Words: Antony Loewenstein
Cocaine is everywhere. In offices and cafes, meeting rooms and parties, homes and bathrooms, restaurants and clubs, at universities and on bank notes. It’s never been so ubiquitous in the UK (and globally). And nor has it ever been this widely available, cheap and high in purity. Order it like you’re calling an Uber on your phone. Grams of cocaine are delivered to you in London and other major cities faster than a pizza or pint in a busy pub. Street dealing is declining in popularity, due to the extensive use of CCTV cameras — and so clever technology has turbo-charged the drug trade. Dealers now use call-centres in Belgium, Spain, the Balkans and France — through encrypted numbers — to get cocaine speed-delivered to them. Drug couriers, often from Albania, enter and leave the UK and complete their business in a matter of days. Street dealers often use Ubers as drug premises, and users are happy — while the rates of cocaine use and abuse continue to soar.
The dark web is now a place where many users buy cocaine and any number of legal and illicit substances. It’s much easier to buy drugs online than in person, and inarguably far safer to order a product that is sent to your house — not to mention that products often come with reviews of quality and strength. Although law enforcement is constantly taking down dark web sellers, and claiming they’re winning the war on online drug marketplaces, huge demand for prohibited drugs will continue to sustain these increasingly-used forums for cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, opioids, synthetics and marijuana.
But while it’s never been so easy to find illicit substances, too little thought is given to those individuals behind the drug — the farmers and mules in faraway nations such as Colombia and Peru that make the cocaine transaction so simple for a British consumer. The global cocaine supply chain is ugly, brutal and violent, and it screws almost everybody except the wealthy drug cartels.
I’ve spent the last five years investigating the global drug war for my book, Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs. From Honduras to Guinea-Bissau, the Philippines to US and UK to Australia, I wanted to challenge the idea that the drug war is winding down or just happening in blood-soaked Mexico. If anything, it’s becoming more ferocious as global demand for illegal drugs surge.
Many US states are legalising marijuana, with poor records in giving access to the most disadvantaged groups after decades of the drug’s illegality. But this hasn’t stopped law enforcement arresting hundreds of thousands of Americans every year for marijuana possession. Cannabis remains illegal federally, and it’s highly likely that the drug’s status will change in the coming years.
Nonetheless, what I witnessed around the world was nothing less than mass carnage, dislocation and poverty due, in part, to a decades-old, global pro-drug war agenda. It claims to be fighting a war on drugs — but in reality it’s engaged in a war against the poor who have no voice in the political halls of the West where drug policy is crafted.
"While it’s never been so easy to find illicit substances, too little thought is given to those individuals behind the drug"
Think of the Philippines where President Rodrigo Duterte has unleashed terror against his own population. His police force and state-backed vigilantes have murdered at least 30,000 poor people since 2016. Honduras is a vital cocaine transit country between South America and the US, unleashing some of the worst violence in the world outside a traditional war zone. It’s no wonder that many of the refugees trying to enter Donald Trump’s America are fleeing Honduras, a narco-state run by a US-backed narco-President. Guinea-Bissau in West Africa is a key transit nation where huge amounts of cocaine are transported between South America to Europe and the UK. If you’re enjoying a line (or ten) of coke this weekend in Britain, there’s a high probability that the drug passed through West Africa and some of the poorest countries on earth.
In the UK, a decade of harsh austerity, led by the Conservative Party, has contributed to unprecedented levels of drug abuse. In Newcastle, I witnessed generations of young people forgotten and ignored, doomed to either low-paying jobs or no jobs at all, often self-medicating with heroin or other hard drugs. Addiction services have been slashed, leaving people without any trained support networks. Cocaine and heroin-related deaths are surging. A leading drug reform group, Transform Drug Policy Foundation, says that drug deaths in the UK are more than double the average across Europe and 12 times higher than Portugal, a nation that decriminalised all drugs in 2001.
All this news is enough to convince you to take more drugs to dull the grim statistics. But the future is decidedly less certain and potentially more positive. For the first time in decades, there’s growing, legitimate voices that are articulating a different, more moral outcome where drug use isn’t damned as a failure but a valid choice if done thoughtfully and safely. We can safely ignore the media creation of “woke coke” — an over-hyped fantasy that ethically-sourced cocaine is possible in today’s drug market. But the notion is pushing more consumers to consider what truly ethically-sourced cocaine would look like.
Imagine a legal cocaine market. One of the UK’s most innovative thinkers on drug reform, Steve Rolles, Senior Policy Analyst for Transform Drug Policy Foundation, is releasing a book soon on the very subject. He tells me that “there are two obvious benefits of regulation for people who use cocaine. Firstly, a regulated legal product is safer, being of known potency, being sold with clear health and risk information, and being free of the adulterants and bulking agents of street cocaine. Secondly, consumers can feel confident that a regulated market can operate ethically, respecting environmental protections, ensuring fair trade for coca growers, and avoiding the violence, criminality, and corruption that plague the illegal market.
Legal cocaine isn’t about encouraging drug use — it’s about the opposite. “A responsible regulated cocaine market would have to balance sometimes conflicting priorities”, Rolles continues. “The need to be accessible and attractive enough to draw consumers away from illegal suppliers but restrictive enough to avoid encouraging use though over-availability, price falls or promotion…A state monopoly on retailing would be a wise starting point.”
An enlightened political and social movement should incorporate serious drug reform at the centre of its philosophy. The legal framework that most Western countries inhabit is designed to demonise the drug taker, punish the low-level dealer and largely leave untouched the major cartels (and rich users) that feed the gluttonous appetite for pure cocaine. Punishment and imprisonment are poor examples of public policy for drugs because they show a paucity of ideas and willingness to accept failure. No country can arrest its way out of demand for illegal drugs.
"With the right campaigning and public pressure, all drugs could be legalised and regulated."
If you’re interested in changing your habits around food consumption, clothing or energy use, why not drug use, too? A leader drug reform advocate in Mexico, Zara Snapp, who works with coca-producing communities in Colombia and Peru, tells me that a more ethical cocaine market would mean “communities that currently cultivate the coca plant would continue to cultivate for a legal market and directly sell it to universities or public institutions that have a state issued license to produce coca-derived products.”
“These products, including powder cocaine, would be available via government run cultural centres which are staffed by specialised health and community professionals or via a pharmacy model in some other countries,” Snapp explains. “The distribution aspect would need to be contextualised for each country depending on its resources and the reach of different institutions.”
Where will the cocaine market be in 50-years-time? There’s the possibility that synthetic cocaine will be produced in labs, in the UK or any other nation, and sold by the state in a highly-regulated way to anybody who needs or wants it. Marijuana hasn’t become a widely- accepted drug overnight: it’s taken advocates and users decades of campaigning to show the medical and recreational benefits of it. Coca could be similar.
With the right campaigning and public pressure, all drugs could be legalised and regulated. The ultimate goal of this position, one that I share, is that currently illicit drugs become boring, normal and largely free from harm. Take away the sexiness of illegal cocaine and other highs, and you start to imagine that a mature society would never criminalise millions of citizens for the simple act of consuming drugs.
Lessons from a business of a different kind: charting the demise of Brooks Brothers…
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