How the middle classes are driving cocaine epidemic
From having the drug delivered to your door faster than pizza to the £22million shipment that was uncovered this week in an industrial fruit processing machine, it’s no wonder the UK is becoming the coke capital of Europe
BRITAIN has a drug problem. But far from it being confined to alleyways and sink estates, our addiction is being driven by the comfortably off middle class. And at dinner parties across the land the drug of choice is cocaine.
Yesterday security minister Ben Wallace said the UK “is fast becoming the biggest consumer of cocaine in Europe” and that, thanks to unprecedented levels of supply and ease of acquisition, it was no longer “the preserve of the yuppie or the rich”.
Earlier this week, Simon Kempton of the Police Federation warned that officers were “looking in the wrong place” by focusing on street-level addicts, as it is “white middle class” people who are driving the epidemic, adding: “Middle class drug users tend not to come across the radar of police because they are consuming it behind closed doors.”
His comments coincide with a new report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which found that Bristol was the top city for cocaine use in the UK, and ranked sixth in relation to population in the whole of Europe, more than anywhere in Germany, France or the Netherlands.
So prevalent has cocaine use become that a recent survey by the University of Surrey found that 13 per cent of British people have traces of the drug on their fingerprints, not necessarily from direct use but through handling bank notes or even shaking hands with someone who has taken it. Dr Melanie Bailey, lecturer in forensic analysis at Surrey, said: “Cocaine is a common environmental contaminant. It is well known it is present on many bank notes but we were surprised it was detected in so many fingerprint samples.”
The Home Office estimates the UK illegal drugs market to be worth £5.3 billion, and it’s growing. Last month, three drug dealers were jailed for transporting £4.5million of cocaine across London in a holdall; and yesterday Olivia Anton-Altamirano, a Spanish national living in London, was charged with smuggling 250kg of cocaine worth £22million hidden in an industrial fruit processing machine imported from Mexico.
This explosion in cocaine use seems to be a matter of simple economics: plentiful supply, a corresponding decrease in price and ease of delivery.
According to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, hectares sown with coca, the raw material from which cocaine is made, have increased in Colombia by 39 per cent in recent years: the equivalent of about 27,000 rugby fields.
The resulting surge in availability has meant prices in the UK have dropped by as much as 50 per cent in a decade. Five years ago high quality cocaine cost about £100 a gram: now it can be picked up for as little as £50 a gram. Thanks to the “dark web” it is easier than ever to find. A recent Channel 5 documentary showed users surfing the web for coke as easily as browsing on Amazon: orders were placed, paid for electronically and the drug was delivered by post.
FFASHIONABLE FIX: Affluent users don’t see the crime behind drugs OR other users, scoring can be even easier. Dealers are no longer shady characters in dark alleys but canny businessmen with an eye for the modern market who use Instagram and Snapchat to advertise their lethal products.
According to the Global Drug Survey, in many cities in the UK cocaine can be delivered faster than a pizza, with a third of users able to get their hands on the drug within half an hour. Some dealers even boast of offering loyalty cards, such as one might find in Starbucks. It is this convenience that is fuelling its popularity among the middle classes. Because scoring has become so divorced from the unpleasant side of the drugs business – the violence, exploitation and desperation – the whole act of using cocaine has become sanitised.
When it encompasses such bourgeois niceties as loyalty cards, the idea of your money funding gun crime and even terrorism is easy to ignore. But with the hike in use has come a surge in misery. According to the Office for National Statistics, deaths from cocaine use in England and Wales have more than doubled in the past four years, and in 201617, 12,000 people were admitted to hospital with coke-related disorders – more than twice as many as a decade before.
Police chiefs believe that our increased cocaine use is fuelling a rise in street violence and even murder as organised gangs vie to control this lucrative market. Campaigner Sheldon Thomas says middle-class cocaine use is essentially funding crime in the UK. “The police target street gangs but the problem is organised criminal networks and the middle-class white people who buy the drugs,” he told the police union’s annual conference.
And Simon Kempton added: “If I could stop one group using drugs tomorrow, I’d stop the middle classes. If I was a drug dealer and could only sell to one market, I’d sell to them. The big market is people with money and they are often oblivious to the misery they cause because it is not on their doorstep.”