Some folks would find it ironic that the barrister daughter of a notorious international cannabis smuggler would abandon her successful criminal law career to go off and write a book about the unreliability of sniffer dogs and other olfactory methods of drug detection. But not Headspace author Amber Marks, who did exactly that.
“I don’t find anything ironic about that at all,” she protests. “I mean it’s only normal if your parents get locked up when you’re a child that you’d end up having a serious interest in the criminal justice system.”
Now aged 30, Amber was just a toddler when her father, Howard Marks, was first busted for cannabis smuggling. However, despite a high profile trial, the event left little impression on her, and he was back home before she knew it.
Eight years later, the then-10-year-old was present when officers from the American DEA stormed her parents’ house in Mallorca. At the time, Howard (who’s a much-loved old mucker of this writer, it should probably be stated) was sheltering under 43 different aliases and handling an estimated 10% of the planet’s marijuana trade.
In full glaring view of the media, Amber’s parents, Howard and Judy, were hauled off into DEA custody. After a lot of backroom negotiations, Judy was sentenced to two years in jail. Having been extradited to America, Howard was hit with a 25-year stretch in Indiana’s notorious Terre Haute penitentiary.
With their parents incarcerated, Amber and her younger siblings, Francesca and Patrick, were entrusted to the care of an aunt and her boyfriend. Sadly, the boyfriend turned out to be something of a sadistic junkie. Suffice to say, the helpless Marks children didn’t have an easy time.
“We didn’t really feel there was anything we could do. If you could imagine both your parents get taken away for what seems to you like unjust causes, and nobody can do anything about that – that’s the most horrific thing you can imagine happening. So when anything else bad happens, you assume that there’s nothing you can do about that either. And there’s no-one you can complain to.”
A concerned GP eventually got word through to the parents that all wasn’t well with their children, and they were swiftly moved to the care of more trustworthy friends. Needless to say, the experience left a lasting impression on Amber – though she appears more radicalised than traumatised by it: “I feel quite strongly about civil liberties issues as a result of it. I get quite upset when people dismiss imprisonment as a soft option. People don’t take the families into account.”
With Howard banged-up an ocean away, Amber and her siblings didn’t see their father for more than five years. “It still amazes me that the police can just march into a family home and take away both parents without having given any thought whatsoever as to what to do with the three young children living in the house. It’s such an irresponsible government action.”
Playing devil’s advocate, others would say that Howard’s actions were far more irresponsible...
“It didn’t occur to him for a minute that my mother would be arrested! So as far as he was concerned, we’d be okay if he went to prison because my mum would look after us. And they only arrested her to use as a bargaining tool for them. He did everything he could to ensure we’d be okay if anything happened to him.”
When it was discovered that, in their eagerness to put him away, the DEA had falsified some of their evidence, Howard was released after serving seven years. He got out just in time to encourage his eldest daughter to pursue a legal career. She did her degree at the London School of Economics, before training for the bar.
“I only practiced in private practice for about two-and-a-half years and then I worked in a government legal service. And now I teach law, but don’t practice.”
The idea for Headspace came about more than three years ago. “I was generally noticing a lot of sniffer dogs around, outside nightclubs and tube stations. People were assuming they were reliable, but I had a sneaking suspicion that they weren’t. And once I began researching it, I started noticing them everywhere. It became a bit of an obsession.
“I suppose I became something of a legal expert on sniffer dogs, and that got me invited to lots of security conferences. And then I got addicted to hanging out with policemen and military and surveillance experts.”
Did her family background impede her research at all?
“No, not at all,” she shrugs. “It was funny to be hanging out with all these police officers who were telling me that, if I had any connections to a drug dealer, their Intelligence would’ve told them. They would’ve treated me very differently had they known. I certainly don’t think they would’ve invited me to conferences on how to detect drug dealers.”
Having always harboured artistic aspirations, it wasn’t too long before she decided to abandon law and become a fulltime writer (“Dad wasn’t exactly happy about that decision, but he got over it”). Written in an extremely amusing, self-deprecatory and personable style, Headspace documents Amber’s financial woes and topsy-turvy love life as much as it does her investigations into the murky world of the surveillance and security industries.
“I didn’t want to rant to the converted,” she explains. “I wanted it to be a lot more readable than your usual civil liberties books. And I’d already spent several years defending suspects and taking everything very seriously. I just wanted to have a laugh with the book and actually enjoy doing something creative.”
One of the odder discoveries she made was that the MoD is currently training sniffer bees. “They place bees – three of them, just to make it that much more reliable - in a box, and then they waft the scent of a target substance like cocaine or explosives over them. At the same time as they’re wafting the smell, they inject the bees with sucrose solution.
“As a result there’s a Pavlovian response and the bees learn to associate that smell with food. And when a bee smells something it recognises as a food source, it wags its tongue. So inside the box there are cameras, which are linked to a computer and monitor screen that shows the bees’ tongues. So that when a substance is put past the bee they can tell whether or not it’s a target substance by measuring the extent to which the bee waggles its tongue.”
Hmmm... bad buzz. But is it trustworthy?
“Well, I wouldn’t want to be locked up on the say-so of the bee box,” she laughs. “And I wouldn’t feel safe that there were no bombs in a tube station because the bees had failed to recognise them.”
Amber’s already researching her next book. Unsurprisingly, it’s in a similar field: “I’m looking at the privatisation of forensic science in the criminal justice system, and how the industry is becoming corrupted. They’re trying to make forensic science something we can export to other countries - which somewhat clouds the Home Office’s judgement as to how reliable many of our techniques are.”
Headspace is published by Virgin Books