Duncan is a functioning heroin user, a father, a teaching assistant, a musician who toured the US. He is also the kind of person Britain's drug economy is designed to consume. His story — told through a long Guardian feature by a school friend turned journalist — maps how cuckooing, the practice of drug gangs taking over vulnerable people's homes as dealing bases, evolved from a fringe Brighton phenomenon in the late 1990s into a nationwide criminal infrastructure. The mechanics are precise. Gangs from London, Liverpool, and Birmingham send young runners — some as young as 12 — to set up operations in smaller towns, occupying the homes of drug users, disabled people, the mentally ill, and groomed young women. The system replaced the older model of user-dealers and derelict crack houses with something harder to detect: hidden bases inside council flats, private rentals, even affluent neighbourhoods. By 2015, the National Crime Agency formally recognised cuckooing as part of the "county lines" business model, though frontline community safety teams had been naming the tactic since 2005. Duncan's own cuckooing followed a textbook decay curve. His north-east London estate was condemned by the council; families were replaced by single tenants leaving prison and care. A gang of teenagers — roughly a dozen boys aged 12 to 17 — took control of the stairwell, dealing crack and heroin. Within a year of the estate's decline accelerating, Duncan's flat was doubling as the gang's base. The article makes clear this was not a single moment of coercion but an incremental process enabled by institutional abandonment: the estate was neglected, the council planned decanting, and no one intervened as the power vacuum filled. The human cost is distributed across every participant except those at the top. Children work 15-hour days in mouldy flats, armed with machetes, lying to their families about football trips. A 14-year-old from Liverpool cleaned a cuckooed flat himself because the conditions were unbearable. A former sex worker whose Southend home was taken over felt sorry for the young dealers sleeping 22 hours a day with phones by their heads. William Algar, a 53-year-old jazz trumpeter with mental health problems, was stabbed to death with a zombie knife and dismembered in his own bath after his home was cuckooed. The violence is not incidental — it is structural. Jack Spicer, a criminology lecturer at the University of Bath and author of Cuckoo Land, complicates the simple predator-victim frame. Some cuckooing relationships involve genuine social bonds, not just coercion. Duncan himself experienced two cuckooings — the first brought misery, the second, he says, brought a strange kind of friendship. This ambiguity is precisely what makes the phenomenon so difficult to police or legislate against: it operates in the grey space between exploitation and dependency, where the state's absence creates its own perverse social contracts. The underlying extraction engine is clear. Neglected housing estates become feedstock for criminal enterprise. Gutted social services — Duncan was fired from his teaching job after his drug treatment service informed his school — remove the scaffolding that keeps vulnerable people stable. The drill music ecosystem glamourises the results while denigrating victims as "fiends" or "nitties." Suffolk constabulary reported as early as 2008 that more than a third of Class A dealers arrested were under 21 and mostly from London. The pipeline was visible for nearly two decades before the NCA named it. What the article documents, ultimately, is not a drug problem but an infrastructure problem. Cuckooing thrives where housing is abandoned, where services are cut, where estates are condemned and left to decay rather than maintained. The gangs are not aberrations — they are the market's answer to a vacuum the state created and then walked away from.
