SNIFFING OUT COCAINE HOTSPOTS

"Simply everyone's taking cocaine..." begins poet Murray Lachlan Young's
sociological ode to the drug.

Everyone? If you have two used banknotes on you, one of them is likely to
have traces of cocaine on it. The drug that has entertained the bohemian
world for a century now seems to have permeated all levels of society -
much as cannabis did 25 years ago. "Policemen and plumbers, roadsweepers
and peers/Simply everyone's taking cocaine" the poem continues.

No one doubts that lines of cocaine are being laid out in bars and clubs
every night across the capital. But, we wondered, are they doing it at the
places too posh for ordinary people to get into? Are the great and good
snorting coke too?

The Sunday Times recently made much of the discovery of a flake of cocaine
in a lavatory near the office of the Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, in the
House of Lords. But in fact the paper's survey of 10 notable office
buildings in London - including Parliament, the Royal Courts of Justice and
Railtrack's headquarters - found very little cocaine. Out of almost 100
tests only four came out positive - three of them were from the
journalists' loos in the House of Commons press gallery.

But our trawl around London's smartest members' clubs, bars and restaurants
seems to show that cocaine's spread knows no boundaries. Of our tests, 75
per cent were positive for cocaine - including in The Ritz, the Savoy and
indeed the Royal Opera House.

We used the system employed by police forensic services to produce evidence
that will stand up in court. Kits were supplied by Scientifics, a forensic
laboratory service based in Derby. After I had made my way to the gents' in
each establishment, I pulled on rubber gloves before dipping a sterile
swab, like a Q-tip, into a vial of methanol - a chemical that will
instantly dissolve most organic compounds. Then I swabbed down
likely-looking flat surfaces, keeping an eye out for tell-tale grains. Only
one cubicle was swabbed in each venue. The kit, gloves and all, was sealed
in a bag to avoid contamination of the next site.

This highly sensitive test is used on the dashboards of cars that drug
dealers may have used, or for testing paraphernalia used by drug takers. It
shows up almost every drug, legal or illegal, in existence - from
amphetamines and cannabis through to heroin and ecstasy - by matching the
molecular structures found against a computer library of several thousand
known compounds.

Matt Russell, the forensic scientist at Scientifics, ran our samples
through the two machines, a gas chromatograph and a mass spectrometer.
After three years in the business the results didn't surprise him. "I
reckon if you ran swab tests on most clubs in Britain, you'd get this level
of positives." The only thing that raised his eyebrows was the quality of
the cocaine: in only one sample was there any trace of amphetamine or other
substitute drugs commonly used to "cut" cocaine. Rich people buy better drugs.

What can the venues' owners do? The police could, of course, have all these
places' licences removed if they believed they were habitually used for
drug-taking. The chef Alastair Little, fed up with the coke-snorters at his
Notting Hill restaurant, is said to have smeared Vaseline over the flat
surfaces in the lavatories. While there's no suggestion that in any of
these venues drug-taking is condoned or encouraged, some of the managers we
took our findings to said the problem was out of their control - though, of
course, club members or customers found using drugs would be immediately
ejected. "Should I have attendants in every loo?" said Christopher Gilmour,
owner of Christopher's restaurant. "It's a problem I'll look into, but I'm
not sure there's anything I can do about it."

Christopher's American Grill

Businessman, politicians and journalists gather at Christopher's; on the
cusp of the City and the West End, it's a place where the people who run
the country can comfortably come together. Cocaine users? They don't look
like it. On a Monday lunchtime the tables were filled with the soberest of
suits, earnestly consuming their lobsters, while in one corner a top Daily
Telegraph executive was talking to a columnist. At the table next to me one
businessman was reading Aviation Monthly. Anyone looking for a different
sort of high would find the flimsy cubicles in the men's lavatories far
from discreet - hardly ideal for snorting, or drug testing. It's not easy
to put on rubber gloves quietly. Blushing, I wondered: would it be more
humiliating to be thrown out of by charming Christopher as a drug abuser,
or as a forensic scientist?

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Savoy Grill

Arguably the smartest lunching venue in London: former Conservative
chancellor Kenneth Clarke was leaving as I entered with my testing kit.
There is, it should quickly be pointed out, no reason whatsoever to think
that Mr Clarke had been snorting from the smart marble-topped surfaces in
the gentlemen's cloakroom. Someone had, but there is no way of telling
when. So sensitive is the GCMS test that it can pick up traces of cocaine
invisible to the naked eye, and they might have been lying about for weeks.
And the cocaine molecule is extraordinarily sticky. It will attach itself
to anything: a cursory wipe-down might easily fail to remove it. I had a
good delve with my swab round the dusty cracks at the back of the Savoy's
cistern-top shelf.

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Ritz

Afternoon tea was in full swing at The Ritz, the gents' full of elderly
American tourists discussing the appalling price of cucumber sandwiches.
Little hope of finding class A drugs here, I thought, swabbing down the
window sill while the liveried attendant paced impatiently outside. But I
was wrong. "I'd hate it if you were to suggest our lavatories weren't
cleaned properly," said a Ritz spokeswoman when told the test results.

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Carlton Club

On top of the cistern in the Conservative Party's own St James's
gentleman's club, I struck gold - I thought. A distinct trail of yellow-ish
white, the length of a credit card, was encrusted on the porcelain. All
around were tiny granules.

Test: negative for any illegal substance.

White's Club

Swabbing the polished mahogany of one of the great thunderboxes of this,
London's oldest gentleman's club, I thought of all the gamblers, drunks and
rakes that made White's London's hottest night-spot of the 18th and 19th
centuries. Sadly, nothing very interesting has happened there since.

Test: negative for any illegal substance.

The Groucho Club Cocaine in the Groucho? Does the Queen hang out at
Buckingham Palace? We used the Soho media hang-out as a laboratory
"control" - if we didn't find cocaine here, the test probably wasn't
working. We weren't disappointed. The black painted wood above the cistern
in the men's loo was scarred with the marks of 15 years' cocaine-chopping -
the crushing of granules with a credit card or razor blade. And around the
books left for leisurely customers to read in the loo white grains were
clearly visible.

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Royal Opera House

Spotless, shiny, the new loos at the revamped Royal Opera House are not
cocaine-friendly - they have no flat surfaces other than the lids
themselves. But that doesn't appear to have deterred the opera-goers. "It's
a public space," said an ROH spokesman when told about the test. "More than
2,000 people pass through every day."

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Ivy

I overheard the strangest conversation on the steps of this, London's
classiest showbiz restaurant (and one of the hardest to get into). "I used
tons of it. Thanks so much. It helped me get away with it - the concert
would have been rubbish." The speaker was a middle-aged gent in camel-hair
coat. "Very glad to be of service," said the other man, grey-haired,
slightly embarrassed. The lab report on the sample from The Ivy lavatory
said it was "heavily contaminated" with cocaine, so much so that other,
rarer substances that can be part of the compound appeared.

Test: positive for cocaine, methyl ecgonine, tropacocaine.

Orso

Another City fringe restaurant, best known for newspaper execs, actors from
West End shows and smarter ad-world people. White grains were visible in a
crack behind the cistern.

Test: positive for cocaine.

The Sunday Times

"Someone has been snorting cocaine under the very nose of Derry Irvine,"
chortled The Sunday Times two weeks ago. The paper had discovered a lump of
the drug worth about UKP 2 in a wash-room near the Lord Chancellor's
office. So what would we find in the Sunday Times's offices? Do pots call
kettles black? The cubicle I swabbed came up clean of drugs - but it was
quite the grubbiest in my whole tour of London. Don't they have ashtrays?

Test: positive for nicotine only.