COCAINE IS BEING PASSED AROUND LIKE AFTER-DINNER MINTS THIS WEEKEND

ADAM EDWARDS is the son of a judge, a former editor of a London
magazine - and a cocaine user. Here, in the wake of revelations
involving Lawrence Dallaglio and Tom Parker Bowles and as the
Government launches its anti-drugs crusade, Edwards reveals from his
personal experience just how widespread cocaine use is today

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Tom Parker Bowles admitting he
took cocaine is that anyone is surprised. It would be more surprising
if he had not taken the drug.

Cocaine is the currency of the capital. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, the
It-girl and friend of Prince Charles, took it and last month ended up
in a clinic. At any fashionable gathering, at smart restaurants, at
funerals, at Christmas, New Year, cocaine is the drug of choice for
the professional classes under 40.

In the past year, I have seen it taken by a Conservative politician,
several lobbyists, a Guards officer, two QCs, a solicitor, a senior
stockbroker, a merchant banker and a score of media men and women,
including PRs, publishers, writers, Fleet Street executives and
television and film producers.

It was taken not as a daring, amusing experiment, it was not even
taken as an illegal excitement, it was consumed with the casualness of
an After Eight mint. The lines of white powder, a row of sherbet
soldiers on a china side-plate, passed around like port.

No fuss, nothing to interrupt the conversation, just a snort through a
tightly rolled note with the left nostril, then a snort with the
right. The moment briefly savoured, like the comforting warmth of a
good wine, and then, without comment, the chatter carries on where it
left off.

And yet not one of these professional men and women, who take the drug
so casually, will agree to talk about their evening's recreation. 'My
promotion chances would be dashed if it were known I had taken the
drug,' said a senior executive at The Times.

'I don't want my children to know I take drugs,' said one of London's
most notorious and beautiful aristocrats. 'You are finished in
politics if it is known you take the drug,' said a successful young
lobbyist. 'I daren't talk to you,' said one of London's best-known
restaurateurs, 'it is guilt by association.'

Yet I have taken the drug with all these people and, at the time, it
has been no big deal to any of them. I have taken a line of cocaine
with the editor of a broadsheet national newspaper and with the head
of a City bank. It has been treated as a brief mark of friendship no
more important than buying each other a beer. The only difference is
the ceremony and the badinage frequently take place in lavatories.

The effect of a line lasts about 20 minutes. It is quicker, although
no more dramatic, than a large Scotch. Like snuff it first sears the
nose, then makes the eyes water. In seconds your spirits are lifted,
you are more focused, garrulous and comfortable in your skin. It cuts
your appetite completely and leaves you with a grin and a dripping
nose. After half an hour you want another line.

I first took cocaine in my late teens, in the early Seventies, at a
weekend cottage in Bradford-on-Avon. I took it, snorted through a
rolled-up note, because I was reckless and foolhardy. Secretly, I was
terrified, convinced I would lose control, see blinding white lights
and think I could fly. Actually, nothing happened. It was something of
a disappointment.

I did not come across it again until I moved to New York in the
mid-Seventies, when singles bars, Studio 54, snakeskin boots and the
New York Yankees made Manhattan the coolest city on earth. Cocaine was
everywhere. It came, as it does now, in home-made white envelopes,
then at $60 a gramme.

I was working for Rupert Murdoch's New York bureau, for the Sun and
the News of The World. It seemed everybody I met took cocaine
regularly. So did I. And so did a tabloid award-winning photographer
who would buy it in the car park next door to the journalists' bar,
Costello's, and sell it to the hacks. At The Bells of Hell, an
expatriate British bar in Greenwich Village patronised by writers,
musicians and Fleet Street correspondents, it would be administered by
one of the bar staff when the clientele got too drunk.

He would take me, and others, into the kitchen, cut out the lines with
a credit card and insist we took it or left the bar. It was
wonderfully sobering.

By the end of the Seventies, many of the British expats, including
aristocrats, correspondents and bankers, were taking cocaine regularly.

But it remained, in both New York and in London, an exotic substance
for an elite few, mostly for the idle and the rich. In both cities,
the people who took it swanked about it. Many carried imitation razor
blades, in solid silver or gold, to cut the cocaine into lines. It
would be snorted through $100 bills or UKP50 notes, or from tiny
silver spoons or specially made phials.

It was rumoured the jewellers Tiffany had stopped selling its
solid-silver cocktail straws because they were being bought by cocaine
users.

In London, in some restaurants there were horizontal mirrors on the
bar and in the cloakrooms and lavatories. Customers assumed these were
to ease the cutting and taking of cocaine.

Then, the dealers were celebrated like minor rock stars, followed
slavishly by those wanting the drug. I knew three main dealers in
London in the early Eighties. All went to major public schools, one
was the son of a well-known actor, another the son of the chairman of
one of Britain's most celebrated companies, and the third the heir to
a household name. All three were charming, well-dressed and never caught.

Twenty years later, Britain's professionsl classes are awash with the
drug. I have not been to an event where it has not been readily available.

Now the dealers are anonymous, the drugs ordered by mobile phone and
delivered to your front door, or to a restaurant, by minicab drivers,
silent men in plain, unassuming saloons. It is still sold by the
gramme in home-made envelopes and the price, at UKP70 a gramme, has
changed little over the years. The difference is the drug is now taken
for granted.

At a dinner party held by a lobbyist in East Anglia this year, a party
including his mother-in-law and a senior Tory MP, the guests were
handed by the hostess on our arrival a small envelope of cocaine. This
was so we could take the drug in private without embarrassing either
the MP or the mother-in-law.

At a Kensington restaurant, where the disabled lavatory is the
favourite haunt of the casual drug-taker, I watched three PR girls,
all well-known within the business, take it in turns to go into the
toilet, passing the envelope of drugs openly between each other.

When the final girl came back, she smiled and slipped the packet in my
hand. 'Go on,' she said. 'You look like you need a line.' She was the
PR girl who told me last week that she did not know a single person in
PR who did not take cocaine.

At a winter party at the Foreign Correspondents Club last year,
attended by some of the most powerful political and business figures,
my wife complained that she couldn't go to the ladies because there
were so many women in there sniffing cocaine and shrieking with
laughter. The gents was just as full.

In most London clubs and restaurants, it is as plain as the dripping
nose in front of your face that the drug is being taken and the owners
are turning a blind eye to what's going on. Often they are taking it
themselves.

Go to the lavatory during a dinner party at the home of many a London
professional and you will frequently see crumbs of white powder on the
top of the cistern where the drug has been snorted.

Or witness the white smears on pictures that have been taken from the
wall. They have been laid flat, used to snort a line, and then a
finger has been wiped across the surface and licked so as not to miss
any of the precious substance.

Even more extraordinary, at one or two private parties I have
attended, the drug is laid out on the mantelpiece or offered like a
delicious canape on a mirror or plate. There is no stigma as to
whether you take it or not.

A recent study from Sheffield and Glasgow universities found 75 per
cent of cocaine users were affluent professionals whose habit rarely
came to the attention of the authorities because they had the
financial means to support it.

The truth is that the modern generation uses cocaine casually and sees
no harm in the drug, whatever the scare stories. Even some doctors,
although they do not in any way endorse the drug, accept its casual
use is endemic.

Dr Robert Lefever, of the Promis Clinic, a unit in Kent that
specialises in drug rehabilitation, gave me the bald figures. 'Five
people a day die from addictive drugs, 100 from alcohol and 300 from
nicotine. Alcohol is as addictive as cocaine, no more, no less,' he
said.

He added, however, that cocaine users are more prone to heart attacks
and more worryingly: 'It takes 20 years to become addicted after your
first drink, it takes only three years after your first line of cocaine.'

But many people, he admitted, perhaps more than 50 per cent of casual
users, may not have a problem with addiction.

Dr Mark Collins, associate medical director of The Priory clinic in
Roehampton, South-West London, admits: 'In general terms, I recognise
through my work that someone who uses cocaine in certain social
circles may not get into trouble. And certainly a significant number
can take the drug without major problems.'

But the difficulty is predicting who is going to have a problem and
who is not. And 10 per cent will have a significant problem.

'When a doctor at Broadmoor admitted 50 per cent of his patients were
not mad, he was asked why he didn't release them. He replied that the
problem was knowing which 50 per cent was sane. That is true in the
business of addiction. You simply do not know who is vulnerable and
who is not.'

This inability to predict who will turn out to be an addict worries
many doctors, particularly now that there is this devil-may-care
attitude towards the drug.

Dr Adam Winstock, a clinical lecturer in addiction at the National
Addiction Centre, said: 'Everyone starts off using cocaine in a
non-dependent fashion. Nobody thinks what fun it will be to end up in
a dependency unit in five years.

'But both dependent use of cocaine and non-dependent, casual use of
the drug are associated with problems. You can't predict individual
susceptibilities. Even if you don't use the drug very often, you can
get into difficulties. Many people do not realise that what seem
unrelated problems in their life are, in fact, related to the casual
use of cocaine.

'You cannot tell whether you can use it safely. It's a
lottery.'

Since I left London six months ago, cocaine has disappeared from my
life. I hardly ever take it now. It is rarely on offer in the shires.
Outside London it is more hidden and the attitude towards it is less
casual.

However, this attitude is not, in my brief experience, very censorial.
For example, the Gloucestershire county set's opinion about Tom Parker
Bowles seems to be not that he shouldn't have taken the drug, but how
disgraceful it was for the News of The World to set him up.

For cocaine is no longer an exotic drug or even a mystery to the young
chattering classes. Nobody under 40 was baffled when Liverpool's
Robbie Fowler ran his nose along the white line of the penalty box,
they were only surprised he did it in public.

Cocaine is to the current generation, rightly or wrongly, what
marijuana was to the previous generation: an apparently innocent
recreational amusement.

And, while Dr Jack Cunningham announces Government initiatives to
halve the consumption of cocaine in Britain within nine years, I can
assure him that in the warren that is the Palace of Westminster, in
the nearby bars and restaurants, in the theatres and clubs, at Ascot,
Wimbledon and even at the Chelsea Flower Show, somebody he knows will
be cutting out a line of coke.