Millennials boost cocaine trade?
Class A drug use is rising among young middle-class professionals. Yes, we’re hypocrites, they tell David Bates as British authorities blame them for fuelling gang wars.
The evening had followed a familiar trajectory: a few beers, raucous laughter, the customary decompression after five days of work for four twenty-something men with no significant responsibilities, more jollity and then, the first inevitable wave of tiredness banished by a line or two of cocaine.
Will, 26, can remember clearly the similarly welltrodden conclusion. The sun, flashing through paper-thin curtains, reminded him and his friends that they had chased the initial intensity of those first few lines all the way into the morning. Saturday arrived with a whimper.
‘‘That first line or two,’’ he says, ‘‘where you think, ‘This is amazing, I never want it to stop, I just want it to go on for ever and ever.’ It is that feeling of complete total energy or euphoria and, with all of these things, particularly with coke, you feel it and then you’re chasing it for the rest of the night. Then you go home and you feel like crap.
‘‘You inevitably lose contact with its effects. You’re not always doing it in a state of sobriety – 9.9 times out of 10 it is because you’ve had a few drinks. In the same way, I know smoking is bad for me, but get a few drinks in me and then all of a sudden I think, ‘Yeah, I’ll go and have a cigarette.’ ’’
Will is a high achiever. He’s privately educated, has a firstclass degree from a prestigious university, he is well read, articulate, engaging and has been fast-tracked by the public service. He also tried – unsuccessfully – a month of vegetarianism in January.
In other words, he is exactly the sort of middle-class ‘‘ethical consumer’’ whom Olivia Pinkney, the British police chief responsible for children and young people, said in June were destroying the lives of young people with their own weekend drug habits – and who Justice Secretary David Gauke suggested should feel guilty ‘‘when they see a story of a 15-year-old boy stabbed in Hackney’’, because of their complicity in a violent trade.
The well-documented spike in London’s murder rate, which at one point in 2018 surpassed that of New York, prompted John Coles, the head of special operations at the National Crime Agency, to warn in May that the demand for class A drugs was propagating gang violence. This was followed, at the end of last month, by London Mayor Sadiq Khan pointing to ‘‘a definite link’’ between drugs, gangs and the rise in knife crime.
Khan said: ‘‘There are some Londoners who think it is a victimless crime, taking cocaine at middle-class parties. We need to make sure Londoners realise there is no such thing as a victimless crime.’’ The next week London police chief Cressida Dick spoke of ‘‘misery throughout the supply chain’’, inflicted by people who were otherwise sanctimonious about, say, the environment or ethical eating. Yet weekend drug use continues to surge.
According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Britain has the highest prevalence in Europe of cocaine use among young adults (15 to 34, 11.7 per cent) and all adults (15 to 64, 9.7 per cent). Deaths due to cocaine rose from 371 to 432 between 2016 and 2017, which is part of a general upward tilt, from 27 in 1997.
The Home Office drug misuse report from 2017, meanwhile, recorded a rise in use. In young people (16 to 24), 4.1 per cent are ‘‘frequent drug users’’ (more than once a month), while 2.6 per cent of people said they had used powdered cocaine in the past year. Will, though, reckons as many as 90 per cent of his friends have used cocaine, and 70 to 75 per cent are regular users.
Lara, 25, who works in sustainability, says: ‘‘It’s just normal, 90 per cent. I know one person who hasn’t done it and, even this year, she says she would. So, actually, I don’t know anyone.’’
Flatmates Olivia, who works in recruitment, and Maisy, a fashion buyer, both 25, agree. ‘‘I would say 90 per cent of the people in my office of about 50 do drugs,’’ Olivia says. ‘‘Two people in my office actually sell drugs.’’
‘‘London especially, absolutely everybody does it,’’ Maisy adds. ‘‘Everywhere you go, every friendship group, everyone. It’s a massive culture.’’
But why? David Nutt, the professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London, and former chief drug adviser to the government, says the impulse is driven by something fairly simple – fatigue. ‘‘Of course, people take stimulants when they drink, because they want to persist in being happy and high, and they want to offset the sedative effects of the alcohol.’’
It becomes clear from asking regular users that this drive has become complicated by cocaine’s normalisation among certain groups. ‘‘I’m not working mad
hours – I don’t often feel I need a pick-me-up, going out for a drink is enough,’’ Will says. He concedes that, among his friends, he is rarely the one to suggest taking drugs, but goes along with those who do.
‘‘One of your friends will get a bag in and then they will say, ‘Oh, don’t let me do this on my own.’ OK, they are calling me out – not on my desire to use anything, but my friendship with them: I’d be letting them down if I didn’t.’’
Over the course of these conversations, cocaine – a drug that kills thousands of people around the world – was referred to as beak, charlie, coke, powder, trimmings, nose beer, additionals, blow, hoot and extracurriculars. It has become so distanced from what it actually is as to become a joke among friends, in the same way that ‘‘poopie’’ between parents has little real relation to a steaming, smelly nappy.
Olivia and Maisy, who began taking class-a drugs in their first year of university, agree. ‘‘You don’t want to be sleepy drunk,’’ Olivia says. ‘‘You want to be optimum all the time when you’re out. I like everybody to be doing the same drug. If people are doing different drugs, then not everyone is going to be on the same level, and that’s half the fun of it.’’
‘Recently, it kind of just comes hand in hand,’’ Maisy adds. ‘‘If you’re going out, someone just gets it [cocaine] in. Having a line of coke or whatever, it’s like having a cigarette with your drink. It’s more of a friendshipculture thing. Someone will say, ‘Oh, I’ve got some, do you want some?’ ’’
The two most pertinent questions for this group of employed, financially stable, well-educated people are surely about personal health and ethical complication.
As far as health goes, Nutt – who is broadly in favour of a legal, regulated market for drugs such as ecstasy – is on the fence when it comes to cocaine, describing the mortality statistics as ‘‘relatively high, but not crushingly high’’. It becomes more dangerous when taken with alcohol, because the compound formed by their mixture, cocaethylene, is more toxic and can contribute towards an irregular heartbeat.
‘‘Sometimes, when I’ve had no sleep, I actually feel like I could drop dead,’’ Olivia says. ‘‘I know you probably won’t die of a hangover, but I feel like my heart . . . like I’m just about to die halfway through the day.’’
For Maisy, the main problem is anxiety. ‘‘I’m constantly thinking about my heart and that I’m going to die,’’ she says. ‘‘I went through a phase where we were doing it every weekend and then staying up really late. I stopped because I just needed to give myself a break. This panicky feeling was completely taking over me. I slowly got back into it again.’’
Olivia and Maisy, who are vegetarians, are, in many respects, ‘‘ethical consumers’’. ‘‘We don’t like plastic bottles and we’re quite environmentally friendly, as much as we can be,’’ Maisy says. Yet, when asked about the human cost of cocaine production and consumption, their responses diverged. ‘‘Honestly,’’ Maisy says, ‘‘I never even thought about it like that. Never.’’
Olivia laughs, embarrassed and aware of her contradictions. ‘‘I knew you were going to say that. It is because we don’t want to know; we won’t kill animals for food, but we’ll let people die. And we’ve watched Narcos and everything.’’
This incongruity seems to fit with the warning from police chief Cressida Dick last month. ‘‘There are a whole group of middle-class – or whatever you want to call them – people who will sit round . . . happily think about global warming and fair trade, and environmental protection and all sorts of things, organic food, but think there is no harm in taking a bit of cocaine. Well, there is.’’
When confronted with those words, Will pauses before replying with certainty. ‘‘It does make you a hypocrite. You can’t argue that it doesn’t. But is that a problem? Yeah, we’re not all perfect, ethical human beings and we all make mistakes.
‘‘The problem I have is that it ignores so many other factors that contribute to the social conditions in which, say, gang violence or a stabbing might occur. Why not bring attention to them all? You don’t have effective or stable communities for people to grow up in, which is a massive issue that isn’t actually being addressed.
‘‘Is it a problem? Yeah. But is it really at the heart of things? No. There are more fundamental things to worry about.’’
Perhaps, but as with plastic bottles, clothing manufactured in sweatshops, and all the lessthan-savoury aspects of the items we consume, the inconvenient truths about cocaine production may become increasingly difficult for these millennials to overlook.
Although, given how ingrained it is in their lifestyle, if Dick and Khan are serious about tackling the drug’s ubiquity, more than a guiltinducing verbal warning may be required. – The Times
‘‘I would say 90 per cent of the people in my office of about 50 do drugs. Two people in my office actually sell drugs.’’ Recruitment worker, 25