Kirstie: Friends of mine take cocaine and I’m so ashamed
KIRSTIE Allsopp has condemned casual drug users for taking cocaine after a record number of lives were claimed last year.
The TV presenter, 47, even admitted some of her own friends take drugs on a ‘regular basis’ with little thought for the support it gives violent criminals.
It comes as a major report found that a cocaine binge among the middle class drove the toll of drug poisoning deaths to a record level last year.
Criticising casual drug users on Twitter, the mother of four wrote: ‘When people who take drugs on a regular basis, friends of mine amongst them, see the horror of county lines drugs dealing and the damage done to very young people, do they feel totally s*** about themselves or do they just think roll on legalisation?
‘I’m not talking about addicts, you’re not an addict when you do a couple of lines every now and then.’
Earlier this year, a senior police officer agreed that middle-class drug users ‘have blood on their hands’ over the spate of violent gangland killings.
Discussing the link between drug use and stabbings in London, Met Police commissioner Cressida Dick said there was ‘misery’ throughout the drug supply trail and a direct link between substance abuse and violence.
She said: ‘There is this challenge that there are a whole group of middle-class 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; there’s misery throughout the supply chain.’
Last year, there were 4,359 deaths from drug poisoning in England and Wales, nearly 3,000 of them a direct result of abuse of illegal drugs. More than one in five of those was caused by cocaine overdoses or effects.
The number of drug-related deaths in Scotland soared to 1,187 last year. The figure is the highest since records began in 1996.
Cocaine was implicated in, or potentially contributed to, 273 deaths, which represented a 23 per cent rise on the year before.
Teacher Victoria Buchanan, originally from Kilmarnock, died in March 2018 after swallowing a £60 bag of cocaine in a first-class lounge at Manchester Airport.
The bag was the remnants of a package that cost £200 which Mrs Buchanan, 42, who lived in Dubai, had acquired during a visit to her family in Britain. Drinking champagne in the airport before returning to Dubai, which has tough drug laws, she chose to swallow the bag, but collapsed moments later when it burst in her stomach.
The leap in cocaine deaths follows reports that the drug has become fashionable among older, middle-class people.
Psychiatrist Dr Niall Campbell said: ‘Middle-class and middleaged people like to use it and it really doesn’t do them any favours. For older people, using cocaine is like putting a supercharged engine in a Ford Anglia.’
There has been a spread in drug gangs operating out of cities and into provinces via ‘county lines’. Such cases are a growing issue, with vulnerable young people being targeted to sell narcotics.
Miss Allsopp is famously open about her views on traditional social mores.
Last year she revealed that she smashed her children’s iPads after they failed to stick to her rules on screen time.
‘Misery in the supply chain’