Ex-top undercover drugs cop forfeits anonymity to fight against the War on Drugs

'I only caused harm'
Huffington Post (UK)
Saturday, August 20, 2016

A police surveillance photo of Neil Woods while undercover in Derby, around 1996Neil Woods insists nothing good came of his 14 years as one of the UK’s most successful undercover cops, fighting the war on drugs. His painstaking, months-long investigations put people guilty of sickening violence in prison for a combined total of more than a 1,000 years, so, surely, there must be something he is proud of? "No. No. I did not good at all, absolutely no good at all," he says with disdain. "I did nothing of any benefit whatsoever, I only caused harm." Woods' new memoir Good Cop, Bad War argues that the way we fight the drugs war is worse than fruitless, it escalates the violence it is meant to prevent.