "Two daughters and one son." "One daughter's two years old." "My other daughter's one year old." "And my son was born July 9th, 2010, so..." "And she's taking care of our children while I'm out here... ..robbing and stealing and begging, just to get my fix every day." "I've lost my family, lost my car, lost my job." "I had a full-time job at UPS." "I lost all my benefits." "ROSS:" "It's very difficult to know what it must feel like when you get the sickness if you don't take heroin." " Can you describe what it's like?" " Yes, I can." "You'll be so sick, you'll be throwing up." "Even if you haven't eaten for days, you'll be throwing up yellow stuff." "You'll have diarrhoea." "You have no energy." "Your whole body aches." "The pain is undescribable." "The feeling is so horrible that you would do anything for that feeling to go away." "Just to get yourself one bag of heroin, you would steal an old lady's purse off her arm." "And you turn into a monster." "You turn into a person..." "You would do things that you would never, never ever think of yourself doing." "And can you remember the first time you ever injected it?" "Can you describe what that felt like?" "It felt like..." "I describe like what heaven would feel like." "It's like the sky opened up and the sun shined." "I felt so warm and everything was beautiful around me." "It was the best feeling I ever felt in my life." "And has that feeling diminished since?" "Well, yeah, cos the higher my habit goes, the lesser the feeling I have, and the more I find myself just trying to make myself feel normal, feel better, not sick." " Stave off the sickness?" " Right." "I have to say, maybe it's because of Tony's age, that I actually hold up some element of hope for him, in terms of his future." "He seems so sickened by what's happened to him and what he's become, but I do think in many respects he sums up what this film is about, because he is a suburbanite, you know." "He started taking the occasional snort of heroin, recreationally, at the weekend, and then the craving grew and grew inside him, till now he's at a point where he's lost everything that meant anything to him," "apart from now a $10 bag every two hours." "This highly addictive drug is rapidly spreading to the suburbs." "Soccer mums, white middle-class kids and businessmen are increasingly using heroin." "Dealers are eager to exploit this new market and law enforcement seems unable to prevent the spread from the ghetto to the suburbs." "We travel down the 290, nicknamed the Heroin Highway, to meet Amy, a mother of three young kids, who's bravely agreed to talk to us." "My cousin originally did heroin, and he had given me, the first time I ever used it, a little bit, when I was 15." "I was so against it, cos almost everyone I knew was doing it." "Say that again." "Hang on." " Almost everyone you knew..." " Was doing heroin." "In this... in this very, very affluent, cosy, little community." "Yes, like, out of almost everyone I knew, 70% of the people that I knew from school did it." "So over 50% of the people that you knew were taking..." " Were doing heroin." " Were taking blow." "Yeah, and part of it is a lifestyle too, because it's like, it's kind of like... I don't know." "When you go down to get it, when you get closer to the city, it's almost like you get a high from that too." "I don't really want to use heroin, but, it's like, the thought is always there." "Even though I don't want to and I hate it, and I hate what it's done... to my life and the people I know." "It's constantly there." "There's times when I'm sitting there and I'm sick, and I honestly think I could go down the road and I could, like..." "Cos I know people that have done it, and you could, like, go steal from a car or rob somebody or panhandle." "When you're sick, you think about all that, because you're gonna get the money and you're gonna get the drug, but then..." "Something has been able to stop me, and I think that's my kids." "If you could go back now, back to when that was first offered to you, if you could, would you take it?" "I have lied to so many people, and..." "like, it's hard, because I don't want people knowing that I do it." "And now I have track marks and everything else." "And...it's just... I wish that I never ever took it, and I hate it so much." "But then at the same time that I say that, I keep thinking about it." "Are you worried about that fact that they could take your kids away?" "Yeah." "That's the most horrible part of everything." "To part with my kids." "Because, like, when I started doing heroin... like, I thought it was making me better, because I have depression, and so when I did it, I didn't feel sad." "I felt like I could do anything." "I'd take them to the park, and I'd walk all over town with them, play with them forever." "So I thought it was making me better, and it was making me worse, you know?" "So that's the scariest thing for me, is to have them taken away, because they're the only reason that I don't want to do it, you know?" "And I feel like if they took them away, then that's gonna make it so that I end up..." "I don't know." " l hope that doesn't happen, yeah?" " Yeah." "I'm trying to find out why Chicago has such a large heroin problem, what the police are doing to try to stop it, and if I can meet the dealers responsible for supplying the streets." "We're gonna take the Eisenhower Expressway, l290, right here at Cicero Avenue." "We're gonna go up maybe two or three blocks." "I'm with special agent John Retarno of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm Agency, which specialises in firearm trafficking, gang violence and the sale of narcotics." "ROSS:" "Where are the areas where the dope gets sold?" "JOHN:" "It can be on any street corner." "When you seen them congregating, you know they're not talking sports." " Yeah." " They're talking business." "These boys on the corner now in the white T-shirts..." "They're up to no good." "And that has become the new uniform." "People don't wear colours any more." "It's a white T-shirt." "It's a sort of like an indication that you're affiliated, yeah?" " They'll wear their pants down." " Yeah." "Prison-style." "Yeah, exactly." " They're all in it." " They're in it, yeah?" "What about in terms of usage?" "Do you find gang members...?" "They're all very much addicted." "Very much so." " What will they be addicted to?" " Heroin." "What about in terms of age?" "Have they started getting younger?" "Yeah." "Younger." "Younger and more, more brazen, more courage." " More violent?" " Yeah, more violent." "Oh, yeah." "This guy's covering himself because he knows there's cameras about." "JOHN:" "Maybe." "No, you're right." "He sees us." "What'll happen is the guy who's got the heroin sales, at a particular location..." "Let's say he'll go to, like, his source of supply, and pick up 50 or 60 grams of heroin." "He'll take the heroin, he'll bring it to a secret location." " They call it like a shake house." " Right." "And it could be a room in any of the buildings around?" "Correct." "And he'll take the dope." "He'll cut it." "They'll weigh it out, and they'll individually bag it into dimes." "Then, they'll put it on the street and they'll have what they call a pass-out." "A pass-out is free dope for all the customers." "They'll put it over the cellphone and tell all the customers, saying there's a pass-out at 10:30 at the corner of Cicero and Jackson." "Before they do that, though, they'll have what they call a guinea pig." "They give the guinea pig the bag." "Test it." "See if it's any good." "So if you've got a habit, you wanna be a guinea pig." " That's right." " That's right." "OK." "He's hoping that the guinea pig will say, "Yeah, it's good dope."" "All right." "They'll make the pass-out, whether it's good or bad." "And then it's on." " These people go off, inject it." " Or snort it." "But within three hours, they're back for more." "The main source of income for most families in this neighbourhood on the West Side is heroin." "The corners are controlled by some of the 100,000 gang members that exist in this city." "Most of the people who live here either are or know someone in the drug trade." "GREG:" "These drug dealers, they're not aliens, right?" "I mean, they are the relatives of the people who live in the neighbourhood." "ROSS:" "It's a drug economy, so therefore it stands to reason that someone in your family might sell blow for a living." "That might be what they do." "That's right." "They're paying the rent." "They're bringing home the food, the diapers, whatever is needed." "And that's just...that's how it goes." "That's often why there's a really uneasy relationship between the neighbourhood and the police." "That's one of the main reasons they don't like the police coming in to do these sweeps, because these aren't aliens getting arrested." "These aren't the bad people that control the neighbourhood." " These are the neighbourhood." " Right." "The demand for heroin in the suburbs is so great that people are prepared to drive down the 290 to the notorious West Side." "But coming into this environment as a stranger involves many risks." " lt's predominately males coming in here?" " No, no." "Not at all." "Young suburban females are the primary source of revenue." "If she shows up here, she's gotta have it." "She formed that habit back in her home community." " Out in the suburbs?" " Out in the suburbs." "But something's gone wrong in terms of the supply chain." "Something has gone wrong in terms of her own personal supply chain." "She probably had a local dealer that she was very comfortable with, maybe went to high school with." "But now something has happened and she has to come in and do the deal directly." "And when she shows up here, it's as though there's a target on her head." " She is gonna get cuffed." " Cuffed?" "Explain to me "cuffed"." "Cuffed refers to a process whereby a young suburban girl shows up on the street, and she has a heroin habit." "She wants to feed that habit, and so what's going to happen is somebody is gonna sidle up to her, a local guy, and he is going to befriend her and he's going to make romantic overtures," "and part of that romance consists of feeding her the drug she wants." "And about a week goes by and you say, "Hey, these aren't free." ""You have to start working for this." "You've got to work off your debt." ""Go to one of these local motel rooms, which you can rent" ""in two-, four-, eight-, 12 and 24-hour increments."" "So in a week, if she wasn't hooked before, she's gonna be totally hooked on heroin, and she's gonna be getting fucked on a daily basis to pay off a debt that she's never ever gonna be able to pay off." "That's correct." "The debt is ever-expanding, because life is organised now around getting that next bag." "There has always been a close relationship between drug abuse and prostitution." "And many of the sex workers on the West Side are addicts." "I'm meeting Angel and Honey, two girls from the suburbs, who now work as prostitutes." "So you grew up in the suburbs, yeah?" "I grew up in mini suburbs." "My father is a doctor." "My mother, administrator at the hospital." "I never was around drugs." "Do you use heroin now?" "Yeah, yeah. I didn't do then. I should have!" "The job that you're doing now, and getting high, do you think they go hand in hand?" "When you're addicted to heroin, you have to have it every day." "Right, right." "It takes three days to get addicted." "It used to take three days to kick it, but now it's like six, because of all the shit they're putting in it." "You're more addicted to the pills than you are to the heroin." "So if you're getting high on heroin, you have to pay for it." "Yeah, right, right." "That's the whole reason why my lifestyle is the lifestyle I chose." "How long have you been doing what you're doing now?" "Three years, four years." " Really?" " Yeah." "Ask her how long she's been doing heroin." "I've only been doing heroin for, like, six months." "Ask her how much I told her not to do it, don't try it." " Plenty of times." " l begged, "Don't do it."" "I just used to smoke weed and smoke crack." " l never used to do heroin." " What made you do it?" "I don't know. I was just like, "Fuck it." "Let me try it."" "Curiosity. I was curious." "So would you take it before you go out to work?" "You wake up and that's your first phone call." "Your first phone call is to dealer, yeah?" "Yeah." "That's the first word out of your mouth!" ""You got any blow?"" "How bad can it get for some of the girls out on the streets?" "How dangerous is it for them?" "Do the tricks ever turn violent?" "ANGEL:" "I had a knife put on me." "This guy, he paid me too." "I let him take me out of the neighbourhood." "He paid me." "Oh, he was from the suburbs, and he had this wife and all this stuff." "We're doing it, right, you know?" "I go, "All right, baby, come on." "This is not legal."" "And he grabbed a knife and he just put it right to my throat." "He's like, "You got my money." "I'm gonna get my worth."" "My question is can you carry on doing what you're doing when you get to 40, when you get to 50?" "I mean, what's the plan?" "is there a long-term plan?" "I can't see me doing anything else!" "You know what I'm saying?" "I could if I move." "As long as I'm here, living where l'm living, I'm going to do it." "(Sirens wail in the distance )" "We're on our way to meet up with Greg, and, hopefully, he's gonna gain access for us to a chop house." "That's where the drugs are cut before they're dealt out onto the street." "It's a very dangerous thing to do what we're about to do, for two reasons mainly." "A, Those houses, those chop houses are regularly raided by the police, and also they're sometimes taken down by other gangs, who will break in, beat the people up, maybe sometimes shoot them, steal the drugs and the money." "No." "No, just..." "OK, that's fine." "No, that's fine." "That's good." "So just send me a text, like, ten, 15 minutes before you're ready." " Hey, Ross?" " Yeah?" "So, I just got off the phone with a guy named Mask, and right now they're in the middle of a shift change." " So it's kind of chaotic." " So they work shifts?" "Yeah, they got shifts." "Four-hour shifts, in this particular case." "And so he's got a couple of women who are working the table for him." "There's women doing the cutting?" "Yeah, it's almost always women doing the cutting." "Yeah." "And they're almost always actually strung out on the dope." "The neighbourhood's hot." "There's been police in the last couple of days." "And we're gonna stand out." "The vehicle's gonna stand out." "We're gonna stand out." " Fine." " Good." "First time I've ever been to a chop house!" "(Sirens wail)" "GREG:" "A lot of sirens tonight." "Nothing happens on the West Side without the approval of one individual." "We had to seek his permission to gain access to the chop house." "People who work the shifts in chop houses are generally naked or semi-naked." "This prevents them from concealing and then stealing the heroin." " So that's the actual stuff?" " Yeah." "How much have you got?" "7.1 grams." "Right, OK." "What is the ratio between what you're cutting with it?" "You've got 7.1 grams." "You've now got 0.8 grams of cut." "Yeah, yeah." "Sure." "Course. lt's gonna weaken it." "Right." "Exactly." "The ratio is you're gonna put about 3 grams of cut into 7.1 grams of heroin." "Got you." "OK." "Can you tell me what the cut is?" "What is that?" "So that's the heroin going in now, yeah?" "Right." "So it's a sieve sort of thing, yeah?" "So, the place we're in at the moment..." "You change these places regularly, yeah?" "You're on the move all the time, yeah?" "Or take-down people." "Are there take-downs around?" "Trying to come after the stuff?" "How much is that gonna be worth once that goes out?" "Right." "Just hand it out." "Let everyone test it, try it." "So they're like a guinea pig." "They try it and you know." "And particularly if no one ODs, if no ones complaining about it, if everyone's getting high, then you know you got good stuff, you got a good mix, and the purity's in the right position." "During my visit to the chop house, I learnt that the blonde women opposite the dealer had been cuffed by him and was now working as a prostitute." "is that a perk of the job, then, yeah, if there's a little bit of left-over?" "DARK-HAlRED WOMAN:" "Always." "That's one of the benefits of it." "So after here, it goes out on the street, yeah?" "DEALER:" "Correct." "Can you tell me who's selling it for you out there?" "He gives it to me." "I pass it through particular areas, particular people, individuals in charge of different locations somewhat." "And it all comes back, you know..." "Are you not worried about the police coming here?" "is that not a concern?" "And is that why you move?" "You have to have people around that you trust." "You got security watching the building and us sitting in here." "People on the corners, people, you know, everywhere, all around the area, watching out for us, everything that's going on." "We're about four blocks now from the chop house." "I'm quite relieved to be out of there, I have to say." "As we were leaving, we were stopped by the police." "We were told that we were in a very dangerous area and did we know what we were doing?" "But as I was going, I was given a present by the drug dealer." "And this is actually how the heroin arrived at the cut house." "There's a hole in the back here, and the purer heroin was stuffed in the back of this." "So I have a little memento of my day, or night, in a cutting house." "(Squeaking)" "We get word that the man who controls much of the West Side has agreed to talk to us, but on the condition that we conceal his identity." "So your background wasn't necessarily based in illegal activity." "So what was the spur, what was the catalyst to make you change your path?" "OK, if you were a gang member, were you ever involved in violence?" "Are you still involved in violence?" "It goes with the territory, surely?" "You mean killed?" "But you have people who enforce for you, surely?" "Can I ask about your relationship with the police?" "What are your views on the policing of your area?" "By that you mean you have alliances with some police officers?" "But you're a big boss in the area that we've been filming." "Do you have a boss?" "Do you answer to somebody?" "By being here and talking to..." "Exposure." "Sometimes when I'm doing interviews, it's very easy to fall into a natural rhythm with someone." "He was very charming." "You know, easy to talk to." "And you forget, you know, that this man controls a very large empire." "But even above him, there's an even bigger empire and a bigger boss." "The one thing he was very clear about was the fact he didn't want the camera in any way to reveal his identity, because he said the people above him, ultimately the people who supply him with drugs," "would have him killed if he was recognisable." "So it may have been an interesting and intelligent conversation, but ultimately we are talking about incredibly ruthless and very violent people." "Heroin isn't just Chicago's problem, it's a global problem, and, as we've seen, once it grabs hold of you, it will destroy everything that's dear to you, and could possibly cost you your life." "While we've been here we haven't come up with any solutions to the problem, but the one thing I do know is it would be wrong to judge the people that we've met while we've been here." "What's become clear is the war on drugs has failed." "Heroin is as cheap today as it was 40 years ago, and the drug is spreading from the inner city to the suburbs." "Ultimately, it is a ruthless business that has and will carry on costing millions of lives around the world."