Ted seemed to have a prosaic explanation for this. ‘Coke turns you into an asshole just by being expensive and desirable. You’ve got to make sure that everybody doesn’t find out that you’ve got coke, so you make your secretive trips off to the bathroom with your elite little club of buddies. Cocaine is an IQ test. If you’re still doing it, you flunked. It’s like masturbating. Masturbating is good fun, but in the end we probably want to do something else with our day, don’t we?’ Bridget agreed that the pleasure to be had from cocaine was self-limiting. ‘In the run-up to one Christmas, I remember having quite a hard-partying agenda, and I got very bored of taking cocaine. If you’re always artificially excited, how can you ever be genuinely excited? Most people work that out.’
‘For me, the downside comes when I go to bed at four in the morning, and I say to myself, “I’m not going to be able to go to sleep”,’ Alan told me. ‘When I do loads of coke I get a pain in my side, and I allow my brain to embark on a voyage of death. I start feeling paranoid, wondering if my heart is beating too fast. I read on the internet that when you get numb fingers or a numb shoulder you’re in trouble, so I’m always looking for those signs.’
Whether bringing out its users’ wit or their morbidity, cocaine seems to have none of the quasi-mystical connotations of other drugs. Indeed, the promise of a ‘trip’, an escape from or transcendence of reality, no longer appears to be a tempting one for most drug users. Cocaine has been described as ‘the steel drug’.19 It changes perception, not by making the world appear more wonderful or magical than the user had imagined, as might be said of cannabis or hallucinogens, but by making it seem even more stimulated than it really is. There hasn’t been a cocaine movement, as there has been an ecstasy movement, or a heroin sub-culture, perhaps because cocaine makes people too self-conscious to listen to other people, let alone devise a collective plan. Sherlock Holmes was probably the first fictional cocaine user. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, used Holmes’s drug abuse to illustrate his character’s restless intelligence, low tolerance for boredom and the ennui that they gave rise to. In The Sign of Four, the great detective says, ‘I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’ As this suggests, among the risks of taking cocaine is that it can elevate the ego to airless heights, the better perhaps for the user to throw himself from. For misanthropes, it can make the world appear inane and people mechanical.
Though illuminating, these accounts tell us more about the context in which cocaine is used and the personality traits of its users than they do about the drug itself. The primary effects of any drug are physical, and stem from its natural properties. The pleasure experienced when taking cocaine is a result of the drug’s effects on levels of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine plays a big part in rewarding us for experiences which promote reproduction and survival, which is why eating, having sex and fighting feel good. Cocaine blocks the re-uptake of dopamine at the nerve synapses in the brain, so the dopamine stays in the synaptic gap between axon and neuron a little bit longer, making the synaptic nerve endings especially sensitive. It is this heightened sensitivity which produces the euphoric feelings described by cocaine users. The Andean Indian chewing a mouthful of coca leaves, the stockbroker snorting a line of cocaine and the homeless prostitute smoking a crack-pipe are each getting high on that delayed re-uptake of dopamine in the brain. What they actually experience varies enormously, however, because a drug’s effects also depend on how much you take and the way you ingest it.
Many substances can be both cure and poison, depending on the size of the dose. Discussing a local medicine, Aristotle recommended that doctors prescribe a dragma (measure) to enliven the patient and boost his confidence, but warned that two dragmas would make him delirious and start to hallucinate, three would drive him to permanent madness, and that four dragmas should only be administered if the doctor wanted to kill his patient. Can it be said that dragmas are dangerous? Not as long as Aristotle was able to measure the dosage. As Ted pointed out, ‘even drinking the nicest Chardonnay, if you drink two cases you’re going to be puking on your shoes. Similarly, if you take the most subtle, refined Peruvian vintages in sufficient quantities, you can find yourself committing some bizarre sex act that lasts for three days.’
One of the unintended consequences of driving drug use underground has been to make the accurate measurement of dosage much more difficult. Every year there are about 3,000 cocaine and heroin-related deaths in the United States. Eighty per cent of them are thought to occur either because the drug has been adulterated with harmful additives or because it hasn’t, in which case the user runs the risk of injecting a much purer dose than he or she intended to.20 In the days when the US government prohibited alcohol as well as drugs, drinkers ran similar risks and died in similar numbers.21
The cocaine experience depends on the form in which the drug happens to be available. Coca leaves, typically chewed or brewed as a tea, are a mild stimulant comparable to tea or coffee. The World Health Organization’s investigation of coca and its derivatives found that coca consumption had beneficial effects on health, and produced no noticeable problems for the user’s work, family or social life. But because all coca products are illegal, importers bring them into the UK in their most lucrative, concentrated and powerful form, as powdered cocaine. There is no market for coca leaves, coca tonics or the myriad milder forms that proved most popular with British consumers in the nineteenth century, when buying cocaine was as easy as buying tea. After all, why would a smuggler risk going to prison for a cheap, bulky product that offers its users only a mild high? Banning drugs has had a crucial effect on the demand for them. Nobody had even thought of smoking cocaine before it was banned.
The effects of any drug also depend on the setting in which it is taken and how it is regarded by others. If you can imagine a world in which alcohol was unknown, the slurring of words, the woozy stagger and clumsy bonhomie that characterize the drunk would be unrecognizable. Instead of being met with a knowing wink, he would have to contend with an uncomprehending stare. Put that drinker in the company of someone who has also had a drink, or has at least been drunk in the past, and he is much more likely to be able to relax. Anyone who has learned how to drink alcohol knows that his clumsiness is not permanent. It is a passing effect of the drug he has imbibed, for which sensible drinkers make allowance, and from which they can then derive amusement.
To some extent at least, the incidence of drug-related problems, including drug-induced psychoses, depends on a drug-using culture’s stage of development. Marijuana first came into popular use in the United States in the 1920s and many reports of cannabis-induced psychosis date from those early days. Far fewer cases were reported after 1940, as users came to a better understanding of what to expect from cannabis intoxication. Pam from Detroit told me that her cocaine use became a problem when she lost control over it, but she also said that the problem was exacerbated by the incomprehension of those around her. ‘My dad came to visit one time, and the friends that I was living with sat him down and said “hey, this girl’s got a real problem.” I was full of stories about why I was so skinny and why I was so depressed, but he was not a person who had a lot of emotional skills, so he didn’t really do anything. He just freaked out and didn’t say much.’
Having realistic and well-informed expectations of a drug’s effects also explains why some cultures seem able to use drugs that others are ruined by. There are hill tribes in Thailand and Burma that are entirely dependent on growing opium. Precisely because it is widely available, opium consumption has had to be regulated and codified, and is generally reserved for old, unproductive members of the community. In less homogenous and cohesive societies, it is more difficult to set ground rules for who can and cannot take drugs, which makes it all the more important that drug users are well informed. The majority of Britain’s primary and secondary scho
olchildren are taught about drugs and the dangers associated with using them. Students are shown hard-hitting anti-drug videos and treated to lectures by former heroin addicts. Teachers promote a ‘drug-free lifestyle’ and stress the importance of personal responsibility. Young people are taught how to resist peer pressure and encouraged to seek ‘alternative highs’ such as pot-holing and abseiling.
Drug education in schools has been shown to have little impact on young people’s decisions to use drugs.22 Some teachers argue that the best that can be expected of drug education is that it restrains drug users’ escalating use once they’ve started using drugs, and reduces some of the harm that those drugs can potentially do. An evaluation of the ‘Know the Score’ campaign in Scotland, which was designed to warn young people off trying cocaine through a campaign of ads on TV, radio and in the press, found that existing cocaine users, those most likely to be exposed to cocaine and females were all less likely to use cocaine after seeing the advertisements. But the majority of respondents could not remember specific campaign themes. They knew that taking cocaine was wrong, but they didn’t know why it was wrong.23
Ted rolled his eyes skywards when I asked him about the role of education in warning young people of the harm done by drugs. ‘Efforts by well-meaning authority figures to stop people taking drugs only make drug-taking more glamorous, exciting and desirable. Most of the governments propaganda campaigns about drugs are in fact advertisements, because the only genuine warning signs are those based on reality and experience.’ But this approach is unnecessarily defeatist. Drug education is important, but its effectiveness depends on the credibility of the educators. Many educators are loth to admit that the pursuit of pleasure might be a valid reason for drug use, or to recognize young people’s curiosity, their need to experiment, to take risks and define their own boundaries. There are plenty of police officers, ex-addicts and theatre companies eager to tell young people ‘the facts’ about drugs, but the use of outsiders only sensationalizes drugs and reinforces the idea that teachers are unqualified to talk about them. Drug education in schools would be better grounded if it adopted the same aims that underpin the teaching of other subjects: to increase young people’s knowledge and understanding, so that they can arrive at their own, informed views.
In the absence of credible education, young people have to draw the lessons that need to be learnt from their peers and from personal experience. Liverpool has experienced explosions of both heroin and crack use. Both have slowed of their own accord, as the informed opinions of one generation have been bought at the cost of the painful experience of the preceding generation. The harm done is much increased. But generations of drug users, whether dabblers or devotees, do learn from one another. It may be true that 50 per cent of the young people in Liverpool took cocaine in 2008, but there has been no corresponding rise in use of crack cocaine in the city.24
Jorge Hurtado, in his book Cocaine: the Legend, quotes a doctor from La Paz, Bolivia, as saying that ‘cocaine is a safe drug, provided that it does not get into the hands of unbalanced people that can use it with self-destructive aims’.25 Most drugs, whether legal or illegal, create problems for a minority of their users. In the United States, 0.3 per cent of drinkers are in treatment for their alcoholism, whereas 2 per cent of drug users are in treatment for their drug use.26 But the criminalization of cocaine use has made it harder to distinguish problematic users, who might need treatment, from recreational users, who don’t. In chapter 3, Russ a former narcotics detective, described the danger he ran in trying to pierce the inner workings of drug-dealing organizations. He also told me that after leaving the narcotics unit of the police department in San Jose, California, he spent the next ten years working with people in court-mandated drug-treatment programmes. ‘Eighty-five per cent of them have been arrested because they’ve been caught with a small amount of cocaine in their wallet. But they don’t have a cocaine habit and they’re only in a rehabilitation programme because the court told them to go there. That is the same ratio that we have for alcoholics today. Eighty-five per cent of everybody who drinks alcohol drinks responsibly. They come home to their wife, children and the family dog, and they have a Margarita with their enchiladas. What most people don’t understand is that most cocaine users do the same thing.’
Carl too was at pains to make the distinction between recreational and compulsive drug use when I spoke to him in London. ‘I’ve grown up with people who’ve destroyed themselves with crack and heroin. They’re on a ride and they’re not going to get off until the drug’s finished with them. No ifs or buts about it, I like cocaine. I like the feeling, I like the buzz. Me and a friend were seeing this Colombian guy on a regular basis. He had really good stuff and we got right into it for about a month. But I never felt like it had a hold on me. Some people are more-ish with it, because, like any good experience, you don’t want it to finish. If I’ve got some cocaine, most of the time I’ve also got some weed, some drink, some fags, and it blends well with them, but when the charlie’s gone, I accept that it’s finished. I’ve still got the rest and the night carries on. I’m an average working man, in the 25- to 30-grand bracket, so I couldn’t afford to be a victim of it. It’s a treat like going to a restaurant, and I can’t afford to go to a restaurant every night of the week either. If you’re rich enough to get fucked up on it, you can probably afford to go to a proper rehabilitation centre place as well and get yourself sorted out.’
The authors of a study published in Toronto in 1989 found that the most frequent pattern of cocaine use over time, far from being an inexorable descent into drug addiction, was ‘up-top-down’. Most of the 100 cocaine users they looked at had taken larger amounts of cocaine over time, but they didn’t lose control of how much they were consuming and only a minority progressed to really heavy use.27 Research done in Amsterdam in 1987 found that 21 per cent of cocaine consumers reached a high level of use at some point during their cocaine-consuming careers.28 An American study which followed twenty-seven cocaine users over an eleven-year period concluded that ‘the tendency for use to escalate to abuse was neither inexorable nor inevitable. Most never came to use cocaine daily or regularly in heavy amounts. The majority of our subjects had used cocaine for more than a decade, usually in a controlled fashion.’29
The typical career of a cocaine user lasts between three and six years, and peters out with age, experience and changing lifestyles. This is much shorter than the typical career of alcohol and heroin users, who can be dependent on one or the other for their whole lives.30 Four years after the first interviews were conducted in Amsterdam in 1987, almost half of the respondents had stopped taking cocaine. Of the rest, over 90 per cent reported periods in which they hadn’t used cocaine for at least a month. These reports and studies suggest that far from being blindly led down a road to ruin, most cocaine users take increasing amounts, realize that the effects are self-limiting, and soon tire of them. It is a pattern confirmed by the anecdotal evidence of users like Alan. ‘Coke is running out of usefulness in my life. Five years ago, I used to take it every two weeks, whereas now it’s once every three months, if that. I don’t want to go out like I used to. Now it’s all about the day and not the night. I’m older, I’ve got a family and I get joy from being out in the country, looking after the house and family and messing around with the dog.’
Gabrielle and her husband Steve are in their thirties. They still take cocaine from time to time, but not in the quantities and with the frequency that they once did. ‘Most people seem to have a three-year phase and I think my three years are up,’ Steve told me. ‘I used to smoke weed and I’ve given that up and I’ve learnt from experience that it’s not worth the bother of doing a pill to have a good time on Friday night, only to feel horrible for three days next week.’ ‘And you’re not sharing that horrible experience with everyone else,’ Gabrielle added. ‘When we used to take pills, we’d spend the weekend with our friends, but now everyone has got families and other commitments, s
o you’re breaking up the party before it’s even started.’
The notion that the charm of cocaine is such that it destroys the user’s powers of self-control just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. As Alan said, ‘what limits my intake of cocaine is that I don’t want to get off my face that often, the same reason that I don’t want to get drunk every day. I want to be in control of my life 95 per cent of the time and 5 per cent of the time I want to let myself go and forget about the other 95 per cent.’ What then, of the 5 per cent of the time that users like Alan want to let themselves go? Doesn’t bingeing on large quantities of cocaine inevitably lead users to become addicted? A Dutch study of 1993, entitled Ten Years of Cocaine, found that 6 per cent of cocaine users had run into difficulties with cocaine, meaning that they considered asking for assistance to help them control or stop using it. All but one of them either quit cocaine without seeking help or continued using it at more moderate levels.31
Plenty of Britons enjoy bingeing on cocaine (partly because it helps them to binge on alcohol), but few of them develop a daily habit, if only because most of them have to go to work on Monday morning. For those so inclined, a true intoxication marathon can last for days, and pave the way for a drug experience quite different to that produced by snorting a couple of lines. The pulses of euphoria experienced by participants in a cocaine binge can create vivid long-term memories, which for some will become a fount of craving for stimulants. Large doses of cocaine can also lead to severe psychosis while the user is still on the drug, with symptoms including powerful cravings, escalating doses, inability to eat or sleep, chaotic mental processes and paranoid hallucinations.
Pam, the former cocaine addict from Detroit, described the terrible fear that would overcome her after taking too much cocaine. ‘One night Steel Pulse were in town. I’d gone to the sound-check, and some of the road crew wanted coke, so that gave me an excuse to go cop a bunch. I went back to my house to do some before I had to go back with the backstage passes and the list of people who were supposed to get in for free. I got so jacked up and paranoid, I was staring out of the window, convinced that there were people in the trees watching me, then crawling around on the floor, and hiding behind the curtains. I told my assistant to come over and get the passes, because I was way too messed up to even go over there.’ Doris, who had told me what she remembered of the free-base phenomenon in Harlem, had, like Pam, been injecting large doses of cocaine. ‘The cocaine would have me up all night, picking on myself. I’d look in the mirror and everything would be magnified. I’d see these big bumps on my face and I’d start squeezing and digging. Later my mother would say “What is wrong with you? You’re losing your mind.” That cocaine is nothing to play with. It ruins you for days.’
Cocaine Nation Page 28