"Spice, toot, bump, skooma, mamba - you can see they're getting desperate", says Sergeant Gary Jones of Scotland Yard. He believes there'll soon be gang wars over the last few remaining combinations of letters in the English language.
Drug dealer Mark Wilde agrees the situation is critical: "When I should be out stabbing rivals in turf wars, I'm stuck behind a Scrabble board trying to see what words we've got left. Would you believe I had to name my last drug "phthisis"? It was either that or "pterodactyl". I even tried going through some old 1950s phone books - but "Mrs Agatha Hardbarking" is hardly a suitable name for a party drug, is it?
Meanwhile, Sergeant Jones reassures people that the illegal drug trade will go into terminal decline around 2027, when the dealers finally use up the last word in the English language. "However", he warns, "they could always move to France and start all over again".