let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
With the party season entering full-swing I was delighted to see the dancefloor, at a weekend works-do, packed to the rafters with the yoof-of-today all having a whale of a time, partying like it was 1999 and waiving their hands like they just don’t care. Back in the day we would all have been staggeringly, slurringly booze-fuelled but no longer and they just seemed full of beans and the spirit of Christmas present. Or where they?
We, as a country, are apparently taking more cocaine than ever before. The UK is now the largest consumer of ‘snow’ per capita in Europe, and the second largest in the world, behind only Australia of all places. It is our second-most popular drug after cannabis and the National Crime Agency estimate that in excess of 125 tonnes, enough to “fill a football stadium”, is consumed every year, growing annually at 7%. Behind this increase the key factors are availability and affordability, and its widespread recreational acceptance.
While the price of alcohol has soared in recent years, cocaine has become relatively much, much cheaper: pre-2020, a gram of ‘charlie’ would typically cost upwards of #100 whereas today it is often sold for less than half that amount. It’s also readily available and in many areas of Britain, the drug can now be ordered as easily as a takeaway pizza. The complementary forces of supply and demand mean production has also followed suit with global production doubling in the last ten years. Most British ‘bugle’ travels from Latin America via West Africa on cargo ships to the European ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Gioia Tauro in Italy. Ship, ferry and lorry then bring the ‘marching-powder’ home. From there, it’s a matter of finding buyers – by all accounts, an increasingly simple task.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s mostly young people using and according to the Office for National Statistics, 4% of 16-24 years olds took the drug in 2024. However, ‘chisel’ appears to have shed its association with city-slickers, celebs, yuppies and rock stars and it’s now the drug-of-choice for everyone, irrespective of social strata. The trend has prompted some experts to coin ‘sniff’ as a “working-class narcotic” used by many to get through the final hours of their shift as often on their nights-out. That said, ‘blow’ is still more likely to be taken by people with incomes over #52,000 and this has lead police chiefs the country over to chastise middle-class drug users who worry about climate change and single-use plastics but consider there’s no harm in taking a quick snort now and then. A class-A narcotic for all seasons and not just the festive one.
