Cocaine isn’t harmless – it drove me to the brink

Cocaine ruins and ravages by stealth, slowly eroding the soul

We need to talk about cocaine, that drug that ruins lives across the world and yet which we tend to ignore because, historically, rich people do it. Celebrities do it. The middle class do it at parties, and so it can’t be a problem, can it? Not on the same level as meth or heroin or one of those other nasty drugs that you find down dark alleys and on estates, those drugs whose users we can immediately judge and condemn for being low-lifes, smack heads, addicts.

But cocaine? Cocaine somehow gets away with murder. It is quietly disparaged, of course, but it somehow doesn’t come with the same level of judgment as other class As. It is seen as a “party” drug rather than a “druggy” drug, its users out for a bit of fun on a Friday night as opposed to desperately seeking a fix to fuel their dependency.

But cocaine is an awful drug, a perniciously destructive drug, one that ruins and ravages by stealth, slowly eroding the soul of the user over time until they are completely hollowed out with self-loathing. I know this, having spent a decade of my life hooked on it.

Of all the dumb things I have done in my life – and I have done a lot – cocaine is by far the dumbest, and most dangerous, the thing that led me into umpteen unsafe, seedy situations, spitting me back out into the cold, grey light of day – a cold, grey light that was almost unbearable to be in.

Cocaine has left me in a state of psychosis. Cocaine has taken me the closest I have ever been to suicide. Cocaine brought me to my knees, and all because of

a little white line that I thought would sober me up and allow me to keep on partying and enjoying the “good” times.

I mention this now for a number of reasons. This week, the inquest into the tragic death of Mike Thalassitis, a former

Love Island contestant who took his own life earlier this year, found that the 26-year-old died after an alcohol and cocaine binge. Sophie Gradon, another former star of Love Island who is said to have died by suicide last year, was also found to have taken cocaine in the hours leading up to her death. Studies have shown that people with depression who mix alcohol and cocaine – and cocaine is almost always mixed with alcohol – are 16 times more likely to try to kill themselves. Cocaine quietly destroys the lives of many users, and it is doubly dangerous because, on the surface, it makes them look as if they are having a good time. And yet in these tragic inquest reports, the drugs are almost a footnote, an incidental.

But cocaine is – quite literally – everywhere. It is actually in our water. A report released this week by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction suggests that the UK’S consumption of cocaine is the worst in Europe, and shows that chemical tests of waste water have pinpointed Bristol as having the highest use per population out of 10 major cities.

The report also noted that getting hold of cocaine is, in some cases, as easy as hailing an Uber, due to “innovative distribution strategies”, and that the cocaine trade was now seen as “a competitive market in which sellers compete by offering additional services such as fast and flexible delivery”.

This week, it was also reported that a British teacher died after swallowing a bag of cocaine while travelling back to Dubai. Friends and family of the late Victoria Buchanan, a mother of three, said that there was never any evidence that she had a problem with drugs. She was “upbeat”. Her death was “accidental”. This will probably be of scant consolation to all those who loved her.

Cocaine is a vile drug, one that goes hand in hand with that most legal of drugs – alcohol – because cocaine has the temporary effect of sobering you up, enabling you to carry on the party. I know that’s why I did it, anyway. It temporarily shuts out any negativity in your head, making you the life and soul – but by the end, it borrows from your actual soul, with interest, and has the effect of utterly depleting it the next day.

The war on drugs is an utter failure. We should be ashamed of the simplistic way in which we view narcotics – not the sick, sad, broken people who feel compelled to take them.