Series: Drugs Uncovered: Part 12 Of 17

The White Stuff

COCAINE NATION

Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine - You Can Even Find It At Your Local. Once
The Champagne Of Illegal Substances, It's Now The Classless Class A Drug.
But 'Doing Charlie' Can Come With A Crippling Price, Including Organ
Failure And Heart Attack.

'Who's takin' cocaine?' grins Andy, 40, an electronics engineer from Perth,
Scotland. 'Everybody. Absolutely. It happened in the last couple of years.
Cos it's cheap, it's available and the quality's good. Guys who for years
have sold a wee bit of dope can get you coke, no problem at all. They'll
just open a different drawer.'

'Two years ago,' adds his friend Christine, 42, a psychiatric nurse,
'cocaine wasn't nearly as prevalent as dope, but the gap, now, has
certainly closed. Charlie's become like a whisky chaser. Sometimes it's
easier to get hold of than dope.'

'Absolutely,' nods Louis, a 38-year-old roofer from Dundee. 'There's a pub
on my old scheme [estate] and you meet all the fellas who were in my class
at school, manual labourers, mechanics, construction workers, factory
workers and they are all on cocaine. Five-odd years ago, there was never
any cocaine in Dundee, never, ever. There's been a massive change in who
uses coke in this country.'

Andy's having a night in with some friends. They have all taken illegal
drugs of some sort (crack and heroin excepted) for 20-odd years. None of
these people are young, psychotic, bankrupt, unemployed, temporarily or
terminally ill. They're long-established recreational cocaine users. Cans
out, spliffs aloft, they have one UKP40 gram of coke between them, chopped
into delicate one-and-a-half-inch lines, making it last, as it's handed
round on a CD. It's an average Friday night in, in front of the TV. They're
watching Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Fish, yodelling ex-Marillion
frontman, is on.

'Fish?' roars Andy. 'More like... Pish!'

Everyone laughs. Everyone's on drugs. What's the problem?

'It's absolutely horrendous,' says Professor John Henry, the leading
toxicologist at St Mary's Hospital in London. He says the British spend UKP
2.1bn annually on cocaine alone. For the doctor, the world and everyone in
it has gone mad. This last year he's seen a 'significant increase' in the
number of patients suffering 'cocaine toxicity' to, on average, one person
every day, across the social spectrum: 15-year-old crack-addicted
prostitutes to middle-aged, middle-class businessmen.

Symptoms he treats include acute chest pains, heart attacks, strokes,
disorientation, hallucinations and deliberate self-harm. Combined with the
huge volume of alcohol consumed in an average cocaine session (unlike
ecstasy, cocaine does not discourage alcohol consumption) and the ensuing
liver damage, your chances of dropping dead with a heart attack on a booze
and cocaine bender is 18 times riskier than with cocaine on its own. Which
is risky enough itself.

'Cocaine puts an enormous strain on your heart,' says Professor Henry,
'because your blood pressure goes up very, very high and your coronaries
are constricted. It's a stress on the whole system. Chest pains are most
common because it affects your coronary arteries. Longer term, those
stresses lead to a build-up of fatty gunge in the arteries, and people are
subject to heart attacks. If you keep putting your heart under enormous
stresses, your arteries begin to fur up, so you end up at the age of 30
with 55- or 60-year-old blood vessels.'

The cocaine high releases massive amounts of the hormone noradrenaline. The
hour-on-hour, up-and-down adrenaline rollercoaster causes blood vessels to
narrow, leading to arterial tightening, blood-flow restriction and
rocketing blood pressure (hence heart attacks and strokes). Arteries in the
brain can also be affected.

With the immune system weakened, regular users are also more susceptible to
a range of problems, from stomach ulcers to epilepsy. Last spring the
Health Statistics Quarterly published data on drug-related deaths in
England and Wales from 1995 to 1999. Cocaine-related deaths (227 for that
period) seemed to be rising sharply.

Professor Henry is astounded by the blase attitude of Britain's weekend
users who believe that their cocaine consumption is harmless. Some police
officers have the same idea. (Traditionally, the recreational cocaine user
has not been linked to crime, hence the more relaxed attitude from some
police officers).

But the difference here is harm in terms of criminal behaviour and harm
inflicted on the body. The traditional profile of the cocaine user also
partly explains why there has been little in the way of official scare
campaigns. In London in the 1950s, it was considered a 'jazz scene' drug,
becoming the 'champagne drug' of the professional classes in the 1970s and
80s. (More recently, the media 'outing' of celebrity drug users - Daniella
Westbrook, Michael Barrymore and Lawrence Dallaglio, among others - has
involved cocaine.)

'You can get hold of drugs as easily now as a pint of milk. I can get you
coke, now, within 10 minutes. Easy. I'd phone a friend.' Bill, 37, is not a
cocaine dealer, he's a cannabis dealer, simply because there's less risk of
going to prison. From '89 to '97, he was a drugs counsellor in north
London, treating and counselling heroin and crack addicts in residential
crisis centres, a man who gave it all up to sell drugs, because that was
the less miserable option.

A bluff, charismatic Yorkshireman, he was good at his old job, because he
understood. He loves cocaine - 'I'm a greedy fucker when it comes to drugs'
- and was introduced to habitual cocaine use five years ago by his last
girlfriend, Helen.

'Cocaine makes women feel incredibly sexy and glamorous and powerful,' says
Bill. 'I think they're better at drugs than men; it's not about bravado.
We'd stay in, have a bath, light candles, cook a meal, do half a gram,
cocaine sex. It was really nice, really proper. If it was up to me I'd do
the fucking lot, immediately, and go and get some more.'

In the mid-Nineties, Bill attended AA for two years 'for total alcohol and
cocaine abuse' and gave it up because he couldn't take the 'never again'
ethos. He's a bit of a card: the first night we meet, he tells me he's now
a 'special occasion' cocaine user: 'weddings, funerals, birthdays'. By
midnight, he's chopping into a gram on a toilet seat and no one's married,
dead or significantly older. Then again, his mum's just died and it's his
birthday next week.

Adam Frankland agrees with Bill that the 'country is awash with cocaine'.
Frankland is the service manager for Turning Point, a nationwide help
centre for drugs and alcohol-related problems. His branch in west London
runs a specific service for cocaine and crack users. 'In our local area, if
you can't buy cocaine in one pub, you can buy it in the next one down the
road.'

These last two years he's seen not only an increase in the number of
clients visiting the centre, but a greater diversity, ranging from
middle-class professionals through blue-collar workers to the unemployed
and teenagers. Mostly, the people he sees are recreational users whose use
has 'escalated without them realising it', affecting relationships and
jobs. He calls it 'normal life breakdown'. A large percentage, he adds,
come to the service because a family member or a partner has expressed concern.

Escalation of crack use, the far more powerful, crystallised, smokeable
form of cocaine, remains the drug professionals' greatest fear. Twelve
years ago officials in New York predicted a worldwide crack-cocaine
epidemic as 'the greatest peace-time threat to the western world'. However,
a mushrooming of US-style 'crack ghettos' thus far hasn't materialised.

'Because of our social structures, it didn't happen the same way it
happened in New York,' says Frankland. 'But now it's beginning to blow up
in our faces. Certainly in terms of crime and culture. It was initially a
"black drug" but it's not anymore; it's hit the white population massively,
particularly the younger end, but now you're getting professional people
using crack cocaine as well, at much increased levels. There's something
about the extra thrill of even scoring the crack, getting a buzz going
somewhere dangerous to buy it.'

Aaron, 28, is a professional bathroom fitter living in Clapham, south
London, whose trade allows him a very particular insight into the
escalation of cocaine use. An occasional user himself, 'only if someone
else has got it', he's watched, these past two years, as the cocaine
blizzard has affected the work he's asked to do. All over Britain, pub
landlords and club owners are modifying cubicle cisterns to thwart clean,
easy cocaine usage: concealed or boxed-off cisterns and 'funny' angles.

'If your pub gets known as the kind of place you can come and do drugs, a
new clientele can arrive,' says Aaron, on his fifth pint, freely lighting
up a cannabis joint in a busy pub. 'So they're protecting themselves, their
staff, the premises and the licence. It's so common now that it's been
necessary for an entire business sector to adapt its facilities because of
one drug. Absolute fact.'

The other week, a new pub landlord came into Aaron's shop, looking to
modify his own cubicle designs. A few days earlier, he told Aaron, he was
checking out a blocked toilet, looked in the cistern and found 'a fucking
massive bag of cocaine' which he kept behind the bar. A few hours later
this guy came in, went to the cubicle, came out 'and looked like someone
had killed his mum right in front of him'.

'Course he gave him it back,' guffaws Aaron. 'My God, yeah, he'd only just
took the fucking pub over! Someone will kill you for that amount.' Cocaine
use might have become everyday, ordinary, but the criminals controlling the
supply remain anything but. In Manchester, the cocaine blitz is just as
apparent, says Tim Bottomly, manager of the Piper Project, a discreet drugs
advisory service. The clients coming through Piper's door range across
'every educational background, every profession, every ethnic group'. Their
ever increasing cocaine use is often coupled with marriage breakdown or
loss of job. One of cocaine's greatest problems, he says, is its 'massive
potential for excessive use'. Most drugs have a natural 'breaking
mechanism': you physically cannot take anymore. 'Whereas with cocaine, you
don't break for sleep, you don't break to eat, you can do a grand's worth
in a day, if you really put your mind to it.'

At least 50 per cent of Piper clients' drug use 'doesn't impact upon anyone
else, but life is seriously disrupted by it - financially certainly. We had
a couple of businessmen who got themselves into a real mess, sold the
business, blew the proceeds, ended up on their backsides.' Bottomly has a
friend who works in a financial organisation in the City. For the past two
years he has been based in Florida but came back to London this Christmas
to visit his old workmates. 'He was absolutely stunned by the openness and
the extent of cocaine use at the London office party. He said that just
wouldn't happen in the States; they're certainly not going to be letting
work colleagues know about their use. The underlying message, of course, is
that it's more acceptable.' Yet you can't maintain, he insists, that
'cocaine is just one big piss-take and a tease'.

He feels that the cocaine mania will 'blow itself out, but it might take 10
years. History tells us things do come in cycles. There is concern that a
significant period of stimulant use is quite often succeeded by a period of
depressant use.' In Manchester he's noticed an upsurge in recreational
cocaine use as 'almost a mating ritual' with mid-twenties 'Loadsamoney
characters' in clubs blowing cocaine-dusted spliffs into the face of the
opposite sex, 'to say: Here, I've got something which you might want.'
Regular dousing of toilet cubicle surfaces with coke-spoiling industrial
hand-cleaner WD40 is having absolutely no effect.

Rural Britain offers a similar picture. Julie is a 33-year-old IT
consultant and married mother of a two-year-old daughter. She smokes
cannabis every single day and takes illegal, stimulant drugs, at home and
in the pubs round her village in East Anglia once a fortnight on average.
'Nearly everybody we know takes drugs,' she says. 'Our crowd ranges from 30
to mid-forties, they do a bit of coke and they're all getting into ecstasy
now for the first time. I took E for the first time 18 months ago and it
was "Where have I been all these years?"'

Julie's friends are all parents, some with their own businesses, a few of
them social workers, and after years of 'bevvying all night' a new
consensus among them has deemed Class A drugs a less physically disruptive
alternative. One friend has stopped drinking altogether, preferring
cocaine, E and spliff. Even in a place this small, Julie's sure 'we could
get pretty much anything we wanted. A year ago we were offered rock. Is
that crack?'

Before their daughter was born, Julie and husband Shaun decided, if one of
them was caught and imprisoned, that Julie would take the rap because Shaun
had the better job, as an aeronautical engineer. 'Our crowd get together,'
she says, 'we make sure someone's looking after the kids, usually a
grandparent, and all have a bit of what we fancy. I don't know anyone who's
lost it. We're older, mature enough to know how much is too much. People in
their thirties, even forties, are getting into drugs all over again. We
tried everything in our twenties, had a break and now everything's cheaper
and more available. And maybe it's more socially acceptable. People aren't
so frightened anymore; it's not such a "Oh my God, she takes drugs", y'know?

'We had two lines and half an E last night for going to the pub. And the
phone went and my husband's mum couldn't get the little one to stop crying.
So we had to come back for an hour, and we were "Oh no! We're gonna be
rattling about the house high as kites."'

'Cocaine is part of everyday modern culture for everybody, isn't it?' says
Jack. 'Everybody from street cleaners to secretaries to solicitors and
judges - I work with them all.' Even those working down the local
laundrette! Jack has been dealing cocaine in London for the last seven
years. He got into it through a friend, another dealer - 'and the sheer
demand was what put the idea into my head.'

'You can't live in London without money,' he notes. 'You can't step outside
your front door and draw breath without it costing you a tenner.
Unfortunately dealing has become a viable career option. And the reason
you're getting a lot of young kids dealing on the street, I guess, is
because they watch TV and they want all the trappings of an affluent,
twenty-first-century lifestyle.'

A gram from Jack will cost you UKP 60. It's 'top quality'. He's not
interested in 'risking 10 years in prison to make the odd tenner'. Within
months of dealing, Jack was earning UKP 1,000 a week, initially as a dealer
to the high-rolling Londoners who'd 'literally cheer when I walked into a
club'. For years he was on guest lists and never had to buy himself a
single drink. For six years, he had a ball: 'I blew every single penny.'

In the last year, he's scaled down - too much risk. 'I'm small time, small
fry. It's no big deal. I don't own a BMW. If the police burst into my house
now they wouldn't be finding mountains of cocaine and guns.'

Today he earns around UKP 300 a week, alongside other work in the legit
world that Jack won't discuss. We're in a bar in central London, Jack on
expensive, rum-based cocktails. A bright, affable, philosophical 41-year
old, he says a great many of his clients are 'just ordinary, everyday
people with decent jobs who wanna go out on a Friday night. What I see a
million times is perfectly normal people not ruining their lives. The
people going steadily and steadfastly off the rails are in the absolute
minority.' Jack thinks of himself as 'a mobile shopkeeper', not public
enemy number one.

He does not think he's doing anything 'wrong' but admits cocaine use is
hardly problem free. 'Cocaine comes from a long way away and some very poor
people may have to get into serious trouble, die getting it here and blah
blah blah. Women donkeying it through get sent to prison for 150 years.
Yeah, you could say I am contributing to that. So what do you do? Go and
live in a tent in Wales and eat grass? For my day-to-day conscience, I
sleep very well at night.

'If I find people are starting to come to me three, four times a week, I
generally start lying to them. "I'm not around, I'm out, I haven't got
any." It's not my life's ambition to be responsible for fucking up people's
lives because frankly you can make so much money in this game, you can say
no to a lot and not have to take a cut in wages.

'There's always another customer. I'm not some scum-sucking, gun-wielding,
gang-turf-war menace to society. I'm not a criminal. What I do is illegal
but I'm not a bad person, I just need money. And I suppose you could say:
"You lazy bastard, why don't you get a job?" All right, I put my hands up,
but I'm not contributing to the problems of society, and the people I hang
out with and sell to are not menaces to society either. In some cases
they're the very backbone, y'know?

'Crack is a completely different ball game. Crack isn't "Oh we're going to
a club tonight, shall we buy some crack? That'll be fun!" You're getting
into something that, for the UKP 60 you spend on your half-decent gram of
cocaine that'll see you and a mate through a Friday night, won't see you
'til the minicab comes: UKP 60 on crack cocaine is gone in 10 minutes.'

In all his 17 years growing up on a sprawling estate in King's Cross, Alex,
a blue-eyed adolescent (he's a burgeoning DJ and musician) has never seen a
Class A drug explosion like it. Round his way, the cocaine dealers are 15
years old, walking the streets on a Friday night with an ounce in their
pockets: that's 24 grams at around UKP 50 each. Ecstasy you can buy, from
teenagers who bulk-buy 1,000 pills at a time, for UKP 1. Alex is astounded;
it wasn't like that when he was younger.

'When I was 15,' he says, ploughing into a plate of sausages, bubble 'n'
beans in a cafe round the corner from his home, 'everyone was selling puff
(cannabis). This next generation, the little lot, they're selling cocaine,
so the next lot are gonna be selling something worse, y'know? It's not
good. They don't seem to understand how bad it could be. There's no notion
that this could fuck 'em up for the rest of their lives. Not just 'cos
they're takin' it every day, most of 'em, and they can't function without
it, but you'll be sent down for 10 years, more than that. They see it as a
toy, and they're playing with that toy.

'During the week,' he says, 'no one really thinks about taking any heavy
drugs. But Friday and Saturday morning, the first thing you ask someone
when you see 'em is never "What you doing tonight?", it's "What you getting
tonight?"'

Usually, they'll go to a local pub, sometimes as many as 100 kids, around
60 per cent under 18, and then splinter off, 10 or 15 converging round
someone's room, listening to music.

'Cos everyone's spending their money on drugs, we can't afford to go out
properly. If you have 50 quid, you can't go out to a club, cos you'd have
to buy half a gram, a couple of pills and then you've got 15 quid left for
drinks.'

Everyone Alex knows smokes dope and has done from about the age of 12 or
13. These days, they're on cocaine by 13 or 14, sometimes before they've
taken E. Alex's never been 'heavily into anything', but some of his friends
'can't speak 'til they've had their first spliff: there's blank looks on
their faces'.

He sees people on his estate in 'big trouble' - financially, physically,
criminally and emotionally. 'Some people, I feel sorry for 'em,' he says,
puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette. 'One guy, his nose is whooof, massive
now, and he's just got these tiny little gaps where he's just been throwing
like a gram up his nose at a time. Big lines like that... [indicating a
seven inch by a quarter inch line]. People are doing that now'. So far,
there aren't any real guns here, only pellet guns, he says, but 'everyone
has knives'.

Most of Alex's mates have jobs, 'building, postman, the lowest jobs', but
the wages 'aren't enough: fiver an hour'. Generally, they don't sell Class
A, but some sell 'massive amounts of skunk (marijuana) and people don't
realise how dangerous that stuff is. It's really addictive.'

Most end up stealing to pay for drugs: mobile phones from Woolworths, boxes
of cigarettes from the back of vans, laptops out of sparsely populated
offices around closing time. 'Theft of mopeds is the big one; everyone
steals mopeds.' He's seen friends lose their jobs.

'And then, if they've got a bit of money left, it'll all just go straight
on drugs, before they'll think about getting another job.'

And then what happens?

'And then they're fucked. Basically.'

So where do you go from there?

'Start selling.'

The population of Alex's estate includes a high incidence of bona fide
criminals, the men who supply the kids with the cocaine for selling in the
first place, cocaine which is 'pure'. Alex won't talk about this,
understandably, other than to say the drugs 'come from the top'. A lot of
mums and dads, if dad's still around, are involved in some way with drugs.
For Alex's generation, the way of the aspirational grafter has no point, no
dignity, he says, no hope of breaking from the life-long breadline. Alex
left school at 13 and has never worked. He does 'odd jobs, little touches,
here and there'. He's too young to go on the dole without being 'constantly
hassled'.

Alex is anything but politically naive or apathetic, believing 'poverty' is
at the root of estate life's problems. His biggest fear is identical to
that of the drugs advisory professionals: London turning into New York in
the Eighties, full of forgotten crack ghettos. He thinks Lambeth's
commander Brian Paddick, suspended from his post the day we meet Alex, had
the right idea, freeing up police resources to concentrate on crack and
smack. 'If nothing changes, it's just gonna get worse and worse. The next
generation, in the next five years, I think they're gonna be getting into
crack and stuff.'

Alex may be a textbook psychology case - living in poverty, minimal formal
education, dad long gone, mum with her own drug history (they smoke dope
together) - but he doesn't feel drugs are filling some cataclysmic void.
'Bollocks,' he guffaws, 'it's for the buzz. Makes you feel good.' More than
anything else, they're the most effective route Alex knows of feeling like,
and seeming to be, a happy, loud, gregarious, confident person whom other
people might want to be around.

'They're for socialising,' he decides. 'You can't have fun without them.
You wanna be the talk of the gang, make people laugh. It's confidence. 'Cos
everyone's paranoid about themselves.'

Back at Turning Point, Adam Frankland says, 'There's this ridiculous belief
now that we've a right to almost everything. We live in an instant
gratification world. Same with drugs.'

'Cocaine will tell you you can have what you like when you want it, if
you've got the money,' says Tim Bottomly at the Piper Project. 'But there's
lots of things that tell us that. Every bloody advert on telly tells us
that every day. Cocaine is an aspirational drug and it's as much about
image as anything, as is much of our lives about image. It fits like a
glove with where we are at this moment in history.'

Speed, thrills, surface, greed, fame for its own sake, sex for its own
sake, lies, glamour, short-term gains, temporary everything. Everything we
want, now, because we're worth it.

Enjoy! These are our values and these are the values of cocaine. Is this,
then, the nature of 'progress'?

At St Mary's Hospital, Professor John Henry thinks about this and sounds
glum. 'But is it progress?' he laments. 'Or has "progress" driven us to
here? We're just... going off the deep end.'

Perhaps he's right. But hundreds of thousands of people, it seems, can't
wait to jump.