1. Is everyone taking cocaine?

No, not everyone is taking cocaine, but it is becoming the drug of choice for many. Figures last week from the British Crime Survey revealed that the number of working-age adults using cocaine is at its highest for 12 years and more young adults in the UK take the drug than take Ecstasy. The percentage of 16 to 24-year-olds who took it in the past year is running at about 6 per cent. The variety of people who are taking it suggests that cocaine use is no longer confined to a recognisable group. It is no longer a yuppie drug or a club drug. Cocaine might be called the drug for people who don't like drugs. The normalisation of cocaine is more important than the actual number of people taking it, because it suggests that the consensus on what is and isn't a morally acceptable intoxicant is getting weaker.

 

2. How dangerous is cocaine?

It can be very dangerous, particularly for people who have little experience of other drugs, who might find cocaine intoxication worrying. Physically, it can be dangerous for anyone with heart problems and, in large doses, it can have damaging respiratory and neurological effects as well. It can also play havoc with your mental state. Take too much cocaine and you're likely to become disinhibited, grandiose, impulsive, hypervigilant and extremely fidgety. It's also very easy to become dependent on cocaine — in other words, to keep taking it even when you know it's doing you no good, and to relapse even after you've vowed to stop taking it.

But I'm loath to call cocaine addictive, because addiction is a very contentious and overused word. Is alcohol addictive? If so, how come most drinkers aren't addicted to it? We hear more about addictive personalities than addictive substances these days; this may be a good thing, as it shifts the focus from the drug to the user. People can have compulsive relationships with all kinds of substances. Most cocaine users can and do control their intake pretty well. A minority don't, but it's all too easy to blame the drug rather than face up to the user's underlying psychological problems.

 

3. Who were the first cocaine drug lords?

It's curious that we use such medieval language to describe the big players in the drug economy. We talk of drugs being a "plague", controlled by "barons" and "lords". We appoint "tsars" to launch "crusades" against drugs. These words were devised by people who were inclined to see the demand and supply of class A drugs as a battle between the forces of light and darkness. In reality, drug use is a complicated business and these crude simplifications only divert our attention from the big picture.

 

Ironically, the first drug dealers were medieval: the Spanish conquistadors and the Roman Catholic Church established coca markets in their Peruvian colony. They didn't approve of coca-chewing by the indigenous population, but as coca was a sacred plant, the Spanish soon realised that by cornering the market for coca leaves they could control the workers they needed to dig up all that silver and gold.

 

People still think of Pablo Escobar as the archetypal drug lord, but Escobar was killed in 1993 and things have changed a lot since his day. There are thought to be 2,000 mini-cartels in Colombia alone. The cartels have splintered and, at the same time, the main players in Colombia's civil war have become much more involved. This has made the drive against cocaine trafficking a political hot potato. The Colombian Government likes to blame the Farc guerrillas for cocaine trafficking. They are involved but most of the business is controlled by mafiosi allied to paramilitaries, often in cahoots with local politicians and businessmen.

 

4. What is crack and why hasn't there been the epidemic that we were warned about?

There are plenty of people who take cocaine who wouldn't touch crack cocaine, but they're very similar. Crack is smokeable cocaine. Cocaine decomposes when it is heated, so in the 1980s, people discovered free-basing, which means combining cocaine with ether. In combination, they can be heated to the point at which they turn to vapour, which can then be inhaled. Crack is the same as free-base, but uses baking powder instead of ether.

 

When you snort cocaine, the active ingredient takes effect in about three minutes. When you smoke it, it takes effect in a matter of seconds, so you get very high very quickly. Most people would find the "rush" from crack a bit overwhelming but many users want to repeat the experience ad infinitum. Crack cocaine has a well-deserved reputation for ruining its users — financially, mentally and physically.

 

The only places where crack has really taken off have been in deprived communities and among people with existing mental health problems. In other words, among people with little to lose: a few of the biggest cities in the UK, lots of cities in the US, and increasingly Third World cities such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Bogotá.

 

5. How does cocaine get into the country?

The drug economy is truly globalised. Four of every ten cocaine importers doing time in British prisons were born outside the UK, and they come from any one of 34 countries. Cocaine is brought into the UK in many different ways, but the sea-lanes between Venezuela and Brazil and West Africa have become particularly important because the chances of getting caught are so slim. From there, a lot of it is smuggled into the big European ports such as Barcelona or Rotterdam and then across the Channel. The volume of container traffic makes it very hard to identify and intercept smuggling operations.

 

6. How realistic is The Wire?

Its depiction of "past caring" drug dealing and chronic drug taking, and the isolation of communities from the rest of America, seems very realistic. So too does the cynicism and apathy of the police and politicians in the series. People forget how impoverished much of America is and how dysfunctional many of its institutions are.

 

I interviewed Kurt Schmoke for my book. He was Mayor of Baltimore when crack hit the city in the late 1980s. He told me that by 1989, one adult in eight in Baltimore had a serious drug abuse problem. He courted a lot of controversy for suggesting that the best way to win the war on drugs was to decriminalise drugs such as crack and heroin.

 

Funnily enough, Kurt has a cameo role in The Wire, in a scene in which the mayor is panicking about the Hamsterdam drug market that the police have encouraged. The Wire is a real wake-up call to change. Wire-watchers, ask yourself this: what would it take for Bubs to get clean: a prison sentence, a drug treatment programme or gainful employment? I'd say "no" to the first, "maybe" to the second and "definitely" to the third.

 

7. Why was cocaine banned in the first place?

The prohibition of drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin was a gradual process that began in the first decades of the last century, as part of the same wave of reforming evangelicalism that banned alcohol. The Dry Law was repealed, but the ban on hard drugs lasted, partly because the demand for the hard drugs was weak and partly because America was so powerful. How long the ban can last is highly questionable. In 1970, four million Americans had tried an illegal drug. By 2003, 112 million of them had, so the anti-drug consensus is much weaker. And the cost of spraying coca fields, intercepting smugglers, jailing dealers and treating compulsive users is astronomical — about $69 billion a year. Given that none of these strategies has had the desired outcome, you'd expect a fundamental rethink to be on the table. But it's not.

 

8. Why is cocaine only 5 per cent strength at the moment? Is it because we are winning the war on drugs?

In May, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) issued a press release which said that thanks to its efforts, the average purity of cocaine in the UK was as low as 9 per cent, and wholesale cocaine prices had risen to £45,000 a kilo. In fact, wholesale cocaine prices are still falling, as they have been for the past 20 years. Any rise in price is a reflection of the weakness of the pound against the dollar, which is the currency in which world drug prices are measured.

 

Of course, there will always be blips, as particularly large hauls are intercepted, supply routes are disrupted and trafficking organisations are dismantled. But the long-term trend is towards cheaper and purer cocaine. Soca has every interest in exaggerating its successes and its claims are rarely scrutinised by other agencies.

 

9. Do politicians and the police care about cocaine? And is it in their interest for the drugs war never to end?

I doubt if they care much about recreational users. Problematic drug users are responsible for most of the robberies committed in this country, so the police are certainly concerned about them. But confiscating a compulsive user's supply of drugs only means that he or she has to raise the money to buy drugs again, which just fuels the problem. The Swiss haven't legalised hard drugs, but they have gone as far as you can go in making drug abuse a matter for doctors not police officers. Crime and hard drug use has plummeted in Switzerland.

But in most countries, anyone trying to change things for the better has to contend with the agencies that are responsible for drug control, most of which are founded on moral objections to drug use rather than evidence-based policies. Then you have widespread fear and ignorance, the inertia of these giant bureaucracies and the timidity of politicians. Finally, the war on drugs provides cover for intervention in other countries' affairs. So it's very hard to challenge prohibition, despite its manifest failure to prohibit anything.

 

10. Should cocaine be legalised?

It should, for many reasons. But there are vested interests that have a stake in keeping things as they are. I also think that people, especially those who came of age before 1970, are very worried about the prospect of legalising drugs. They imagine that legal cocaine would be sold alongside the aspirin in the supermarket. But as the regulation of the tobacco and alcohol trades show, you can control access to potentially harmful psychoactive drugs. You can tax them, which pays for credible education about their dangers and effective treatment for those who need help it. At present, we're lumbered with the worst of both worlds: politicians can't eradicate cocaine and they choose not to regulate it.

 

11. Is Coke still the real thing?

Years ago, Coca-Cola used to contain about 60mg of cocaine in every bottle, which is about half the average line of cocaine. These days, it removes the active ingredient from the coca leaves that it uses. It may well be that legalising coca products would provide a healthy alternative to cocaine for those who want some, but not all, of the stimulation that cocaine provides. Cocaine is much less popular in Bolivia, where they grow a lot of coca, than it is in the UK. Bolivians generally prefer to sip coca tea, which is a much more cerebral buzz than the one you get from coffee or black tea. Ironically, the American Embassy in La Paz used to recommend that new arrivals drink coca tea for altitude sickness.

 

12. Should I use drug-testing kits on my teenage kids?

A study from 2008 suggested that 50 per cent of young people in Liverpool have tried cocaine, so you might not like what you see if you do start dipping litmus paper in the toilet bowl. When you look at patterns of drug use and psychological health, you find that people who use drugs heavily often are more likely than most to be suffering from other psychological problems. That sounds like common sense, but what is less known is that the same is true of people who abstain from all drug use. Life satisfaction is associated with moderate, occasional drug use.

 

Of course, kids shouldn't drink or smoke tobacco until they are of age. But they're bound to experiment, which is all the more reason to divert drug sales from the street to licensed premises. Street dealers don't care about their customers' age or psychological health. Licensees do, because they've got a licence to lose.

 

Read online at The Times

 

The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World by Tom Feiling is published by Penguin on August 6 at £9.99.

 

 

In the course of researching The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, I struggled to find a cost-benefit analysis of a hypothetical legal market in drugs. More surprisingly, I also struggled to find an analysis of the pros and cons of banning them. A legal market in addictive drugs is widely judged to be a self-evidently stupid idea, unless of course, you enjoy the prospect of mass drug addiction. It must have been with such permissive airheads in mind that US Congressman Larry Smith once said: "The most dangerous people in America are those who believe in legalising drugs. They are traitors."

 

Mark Kleiman, author of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, argues that "freely available cocaine is likely to give rise to self-destructive habits for an unacceptably large proportion of users". But how addictive is cocaine? A study of Dutch cocaine users conducted in 1993 found that only six per cent of users had problems controlling their consumption of the drug. Most of the remaining 94 per cent reported that their cocaine use tailed off of its own accord, usually after a three year 'cocaine career', as they lost interest, had children or got better jobs.

 

So how might a legal market in cocaine affect the six per cent of cocaine users who do become dependent on the drug? Many of the 147 people in England and Wales who died a 'cocaine-related' death in 2004 were drunk when they died. But most were injecting cocaine in conjunction with heroin and died because they were unable to judge the purity of the drug they were injecting. Metaphorically speaking, they died because they drank a pint of whisky thinking it was beer. If cocaine production and distribution were legalised and regulated, users would have access to pure cocaine, as well as effective drug education and help for those who needed it, none of which your average street dealer has any interest in supplying.

 

But the great unknowable is how the vast majority of people who do not take illegal cocaine would respond to a legal supply of hard drugs. Would they be more likely to take them if they were legal? A survey conducted in Arlington, Virginia asked just that. Only one per cent of those polled said that they would. 'Drug warriors' tend to assume that the law is the only thing deterring a global orgy of cocaine use. But the impact of the law on the prevalence of drug taking has been hugely exaggerated. Fickle fashion seems to be a much more important factor.

 

Since the Portuguese government decriminalised the possession of drugs for personal use in 2001, recreational cocaine use has indeed gone up. But much of that increase can be attributed to Portugal's role as entry point to the booming European cocaine market from Colombia. What is most striking about the Portuguese experiment is that drug-related health problems have been reduced, there are fewer problematic users and more of those still dependent on hard drugs are now in work, which is probably the best antidote to any drug habit.

 

So what's not to like about a controlled legal market in hard drugs? For those inclined to see hard drug use as morally wrong, the answer is: 'everything'. But for the growing numbers of Europeans who see the problem not as drug use per se, but drug addiction, a legal market in drugs like cocaine would allow much tighter control over who takes them, where they take them and how much they know about them than the current gang-ridden anarchy.

Still not convinced? Consider this: we currently have a legal right to drink ourselves into a stupor. Common sense, an understanding of the potential dangers of alcohol and the need to get up and go to work tomorrow ensure that most of us choose not to exercise that right. Legalise cocaine and of course plenty of people will go on a cocaine-fuelled bender. But the novelty will soon wear off. Is there any reason to believe that legal cocaine need be any more (or less) of a problem than legal whiskey? It certainly couldn't be worse than the political paralysis that passes for drug policy today.

 

Read at The First Post here (also includes comments)

 

The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took over the World by Tom Feiling is published by Penguin Books, price £9.99

 

The UK's 300,000 problem users of cocaine and crack might argue that we already have a drug epidemic on our hands, but what Costa has in mind would be worse. Much worse. Within weeks, we could expect to see middle England turn into Harlem circa 1985, as Mondeo man sells his car, house and ultimately his wife's body to feed his hunger for cocaine.

 

In researching my book, The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took over the World, I was struck by the similarities between the anti-drug movement and crack addicts. Both live in fear of ill-defined phantoms. They also tend to have short attention spans, be committed to repeating past mistakes and have a seeming inability to admit responsibility for the problems they create.

 

Here are some facts that both parties would do well to consider. First, most people who take cocaine don't become addicted to it. A survey conducted in 2007 found that of the 35 million Americans who admitted that they had tried cocaine, only six million had taken it in the previous year. Even crack, probably the most moreish substance known to humanity, can be resisted: 604,000 Americans had smoked crack in the previous month; but another 800,000 Americans had smoked it at some point in the previous year, but not in the previous month. Occasional crack smokers? Yes, really.

 

When Costa warns of a drug epidemic, he is not thinking of today's drug-takers, but the millions of people who have never tried cocaine. His assumption is that they don't take it because it is illegal. But would they be more likely to if it were legal? A poll of people in Arlington, Virginia, asked just that. Only 1 per cent of respondents said that they would. Maybe they were just being coy, but it seems safer to assume that most people don't like most drugs.

 

"Ten Years of Cocaine" is a Dutch study published in 1993. It confirmed that most users take the drug for an average of three years. Their use tended to escalate in frequency and dosage, then tail off as they found more interesting things to do with their time. Only 6 per cent of users found it hard to control their intake. Finding ways to keep drugs out of the hands of these users makes sense, and banning those drugs might seem to be the obvious way of going about it. But for those who do become dependent on cocaine, its legal status has little bearing on the availability of the drug or how much they take.

The logic of prohibition is appealing, but flawed. It assumes that the law can eradicate drug consumption. It cannot. Cocaine is here and will stay here until fashion, not the law, says otherwise.

 

We should abandon the fantasy of a drug-free world and start taking responsibility for regulation. If you really want to control who grows coca, who produces cocaine, who sells it and for how much, who can take it, and how much they pay for it, create a framework that is logical, accountable and adjustable.

Still not convinced? Consider the declining popularity of tobacco smoking. High taxation, credible education programmes and effective treatment programmes work – a legal ban on smoking would not. Why should cocaine be treated any differently?

 

Read at The FT here (includes companion piece by Matthew Engels

 

Tom Feiling's book, 'The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took over the World', is published by Penguin on August 6, priced £9.99