I'VE GOT TO DRAW A LINE AT SNORTING GOURMET COCAINE

Drug-related charities have been observing some recent, modish shifts
in the British consumption of drugs - particularly in cocaine.
Apparently, there is now a "two-tier" market in place. You can get
cheap, cut, "commercialised" cocaine - perhaps we could refer to it as
Lidl coke - for UKP30 a gram. More affluent customers, meanwhile, go for
a much higher quality Peruvian cocaine - or Waitrose cocaine - for UKP50
a gram.

I love the idea of there being middle-class cocaine. Even though it's
an illegal street-drug sold by blank-eyed people, wrapped in torn-out
pages of We Love Telly! magazine, which can make your nose fall off or
kill you, the middle-classness of its renaming still occurred.
Specifying "Peruvian cocaine" - like it's "Madagascan vanilla
essence," or "the wines of the Loire". It makes you sound like you
know a little bit about the provenance. Like you might have had a
driving holiday and found a lovely local strain of drugs that goes
nicely with lamb.

This splitting of the market along class lines happened with marijuana
a couple of years ago, as I recall. While all the kids on council
estates were fostering psychotic disorders on ludicrously strong
skunkweed - the psychotropic equivalent of parking a helicopter in
your mind and revving it - the middle-classes started smoking pure,
"euphoric", UKP200-an-ounce, hand-rubbed "gourmet" weed, such as charas
and AK47.

Bless the middle classes. They're always so . . . middle class. I
can't wait until they all get into ketamine - the horse tranquilliser
so popular in clubs - and start the one-up-manship about the poshness
of the stable it was stolen from. Imagine if you got hold of a supply
of paralysing horse medicine stolen from Earl Spencer's stables! Or
Madonna's! You'd be the best middle-class ketamine user ever!

The name you give a drug is important. There is marketing for drugs,
as with any other product. Indeed, when it comes to drugs, the name a
drug gets landed with is often a matter of life and death. Look at
America at the moment - or, more specifically, Texas, where a new drug
has killed 23 teenagers in the last two years. The drug has been
described by the Dallas County Health and Human Services as an
epidemic - "the most instantly addictive and deadliest drug we've seen
since crack cocaine".

Made with a combination of black tar heroin and powdered headache
tablet, the new drug is particularly lethal because it's snorted.
There's a whole market of potential teenage heroin users scared of
injecting or smoking, but inured to the idea of snorting something on
a Friday night. So it's a gateway opiate for very young people. We
should all be doing something about it.

Except the only problem is, this lethal new drug is called Cheese.
Really. Apparently, when you mix up powdered headache medicine and
black tar heroin, it resembles crumbled Parmesan.* So far, there's
been notably little national publicity or action in America over the
rise of Cheese - because, I would suspect, it's very difficult for any
campaigner to stand up and, in all seriousness, say: "People of
America, there is a new menace that stalks our streets - and it is
Cheese. Cheese is coming for our young. Part of the war on drugs must
also now be the war on Cheese. Look out for Cheese. Cheese kills."

Cheese is a word that is both amusing, and quite comforting. It's
therefore, from a law-enforcement point of view, a terrible name to
give a new drug. You might as well call a drug Margate, or Mum.
No-one's going to take it particularly seriously.

Of course, the fact that it is called Cheese does also give you a
clear indication of how potent it must be: after all, part of the
appeal of taking drugs is pretending that you are in some noirish,
nihilistic underworld of black-veined rebels. It's kind of hard to do
that in a social exchange that involves the words "I've come for my
Cheese, maaaaan".

I keep coming back to the middle-class drugs phenomena, however,
because it' s something that genuinely bemuses me. Almost any
middle-class drug consumption is, theoretically, oxymoronic. These
are, after all, the bleeding heart liberals who recycle their tins,
sign petitions against sweat-shops, buy organic wine and fair-trade
coffee, and fulminate against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You
never once, however, hear them excitedly boast about having got in a
load of fair-trace, organic cocaine from a socialist lesbian commune
in Colombia. And that's because there aren' t any.

The illegal trade of Class A drugs rivals the black market for
weapons, and the slave trade, as the most unethical on Earth. People
working in the drugs industry get threatened, tortured, enslaved and
killed, and the progression of the drug from one side of the world to
another is marked out with a trail of misery, destruction, ecological
degradation and death.

It's about as friendly and right-on as the sex trade - and yet people
who would look down on a shag with a crying 16-year-old Estonian
prostitute will happily call their dealer in front of everyone on a
Friday night. I'm amazed the middle-classes still turn a blind eye to
the reality of the drugs in their pocket. Frankly, I'd rather eat a
battery-farmed tiger steak washed down with the tears of a child
prostitute than do a line of cocaine, middle-class and "Peruvian" or
not.

But then, I've never been the same in my mind since I had those
brilliant Rhubarb & Custard Es in 1992; so it could just be the
stupidly named drugs talking. *Hopefully the cheap dry stuff in a tin,
not Reggiano, or all of Islington will be hanging out with Amy
Winehouse by 2012.

Ooh, darling, have you erupted?

While we're still on the subject of ill-thought-out product names,
there's been an enormous reader response - 14 e-mails and only seven
of them insane! - to last week's column, where I discussed a perfume
I'd found called Trench. This had caused me to speculate on whether
this was the worst product name of all time - given its abiding
associations with foot disease, lingering death in the First World
War, and the muddy cultivation of the potato. There were some
dissenters over the totally nonromantic nature of the word Trench.
"What about the trench coat?" asked Bill Barrett, Jenny Roberts and
Dennis Cheeseman. "Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca?"

This, however, overlooks that a trench coat is still a rain coat. You
will stand in the rain being rained on when you are wearing it.
Whatever was in my mind the first time I bought Mitsouko, or Kiehl's
Musk No. 1, it wasn't the dream of having wet feet and being splashed
by the 512 bus.

Gordon White, Kevin Divall and Judith Kimber have all independently
spotted an aftershave named Eruption. "It's sold - but probably not in
great amounts, I suspect - by Lidl," Gordon notes, pertinently. And
what a name it is. Eruption. It captures almost every possible bad
association with cheap aftershave. Noisome adolescent "blooming",
acne, immense allergic rashes and boils. Lovely.

A Brit of sympathy

I note that the shaven-headed, multi-rehabbed, depressive, divorced,
former child-star with a manipulative mother, Britney Spears, gave
what was considered to be a "poor" performance at this year's MTV
Video Music Awards. A "poor" performance? Give the girl a break. It's
extraordinary that she can even get out of bed in the morning without
crying.