LBC Views: Casual drug users should be ashamed as gang violence spills over to innocents

25 August 2022, 17:07 | Updated: 25 August 2022, 19:41

Former Arms Dealer Sicarius McGrath says casual drug use is funding the murder of children

By Rachael Venables

@rachaelvenables

“I’ll never know how many people were injured, maimed, or killed as a result of the firearms I put on the streets. I was dealing death, I was dealing misery.”

Sicarius McGraph is a former crime boss and brothel owner, who once ran a firearms factory selling thousands of guns to the criminal gangs of Liverpool and beyond.

Today he’s a reformed ex-con, seeking money to run a programme to get problem youths out of the underworld he once dominated.

The first thing to say about Sicarius, as we meet near his home in Manchester, is, as you can probably tell from the above quote, that he is really, bluntly honest.

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He doesn’t shy away from his hideous past, the “animal” he once was, but tells it as an impartial fact, a fact he wants to make up for.

It also means he’s honest about the problems facing Liverpool today, after three gun murders in less than a week.

He sees what happened to little Olivia Pratt-Korbel as a horrendous ‘anomaly,’ but also a by-product of a younger generation of gang members who are reckless and ruthless.

When I ask about the availability of guns, he says the idea that just ‘anyone’ can buy a firearm today in the city is ludicrous.

“If you went into a pub and asked to buy a gun, someone might take your money but they’re certainly not giving you anything for it!”

But, for anyone connected to an organised crime groups (OCGs), as he once was, it’s a different story.

They import weapons of war with shipments of Class A drugs, moving them around the country between different city’s gangs, storing guns ‘for a rainy day.’

When I ask about people using children to hide weapons, he tells me straight up it’s something he used to do, telling young people to mind a ‘safe of cannabis’ that really contained firearms.

And, it’s on the topic of drugs that he also appears damningly honest, repeatedly taking swipe at folks who think they’re ‘good people’ but “sit snorting cocaine in a pub of a Friday night.”

They, he says, are funding the violence that “murders children.”

He clearly believes - just as the former Commissioner of the Met Police Cressida Dick did, that ordinary drug users too are to blame for gang violence on our streets.

McGrath strikes me as a man who’s coming to terms with his sins, but he wants others responsible for funding the violence - to also face facts.

One thing is abundantly clear to me. People who do drugs casually should feel their fair share of shame.