Loyalty card for cocaine
Dealers offer discount deals to users of drug which is ‘as easy to order as pizza’
COCAINE dealers are offering users coffee shop-style loyalty cards to fend off fierce competition.
The cards offer customers the opportunity to get a sixth ‘wrap’ of the class A drug for free if they collect five stamps.
Featuring a logo and professional-looking branding, they are almost identical to similar schemes used at fast food chains to promote brand loyalty.
And one MP warned that getting cocaine delivered to you was now as easy as ‘hailing a taxi or ordering a pizza’.
The loyalty card reads: ‘One freebie for every five stamps that you collect!!’ The scheme offers stamps for repeat purchases, giving the sixth and then 12th wrap of cocaine free.
A wrap of cocaine generally costs between £50 and £80, depending on the quality.
The drug is delivered by a network of motorcycle couriers.
But campaigners warned that middle- class users were fuelling street violence as gangs fought to secure their market share.
David lammy, the labour MP for Tottenham in london, said: ‘ People who are buying cocaine on a Friday night in the City or are having drugs delivered to a dinner party or a house party in a wealthy suburb have got to look at themselves and make the connection between their drug use and what is happening on the streets to serve their recreational weekend habit.
‘Having cocaine delivered to your door is as easy as hailing a taxi or ordering a pizza.
‘There is a lucrative market worth billions of pounds and what this means in communities like mine is that teenagers and school kids, who are almost always black and from deprived backgrounds, are essentially foot soldiers for gangsters much higher up the food chain.’
Harry Shapiro, from charity DrugWise, added: ‘The level of competition on the street means they have to offer an incentive to get their customers to stay with the one dealer.’
A teenager needed hospital treatment following a binge on anxiety drug Xanax with other pupils at school. At least 11 children fell ill after taking the substance at 450-year- old lord Williams’s School in Oxfordshire, with one coughing up blood and some said to have passed out in class.