Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  The British folk tradition of taking ecstasy in a field strewn with empty water bottles and high-wattage speakers lives on in the summer festivals. Just as festival-going has passed from the radical fringe to become an essential fixture in the social calendar of millions of young Britons, hard drugs have migrated from distinct sub-cultures into the mainstream. Alan is in his late thirties and works for an advertising agency in London. ‘With the advent of the music festival crowd, it’s become Guardian-cool, Channel Four-cool to get twatted. You might not do it all the time, but it’s all right to do it every now and again. In my company it is absolutely, 100 per cent acceptable to take cocaine. Dabbling in a bit of coke is not a taboo subject. You don’t blurt it out in front of your managers, but that’s what everyone does. It’s like getting pissed in the ’70s.’

  Cocaine is no longer the preserve of the advertising executive. It is consumed by many successful, stable, otherwise law-abiding citizens, and it is this change in the drug-taking demographic that makes the laws governing drug use so out-dated. Studies have shown that American drug users’ wages are 7 per cent higher than the national average, and that this increases to 20 per cent for users of hard drugs.9 This may seem surprising, but the same holds true for drinkers. Use of alcohol and/or strong drugs is not associated with low productivity, or sloth. Both have become part of the lifestyles of those who are most productive and have passed into even the most respectable institutions. Every year, the British Army dismisses the equivalent of almost a battalion of soldiers for taking drugs. The numbers involved are still small: 769 soldiers tested positive for drug use in 2006, a rate of less than 1 per cent, compared with over 7 per cent in civilian workplace drug-testing schemes. But the number of positive tests for cocaine use by serving personnel has risen fourfold since 2003, and now outnumbers positive tests for cannabis use.10 Sniffing cocaine is no longer the distinguishing feature, tag or signifier for young people that it once was. As it moves from the cultural niche in which it first found favour into the mainstream, it is likely to become more widely used and more widely acceptable.

  Why do people want to take cocaine? Every era has its drug, its effects serving as a barometer of the prevailing mood of a time and a place. In some periods, people have been inclined towards relaxing, narcotic drugs such as opium; in others, people have chosen to take reality-warping, psychedelic concoctions. The spirit of the new century seems to respond best to stimulants, such as caffeine, cocaine and amphetamines. Throughout the 1970s, cocaine was available to a small and moneyed British market but it wasn’t until the following decade that use of the drug spread to highly paid, highly pressurized professionals working in the media and the City of London. All drugs gain their first adherents among a small clique, but it is telling that cocaine use first became fashionable among members of the elite. In 1985, a doctor in La Paz, Bolivia, described the city’s typical cocaine user. ‘The majority of occasional cocaine users belong to the upper or upper middle class. Almost all of them are professionals, artists, businessmen or successful politicians. Generally, the quantity does not go over a couple of grams a month. Its use is usually limited to weekends, and it is generally used only at night. Daily use is extremely rare. The majority use cocaine with the same frequency that they use alcohol, as an antidote to drunkenness or to prolong the entertainment. A minimal percentage uses cocaine to increase their physical or intellectual output. A few young women use it to lose weight; others like its aphrodisiac powers.’

  Cocaine is part of a wave of democratization of bourgeois taste in the United Kingdom. As access to holidays abroad, designer fashion and exotic cuisines has spread from the elite to the masses, so too has access to cocaine. Its use has become a gesture of extravagance, sophistication and conspicuous consumption, akin to drinking champagne. ‘Cocaine is getting more popular with less affluent people because it’s opening a gate for them,’ a recreational cocaine user called Carl told me. ‘It makes them feel a bit better about themselves, in the same way that people go to Tesco’s and buy an organic carrot instead of a cheap carrot. We’re in a consumer state now and people’s self-esteem is boosted by what they can afford to buy.’

  In 1924, two German doctors wrote that ‘generally a cocaine user is a sociable personality’.11 The UK might have become a politically and economically more conservative country in the past thirty years, but it has also become one whose mores are more permissive and whose people are more sociable. The Victorians first took bourgeois propriety to the masses. Today, the mantle has been almost entirely cast aside, as Britons revert to a pre-Victorian tradition of carefree pleasure-seeking.

  Gabrielle works for Strathclyde police constabulary, but outside working hours she has found cocaine to be an effective social lubricant. ‘Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had have been between close friends when we’ve had some charlie. You’re on it, but there isn’t that pressure to compete with other people for attention. You can have an earnest and honest chat about personal things. We were friends before, but the coke helped us to really open up to one another.’ When I asked Alan from the advertising agency about the pleasure he got from cocaine, he described it as ‘a tribal feeling, doing it with your friends, and all going off into a little story together. Coke amplifies your personality and makes your conversation that little bit more amusing and sparkly, if only for a short period of time. It’s a subtle state of euphoria. It makes me lose my inhibitions without being out of control. Or at least you think you’re in control. While you might be boring the shit out of the people you’re talking to, you think you’re being witty and intelligent.’

  The sense of heightened awareness, combined with confidence and ease that cocaine users describe was recognized by the first Europeans to study its effects. According to his biographer, Sigmund Freud ‘tried the effect of a twentieth of a gram and found it turned the bad mood he was in into cheerfulness, giving him the feeling of having dined well, “so that there is nothing at all one need bother about,” but without robbing him of any energy for exercise or work’.12 Under the influence of cocaine, Freud’s intellectual output was much increased. On 21 April 1884, he was still only planning to secure some cocaine, but by 18 June, he had completed a veritable paean to the wonders of cocaine, an essay that was hurriedly published in the Zentralblatt für die gesamte Therapie. Freud’s initial praise and eventual repudiation of cocaine has become a widely cited cautionary tale. After wholeheartedly recommending cocaine to his friend Ernst Fleischl von Marxow as a cure for his morphine addiction, Freud watched as Fleischl developed an all-consuming cocaine habit.

  What most tellers of this tale omit to mention is that Fleischl was driven to daily use of morphine and then cocaine by recurring tumours that kept him in unremitting physical pain. For the average recreational cocaine user, Freud’s experience of cocaine is more pertinent than that of his friend because it demonstrates that while cocaine has long been regarded as a drug for the sociable, it has other uses as well. As might be expected, British cocaine users are more likely to go to pubs and clubs than non-cocaine users. But 62 per cent of British people who have used cocaine in the past month are not frequent pub-goers and several of the users that I spoke to incorporated cocaine into their daily lives. ‘I got a couple of grams for my birthday and it lasted me a month,’ a recreational user called Paolo told me. ‘I’d have a little line before I went to work and maybe one when I was at home with the kids. Last Sunday, I had a line at about 4 o’clock and I happily did the ironing. Today I had a Red Bull, and my heart was pounding, but I don’t get that with coke. But it is expensive and I don’t want to be in zippy mode all the time.’

  The need and desire to be in ‘zippy mode’, to face the world with energy, optimism and fearlessness, provides a promising insight into cocaine’s rise to fashionability. Pam is a former cocaine user from Detroit, who has long put her addiction to cocaine behind her. I asked her what she had got from cocaine. ‘I grew up in a town in rural Michigan, so there weren’t a lot
of drugs, but I would do anything and everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t have access to cocaine until I was fifteen. I had a boyfriend from Detroit who was a little bit older than me, and he brought cocaine on a date for us to snort. I liked it a lot. It suited my personality. I’m pretty hyperactive, and one of the things that I liked about cocaine was that I didn’t have to sleep as much. I could stay up and get a lot done.’

  In the course of the freezing Sunday afternoon I spent with Ted in Williamsburg, New York, I asked him about the reasons underlying his cocaine use. I was met with a look of befuddled frustration. ‘I never thought about why I did coke. It’s a central nervous stimulant. It makes you feel really good. It makes you want to talk and have sex and dance, and whatever else you normally do, only more so. I guess some people want to be more awake than others. You miss stuff if you go to sleep. I might have dozed off once or twice when I ran out of drugs, but I basically didn’t sleep from 1979 to 1986.’

  In the early years of the twentieth century, an artistic movement that came to be known as Futurism was notable for being the first to recognize high speed as the main, if not sole, contribution that modern civilization had made to the history of human pleasures. Life in the modern cities of the world is characterized by its speed: city dwellers in all the developed countries are in constant physical, mental and spiritual movement. Everything is subject to change, and we are constantly being encouraged to absorb and respond to those changes. In this context of incessant stimulation, we cannot afford to switch off because anyone tempted to passively observe change risks being left behind. The coordination, communication and efficiency that speed facilitates are among the greatest virtues of modern city dwellers. The hyperactivity, impatience and restlessness it produces are among our worst vices. The seductive capacity of cocaine resides in its promise of committed engagement with the present. Cocaine helps its users to maintain intense attention, even as it shortens its span. Indeed, cocaine promises its users little other than a fascinated engagement with the here and now. Perhaps the sensation of speed has eclipsed the origins and destination that once gave the journey its meaning. Even as the object and purpose of that engagement remain distressingly elusive, cocaine reminds the skittish of what complete engagement feels like.

  Hard drug use was virtually unheard of in the United States in the period between the First and Second World Wars.13 By contrast, drugs had a profound impact on the postwar period. There has been a generation of heroin users born between 1945 and 1954, a generation of crack users born between 1955 and 1969, and a generation of marijuana users born since 1970. Hysterical claims about drug use have abounded since the Industrial Revolution, but a more sober assessment now seems possible. Most people don’t like most drugs. Most of those who do try cocaine do not go on to use it heavily. They don’t even go on to use cannabis heavily.

  Most recreational drug use is unproblematic. Studies have shown that young Americans who use drugs heavily and often are more likely to be emotionally insecure, less likely to be able to form healthy relationships, and were often emotionally distressed as children. But they have also shown that young people who abstain from all drug use tend to be equally maladjusted, described in one study as ‘anxious, emotionally restricted and lacking in social skills’. Those who fared best were those young people who used drugs occasionally, engaging in what the authors of one study termed ‘age-appropriate, developmentally understandable experimentation’. They went on to argue that heavy, frequent drug use among American adolescents is a symptom, rather than a cause of psychological problems, and that focusing on symptoms rather than the underlying causes is counter-productive.14 Another study showed that the same holds true for American adults: life satisfaction is associated with moderate and occasional drug use. Dissatisfaction is associated with both heavy use and abstinence.15

  Authorities charged with reducing the demand for cocaine might take some small solace from the fact that whereas in the UK, cocaine has risen in popularity as ecstasy’s star has waned, in the United States there are more first-time users of ecstasy than of cocaine. Cocaine use among American high-school students is now 60 per cent lower than it was in 1985.16 The all-time peak of cocaine use occurred in 1979, when about 20 per cent of eighteen to twenty-four year olds said they had used cocaine in the last year. It had never been that high before, and it has never been that high since.17

  The popularity of a given drug is subject to the whims of fashion, like any other consumer good. But attitudes to drugs also evolve in tandem with the law, or the lack of it. The days when most of the cannabis smoked in the United Kingdom was imported from Morocco are long gone. The advent of widespread home-grown cannabis cultivation has made it much harder for the British police to enforce the prohibition of cannabis. Acknowledging the limits of law enforcement, many European cities have instituted a de facto decriminalization of cannabis possession, even where official policies and rhetoric remain unchanged.18

  British cocaine users face a less than 1 per cent chance of being apprehended by police in possession. Today’s aesthetes take drugs because they can get away with it, but also because they have an almost politicized sense of pleasure. They jealously guard their right to define what their pleasures might be. Pleasure, having been harnessed to the engine of commerce, carries its passengers to a utopia of endless shops. Goods and goodies have become indispensable to our personal happiness as well as that of the wider economy. As pleasure and profitability become paramount, and the global drug economy continues to thrive, the distinction between a chocolate cake, a fine single malt and a line of cocaine has become blurred. Many consumers would argue that if they have the money to pay for all three, they have the right to buy all three.

  Drug sub-cultures still exist. They are a way of life and an important part of the self-identity of some young people. Asking some teenagers to give up smoking cigarettes is tantamount to asking them to give up their credibility in the only peer support system they have. Drug use was so important to a specific sub-culture of the 1960s that it was regarded by friends and foes alike as an ideological statement. Today, however, there are multiple sub-cultures based on race, sexuality, music, even the food you choose to eat and the shops you choose to buy it in. It is no longer a question of being hip to drugs that mainstream society spurns. Instead, there is a grey area of generalized drug use, which most practitioners would file under ‘occasional leisure activities’.

  Cocaine is likely to remain popular because it works with rather than in opposition to Britain’s drinking culture. As Alan the ad-man put it, ‘once I’ve had a line, I’m in pintage mode. It’s wet against dry. You need the wetness of a pint to match the dryness of the coke.’ ‘Teenagers today are incredibly blasé,’ Ted assured me. ‘They’ve been watching women getting fucked by horses on the internet since they were five. Everything that was counter-cultural or subversive has been co-opted, so drugs have become more normalized. They’re an option. To worry about young people taking drugs is about as sensible as worrying about what kind of shoes they wear. What’s the big deal? It’s highly unlikely that they’re going to take as many drugs as my generation did, and we didn’t turn out that badly.’

  A blasé attitude to cocaine is, however, no surer a guide to its effect than a fearful one. Understanding the risks inherent in using cocaine is a vital first step towards anticipating and dealing with compulsive cocaine use. Trying to figure out why cocaine becomes a problem for some but not for others, I started by asking recreational users what they considered to be cocaine’s negative effects. Ricardo, who I had met while I was in Bogotá, wanted to talk about the contradictions inherent in taking cocaine to ease communication. ‘One of the main effects of coke is that everyone wants to talk and talk and talk. But after a point you realize that the words aren’t working. You find yourself trying to describe your need to talk, but realizing that the words to do so barely exist. Words become useless, despite your fluency with them.’

  Back in London
several months later, I met Mark, who told me that he had tried cocaine and decided that he didn’t like it. Like Ricardo, he had found that far from easing conversation, the loquacity that cocaine gave him betrayed him in the end. ‘I was out until five o’clock in the morning, having the most earnest conversation of my life. I felt a desperate urge to unburden myself, to reveal things. But then I asked myself, “am I only saying this because I’m on charlie?” That terrible double-edged paranoia was quite a horrible experience. The cocaine should have created some kind of bond between me and the person I was talking to, but your inhibitions are there for a reason and we hadn’t loosened them organically. We’d caustically stripped them.’

  ‘I went to a nightclub the other day,’ he went on. ‘Everyone was on charlie, but I’d arrived at the point where the coke had run out, and I had the feeling that the party was going on somewhere else, in some dark recess. Everyone was an island, like monkeys in some strange zoo. You couldn’t talk to anyone, because they were all following the one guy with coke, like he was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The desperation was frightening.’