Cocaine is the new plastic: let’s banish it with a shock campaign

The “hypocr-ethical” metropolitan; we all know at least one. Their quinoa-speckled existence is defined by the most magnificent double standards. Monday to Friday they take their tote bags to Waitrose, sip water from £35 reusable teakwood bottles at work, and abstain from beef because of the CO2. Then they celebrate the weekend with a rainforest-wrecking, violence-fuelling line of cocaine.

This despite the fact that our cocaine problem is just as out-ofcontrol as our plastics problem. Class A drugs use among young people is at its highest level in more than a decade, according to new Home Office figures. A bumper cocaine harvest in Colombia has caused violent crime in Britain to soar as dealers battle over new markets in the home counties, and coastal towns. For every gram of cocaine snorted, 4sqm of South American rainforest is destroyed. Rare species like hummingbirds and spectacled bears are being driven to extinction because their habitats are razed to make way for coca plantations.

Rather than sneering at bourgeois hypocrisy, we should ask what the war on cocaine can learn from the antiplastics movement, especially as warnings about cocaine’s health risks have so far fallen on deaf ears. First, the skilful use of images to massage the middle-class preoccupation with humanity’s deleterious impact on the world: viral images of turtles trapped in plastic bags and drone footage of seas swirling with plastic bottles are dramatic cause-and-effect visualisations; suddenly we have all realised our everyday behaviour is ruining our planet.

An anti-cocaine social media campaign could similarly use powerful images to hammer home the implications of that cheeky sniff of cocaine at a house party: the 12-yearold London boy caught up in a turf war after being lured into dealing by the promise of free trainers; the coca fields vomiting kerosene and sulphuric acid waste into Amazonian rivers; the sniffer dogs suffering from cancer of the nose.

Second, anti-plastics campaigners are good at making their activism, such as local beach cleans, enjoyable. What about promoting “ecovoluntourism” in areas of Colombia and Bolivia rehabilitated by the cocaine trade? Or asking young professionals to give up a Saturday morning a month to spend time with children ripe for recruitment by drug gangs, helping them with homework?

But we also need to talk more about the bipolar, compartmentalised nature of modern ethical behaviour. At a party, I recently teased a coke-using vegan friend, Joe, about the contradiction in his lifestyle. “Yeah it’s quite bad when I think about it,” he gulped. The problem is, people like Joe aren’t thinking about it often. With the same tireless, creative energy as the anti-plastics movement, we must keep reminding them.