Heroin's journey from pharmacy shelf to street corner runs through this Dispatches film, made by journalist Nick Davies for UK television. The report tracks the drug across three fronts: its medical history and use as a painkiller, the realities of recreational and street use among addicts, and the smuggling routes that move it from producer countries into Britain. Davies uses that groundwork to make an argument rather than just a survey, framing the film's real title, Drug Laws Don't Work: The Phoney War, as its thesis: that decades of prohibition have failed to curb supply or use and may have made both worse. Interviews and reporting move between users, dealers, and the policy debate in Westminster, treating enforcement as a system to be tested against results rather than a given. The film sits squarely in the British drug-policy arguments of the early 2000s, using heroin as the case study for a wider claim about what current law actually achieves.