Credit: Dangerous Minds / Video Stills

Take it from anyone who works in one, nursing homes may appear quaint and a little sad on the surface, but look a little closer and you’ll find a den of drug-fuelled lawlessness that rivals any night at Berghain.

After all, unless it’s less a nursing home and more a hospice, the people there will often have a lot more energy than you’d expect. Principally due to the general “fuck it” attitude that affects the teenage and the old alike.

Ironically enough, it affects the former because they believe they’ll never die, and the latter because they know they will, sooner rather than later. Either way, responsibilities tend to go out the window and that “fuck it” attitude takes over. Very literally in some cases.

In others, it takes a less literal and more metaphorical attitude. A willingness to bend the rules to have a little fun in their dotage. Drug use, for example, has gone up among senior citizens in most countries. Not just the usual painkillers and pills one would expect, either. In England alone, recreational and illegal drug use among pensioners has increased tenfold since the early 1990s. However, only a few of them have gone as far with it as one grandfather in Sydney did in September 2021.

The residents of Dural’s Mountainview Retirement Village started noticing that 62-year-old Gary Halford was getting more visitors than normal. Not only that, but they were arriving at the strangest times. Mostly at night and never staying for long. They were rarely the same people twice, either, which was the reason that the other residents of the retirement village called in a number of anonymous tips on their fellow resident.

I can only hope that when I reach their age that I’m less of a narc.

So, what happened to this OAP drug baron?

This lead to what must have been one of the more bizarre operations ever put in place by an Australian Police Department.

A full-scale monitoring of a retirement village for a possible drug lord operating in its midst. Since this was summer 2021, what gave the game away wasn’t just the sheer number of people coming and going from Halford’s residence, but the fact that they were unmasked. Whoever these visitors were, they weren’t going through normal channels.

After spending the summer of 2021 building a case against him, the cops finally struck. Pulling the former bus driver over and seizing cannabis, methylamphetamine and a burner phone from his car. After this, the police issued a warrant to search his residence and found more illegal drugs and an unregistered weapon. This being 2021, he wasn’t just arrested for supply and possession of illegal drugs but failure to comply with a public health order.

Sorry, Gaz, Sydney’s no place to live out your Narcos fantasies, even if you can’t stomach one more bingo night with the girls.