An expert witness may give evidence that persons engaged in drug dealings speak in code and that particular words are commonly used by drug dealers to refer to drugs, and that words used in intercepted conversations could be references to drugs. However, the expert may not give evidence that words used in a particular conversation were in fact references to drugs, unless the opinion is wholly or substantially based on specialised knowledge with the reasoning process sufficiently disclosed. Drug code tables must be admitted with a direction limiting their use to showing that words could be references to drugs, not as a dictionary establishing that they are.
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