The illegal drugs trade is now one of the world's major industries; it is a cornerstone of the underworld's activities. Yet 40 years ago diehard villains regarded drugs, addicts and those who traded with them with distaste. Marijuana was associated with Caribbean immigrants, harder drugs with the narrower jazz world. The underworld had no part in it, and dealers were, in the words of ex-robber Frankie Sims, "disowned, no two ways about it".
And so in the 1960s and 70s drug smuggling was the province of white, well educated, middle-class criminals like Charlie Radcliffe, who came from an army and public-school background, and Oxford physics graduate Howard Marks, for whom cannabis trafficking was a glamorous crusade. "I smuggled as much cannabis as I could," he has said. "This was my destiny, this was my karma."
But as the potential profits of the trade gradually became apparent, the underworld moved in to displace the dilettantes, as is shown in the final programme in the series.

Polly Toynbee page 26