The London Underground is being turned into a drugs den with commuters having to watch on while passengers brazenly smoke crack cocaine and cannabis for their daily high.
The Tube’s crime epidemic was laid bare this week after photos emerged of a ‘dirty, scuffy-looking’ male lighting a metal pipe on a carriage.
Phlegming at the mouth and spitting on the floor, he had a ‘gormless grin’ on his face as unnerved passengers stood up and moved away.
Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander this morning said the shocking images would ‘concern’ Sir Sadiq Khan who has seen violent crime rates steadily increase under his nine-year tenure as London Mayor.
Passengers are unashamedly using the Tube as their makeshift drugs lair across the network, with Transport for London staff seemingly powerless to act.
Commuters have told they have had to contend with smelling cannabis at least twice a week on their packed daily 50-minute commute on the Elizabeth, Circle and District Line.
One female told us of feeling petrified as she sat on the Tube next to one male as they smoked Class A drug crack cocaine in front of pregnant women.
They reported the drug use on the District Line through British Transport Police’s text service but said they never received a response with the man happily getting off the carriage at Victoria.
Other Tube users have taken to social media platforms to post videos and pictures of people using drugs.
Footage posted on Reddit from September last year titled ‘London’s finest on the Tube’ showed a man with matted hair smoking crack.
It led to people sharing their own experiences of witnessing drug use on the Tube, with one person saying it was like being in New York City.
One commenter said: ‘Saw a fella with his trousers down injecting into his thigh on the Overground once, and I don’t mean insulin.
‘Two lads in hi-vis vests drinking lagers spotted it and roughed him up, then literally threw him off the train at Bruce Grove.
‘Without going into the rights and wrongs of it, I just sat and observed, like I was on safari.’
In one video posted on TikTok in February, a man wearing a green beanie hat smokes crack cocaine in a packed carriage as bemused passengers look on.
In response, one person wrote: ‘They know they can get away with it because we have been too tolerant.
‘Which has led to people being afraid to speak up because of the fear of violence especially in certain groups of society.
‘People are unsure if their neighbour will stand with them in confronting such behaviour.’
Another clip emerged only last month appearing to show a man smoking cannabis on the Piccadilly Line.
‘Saw this on the Vic line too last week,’ one person wrote on Reddit.
‘Smells gross. Also these losers clearly haven’t heard of the Kings Cross fire… I did report it at the barriers when I exited the train but TFL staff didn’t seem bothered.’
Sitting in a ‘priority seat’, a bearded man inhales from his DIY bong and is engulfed in drug fumes as children walk past.
The footage infuriated one X user who said: ‘This is completely unacceptable – a man openly smoking crack on the Tube in front of children.
‘How is this happening on London’s public transport? – what are you doing to keep passengers safe? #londondecline #savelondon.’
Since the start of 2016, Tube crime rates have more than doubled, from nine per every million journeys to more than 21 last March. Similarly, offences have risen on the Overground, DLR and Elizabeth line, which opened in 2022.
A analyis shows that the capital’s the most dangerous station per passenger is Poplar on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), near Canary Wharf.
Statistics collated by the British Transport Police (BTP) and TfL show 46 crimes were committed at the stop on the self-driving line last year. This equated to a rate of 58.7 offences for every million passengers.
Transport for London have acknowleged the recent crack smoking incident, which happened during a ‘busy hour’ and went viral after being shared on Reddit.
It occurred during rush hour when the passenger, who wished to remain anonymous, noticed other commuters hurriedly moving away from a man sitting across from him on the Tube.
Initially assuming the man might be homeless and people were simply avoiding the smell, the passenger was horrified when he realised the individual was attempting to light up crack cocaine in full view of fellow passengers.
‘I was travelling back from work during a busy(ish) hour when I became aware that a number of people before me had started to get up and move away before what was normal for the next stop,’ the commuter wrote on Reddit.
‘I looked up and saw a dirty, scuffy-looking man opposite me and I initially thought that he was homeless and that other people were moving away because he smelt bad or something before realising that he was behaving oddly and attempting to light a small, metal pipe.
‘Thinking he was just drunk, I said ‘Dude, no- you can’t do that here’ before I recognised that he was attempting to light up some crack.’
‘He was as high as a kite, occasionally looking around but not really focusing on anything, with a gormless grin expression on his face. He was phlegming and spitting on the floor near-constantly too.’
Although the passenger initially considered confronting the addict, he ultimately decided to move away to another part of the carriage, joining others who were visibly unnerved by the situation.
‘I could tell that many others were unnerved and/or repulsed by the man, especially the young women on the carriage,’ he said.
When the commuter got off at his stop, he went straight to a nearby Transport for London (TFL) worker to report the incident.
However, the response he received was not what he expected: ‘I went to tell a TFL worker about what I’d just witnessed, telling them the carriage number, guys description and general direction. But the TFL guy said that there basically wasn’t much they could do about him,’ the commuter explained.
‘Apparently the crack addict was so well known them that they had complaints about him every one to three days and that he was so familiar that the workers all knew him by his 1st name.’
Crime data compiled by shows the gradual increase of crimes per million passenger journeys on the Undergorund over a 15 year period from 2009 to 2024.
However, the curve of the graph shows that the crime rate was actually declining from 2009 to 2016, hitting its lowest crime rate of 7.3 just before Sadiq Khan took over as Mayor of London.
March 2023 was the worst month on record with a crime rate of 24.9. This is excluding data complied around Covid which is skewed as ridership plummeted during this time due to government restrictions being in place.
Most recent data for the first quarter of 2024 is also bleak and showed little signs of improvement with 6,319 crimes being reported across January, February and March.
That is more than 70 crimes being reported per day.
A TfL spokesperson said: ‘We want all customers to feel safe when travelling and we understand the alarm this kind of behaviour could cause.
‘We are working with the police, specialist teams and other agencies to help move vulnerable people away from our network and into help and support.’