YOU'RE GOING TO DIE, SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIVE

Danniella Westbrook's Disfigured Nose Is Being Held Up As A Warning To
Cocaine Users. But Julie Burchill, Who Has 'Put Enough Up Her Nostrils To
Stun The Entire Colombian Armed Forces', Has No Regrets About Her
Powder-Fuelled Years. Here She Explains The Drug's Powerful Allure

In an episode of the Simpsons, Homer - trying to express his delight at a
particularly tasty meal - once put it thus: "It's like there's a party in my
mouth, and everyone's invited!" Looking at the recent newspaper photographs
of Danniella Westbrook's face, you could be forgiven for thinking that the
poor kid had had a riot in her nose, and everyone turned up in their
steel-capped DMs.

I must admit that my first reaction had a tinge of, if not admiration, then
awe, about it. How can you do that much coke in five years?

She's only 26, for the love of Mike! It took Stevie Nicks well into her 40s
to see that much active service. Danniella was reportedly spending UKP300 a
day on the stuff - that's six grammes!

Any drug-taker, no matter how reformed, cannot help but gasp at the sheer
physical stamina and determination demonstrated by such a young person.

One's next reaction has to be a healthy twinge of scepticism. Westbrook just
happens to have broken her nose two years ago in a car crash, had
reconstructive surgery - and here she is with part of it missing.

As a cursory glimpse at Michael Jackson will confirm, the butchery of
plastic surgeons has ruined more noses in a year than cocaine could in a
lifetime.

To hold Westbrook up as an example of what will invariably happen to a
moderate recreational user of cocaine - or any drug - is as silly, deceitful
and alarmist as pointing to a homeless dipsomaniac lying in a pool of his
own vomit - don't point at me like that, you! - and claiming that that's
where a couple of pre-dinner Camparis will inevitably get you, given time.
Still, even if we are to believe what we read - at the height of her earning
power, allegedly blowing UKP100,000 a year on the stuff - I just don't know
how she did it. Between 1986 and 1996, I must have put enough toot up my
admittedly sizeable snout to stun the entire Colombian armed forces, and
still it sits there, Romanesque and proud, all too bloody solid actually,
unmistakably my father's nose. (That was the only aspect of taking coke that
ever used to freak me out; "Wooah! I'm putting coke up my father's nose!"
I'd think around 3am.)

But unlike my wussy compadres, who used to get teary and bleary as the sun
came up, I never found cocaine a problem; as one who suffered chronically
from both shyness and a low boredom threshold, I simply can't imagine that I
could have ever had any kind of social life without it, let alone have
reigned as Queen of the Groucho Club for a good part of the 80s and 90s. I
don't regret my years as a cokehead, and, in fact, look back on them with
affection; a whole decade went by in a blur, like some crazy Aerosmith
video.

But gee, it was laffs.

There is a certain sort of milieu in which the people are so self-obsessed
and yet deeply dull that if you don't do drugs, you'll end up wanting to
kill yourself with the boredom of it all. Fashion is one such scene, and so
was my branch - stylish, show-offy - of the print media.

Let us not forget that cocaine is first and foremost an anaesthetic, and
therefore particularly handy for medicating the tricky condition called
human.

But I still maintain that what you pay for with coke is what you don't get
as much as what you do; you don't get the slavering addiction,
bone-shivering debilitation and detox horrors of the other Class As, not if
you sniff it. (Crack is another matter.) The main danger of powdered cocaine
is its subtle, insinuating reliability; it becomes both the problem and the
solution to a far greater degree than other, ruder drugs, which start acting
up right after the honeymoon period.

I've been lucky enough to come out the other end of my Cocaine Nightmare
with no greater damage to my health than a bit of RSI, from working twice as
hard as I otherwise might have - hardly the worst way to spend your 20s and
30s, especially considering the amount of fun I was having at the same time.
I don't take it now for the simple reason that for the first time in my life
since I was 17 (and started ingesting huge quantities of bathtub sulphate) I
am not surrounded by bores day and night; I have no need to make my life
more interesting, more bearable to myself any more. But if I had spent 10
years smoking dope, I would have been robbed of my ambition, and if I had
spent 10 years doing heroin, I would have robbed other people of everything.
I still maintain that cocaine is the best fun you can have while being
ripped off left, right and centre.

Anyway, Danniella's only young still, and she's got a rich boyfriend;
without meaning to be callous, she can always have a new bit stuck on. There
seems to be something rather illogical about making such a fuss about an
actress being in need of a bit of facial reshaping when the likes of
Elizabeth Hurley, say, are practically unrecognisable as the faces they had
a decade ago, and have been richly rewarded for each new mutation.

But Liz, of course, pumped up those lips and whittled down those hips in
pursuit of her career, not her own pleasure.

For a woman to risk her all-important looks in pursuit of her own pleasure,
though, is a cardinal crime, female beauty existing only to aid and
facilitate the pleasure of men as opposed to the woman herself.

Hence Brigitte Bardot's sun-seeking, wine-drinking life has left her a mess,
according to received wisdom - while the turnip-headed man-mountain that is
Jack Nicholson is still sold to us as an attractive prospect.

And, similarly, whereas the cocaine high-jinks of Ronnie Wood (who snorted
so much that he could eventually see through his nose) and Francis Rossi
(whose party trick involving a piece of string going up one nostril and come
out of the other) are knowingly, twinklingly tut-tutted over as part of
rock's rich tapestry, Danniella's nose must serve as a dreadful warning to
all. Naughty old Ronnie, hell-raising old Ross! - tragic, troubled
Danniella.

But consider.

Though I have no desire to lose my nose, I will always believe that youth
and beauty are, to a great extent, fuel to be burned in pursuit of pleasure
rather than fruit to be preserved at all costs for a rainy day. When you're
on your deathbed, it's the fun you didn't have that you'll think back on,
not the perfect health and/or youthful beauty you maintained, because now
you're going to die anyway. That's the bottom line; you're going to die, so
you might as well live. And if your idea of living it up isn't altering your
consciousness in some way - hey, I'm sure you're a great all-round human
being, but don't ask me to any house parties, will you?

People will continue to take cocaine for the same reason they will continue
to drink; not because we are intrinsically self-destructive beings, but, on
the contrary, because we are, for the most part, logical beasts with sound
judgment and a tendency to believe the evidence in front of our own eyes
rather than the scare stories in a newspaper. We know that tobacco and
alcohol kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, and that cocaine
kills, on average, three. Three people.

For every Danniella Westbrook, there are a thousand recreational cocaine
users living perfectly full and useful lives who consider a bit of sniffing
and a few palpitations now and then a pretty low price to pay for a life
less slow, less lumpen, less ordinary - a life more shiny.