You can’t do drugs and avoid doing harm
The excellent Shaun Bailey, Conservative hopeful for London mayor, has proposed that bosses should carry out drug tests on their employees. In an open letter, he wrote: “Drug use is not only a crime in itself; drug use is a direct cause of crime, from county lines gangs to stabbings on our streets… The purpose is not to get employees fired or shamed. The purpose is to change our culture.”
My work trajectory is hardly typical. At the first job, I sometimes felt that one might be sacked – or certainly not admitted into the inner circle – if one failed to take drugs. At elevenses the stench of cannabis rose all around while the syncopated sound of speed-sniffing indicated that those members of staff not getting stoned were suffering from nasty colds.
I left the NME while still a teenager, but in my 20s progressed to Fleet Street – and cocaine. For 30 years I ingested enough to stun the entire Colombian armed forces; suffering from both shyness and a low boredom threshold, I couldn’t imagine any kind of social life without it. But five years ago, it dawned on me that I had long ceased to be either bored or shy – and I gave it up overnight.
As usual, I was against the trend; London is now the biggest consumer of the drug in Europe with a market worth £1billion per year. Last year forensic scientists at King’s College London tested waste water and found that the average daily amount of pure cocaine being consumed in London was 23kg
– more than Europe’s next three biggest cocaine-consuming cities (Barcelona, Amsterdam and Berlin) combined. Everybody’s doing it – traces have been found from the House of Commons lavatories to hyperactive Thames eels. It’s on most of our banknotes and in some of our drinking water.
But there has been a crucial change since I kicked my expensive habit in 2015. In the year 2000 tobacco and alcohol killed hundreds of thousands of people; cocaine killed three. That’s not true anymore because homicides using knives committed by under-18s rose by 77 per cent from 2016-2018 and were on course to rise to an all-time high until lockdown. The reason for most of these killings is cocaine.
In 2018, the first drug dealer was convicted of offences under the Modern Slavery Act relating to what would become known as county lines, involving the recruitment by dealers of vulnerable children, who are less likely to be stopped by police. In 2019 more than 4,000 children were thought to be involved; this year a Home Office report stated that this had risen to 27,000. Additionally, the NHS felt it necessary to publish a guide to assist the “very young” children being recruited and whose admittance to hospital with knife injuries has almost doubled in three years to 573.
As with pornography, users want to believe that regardless of the broken lives which litter the production of everybody else’s thrills, the source they alone opt for is magically free of exploitation and death.
I used to tell myself that growing the coca plant gave Colombian farmers a good living; it’s always easy to lie to ourselves about the plight of people in faraway countries of which we know nothing. Today, it would be a wilfully blind ocean-going hypocrite who could ignore the human collateral that is left lying in the wake of the “cheeky” line of coke.
I’m a libertarian and would like to see all drugs legalised and sold by pharmacists, as they were until relatively recently in this country; Queen Victoria was prescribed heroin and cocaine, and she was hardly a slacker. But until they are, people need to think about where their drugs come from and avoid doing harm – just as they used to avoid buying fruit produced under apartheid. There’s no point in “eating clean” if there’s blood on your hands.
And at a time when we are being told how important it is to listen to our black countrymen, those Black Lives Matter supporters who enjoy street drugs should pay attention to t Shaun Bailey, a man from a Ladbroke Grove council house. If you truly believe that black lives matter, stop taking cocaine.