POWDER TO THE PEOPLE

Cocaine Has Conquered Britain. This Angry Little Island Is in Thrall
to an Angry Little Drug

Nottingham's Lace Market district is one of those apparent miracles of
regeneration that have seen post-industrial stagnation replaced by
consumerist wonderment. According to its website, the bars, clubs and
restaurants give off "a Left Bank vibe" and ooze a "laidback
attitude"; by night, "the streets are crowded, the mood's uninhibited
and the bars are ultra hip". The reality, however - not least on a
Saturday - has more to do with the weekly ritual in which Britons
empty the cashpoints and go in search of a night out that may well end
with either romance or a ruck.

Pointing up the Lace Market's place on the leisure industry's cutting edge,
there is another aspect of this scene. Earlier this month, Nottingham's
police did a sweep of bars and clubs, and were not entirely surprised to
discover that the toilets in 24 of 28 premises tested positive for cocaine;
somewhat incredibly, more people admitted to using the drug than smoking
cigarettes in a city-centre survey reported by BBC East Midlands. Here, it
seems, is on-the-ground proof of developments announced in this week's
report from the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction:
among Britons aged between 15 and 34, one in 10 has experience of cocaine;
it's also reckoned that one in 15 young British men has used the drug
"recently".

So for Nottingham, read Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, Brighton or
Cardiff, and behold the ever more familiar picture of a country in
which - while a novelty-hungry press switches attention to such
marginal menaces as crystal meth - coke has become so built into
hundreds of thousands of lives as to be downright mundane. And while
we're here, it might be an idea to do the basic sociological sums that
seem to have eluded many: if one of our most popular national pastimes
is getting intoxicated and punching each other, might not a drug that
allows you to drink superhuman amounts while fostering tetchiness and
paranoia have quite a lot to do with it? The authorities in Nottingham
are beginning to think so: while recorded violent crime in other parts
of the city has either dropped or held steady, the Lace Market has
seen a 16% rise in the past year, and they suspect that coke is a key
reason.

A deeper look at the figures only underlines cocaine's centrality to
the average Saturday night. Its price currently hovers at between UKP40
and UKP50 a gram - and recent figures from the charity DrugScope suggest
that Gloucester (Gloucester!) has set a new benchmark of UKP30. In terms
of popular use, we are an accredited world leader: according to the
most recent UN World Drugs Report, we leave the rest of Europe - bar
Spain - standing, and take our place alongside a tiny band of
pre-eminent cocaine nations that includes the United States, Canada
and El Salvador. (It seems scarcely believable, but the UK's figures
come in higher than even those of Colombia or Peru.)

So, while the lavatories resound to snorts and sniffs, coke has joined
alcohol and cannabis in that select group of intoxicants that are
built into just about every British subculture, from lads on the piss
to pale bohemians - affordable yet aspirational. It is the link that
ties Frank Bruno to Kate Moss, and the catwalk to the high street. One
would have thought its ubiquity might kibosh the cool factor, but that
doesn't seem to have happened yet - and besides, for true desperadoes
there is always the option of leaving the merely recreational
pharmaceuticals behind, and moving from powder to the more outre
business of crack use.

Therein, incidentally, lies cocaine's awkward relation to the
perennial dinner-party idea that we should accept the inevitable,
legalise the class As and celebrate the tax take. Though powdered
cocaine might leave most users with little more complicated than a day
of self-loathing and a sore nose, that isn't really the point. With
the aid of a process that addicts find no more difficult than boiling
an egg, cocaine can be converted into crack, which - unlike even
heroin, whose users can theoretically maintain manageable lives -
tends to turn people into narcotic monomaniacs. It's an argument for
another time, but the point needs restating: while turning cocaine -
and, by extension, crackheads - into a source of tax revenue is
probably an exciting idea for swashbuckling libertarians, it's of no
use to the rest of us.

Thus far, mercifully enough, it's the less malign form of coke that is
sprinkled over so many British lives: perfect not just for these
consumerist times but also for that shouty, overcompensating,
post-imperial belligerence that defines much of our current national
identity. We're an angry little island in thrall to an angry little
drug; were a modern Hogarth on hand to provide a more artful record of
all the snorting, twitching and fighting than do the CCTV cameras, he
would surely have a whale of a time.