Lying in a cardiac care unit with a scar from throat to belly button, my fiftysomething friend Bob (not, unsurprisingly, his real name, given the story that follows) reflected on the lifestyle factors that had led to this. Weight, diet, insulin resistance, pints, stress, late nights, the tabs, yes, all played a role in him being carved up like a Christmas turkey for quintuple coronary bypass surgery. “And,” I ventured, “what about the coke?”
He became agitated. “Who do you think you are? Nurse Nancy?” Despite the soothing effects of morphine, Bob went off on one. Apparently his cardiologist had reassured him “it’s nowt to do wit’ bugle”.
Gear, Charlie, chisel, baggy, bugle … the plethora of euphemisms for cocaine is indicative of its acceptance and popularity: just last week the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) put British people as the second highest users of the drug. Or as the Telegraph put it: “Britain has a worse cocaine habit than Colombia”.
Hospitalised Bob is one data point in the demographic who blazed a trail for mainstreaming cocaine use: those born between the tail end of the 60s and the rise of Thatcher in the 80s. But what comes next for this group, known as Generation X? The numbers indicate coke strokes and premature death.
According to the drug poisoning data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) last week there were 4,907 deaths related to drug poisoning registered in England and Wales in 2022, 3,127 of them the result of illegal drugs – the highest since records began in 1993 and a figure that since 2012 has risen year on year. Of these deaths more than a quarter were cocaine related. Back in ’92 that figure was 24. If you want to find some comfort, there isn’t much. Generation X, the report states, “have consistently had the highest rates of drug misuse deaths for the past 25 years”.
Meanwhile, drug use is declining in millennials and especially the Gen-Zers. Cocaine Dad with his rave memories and lost weekends is a cringeworthy laughing stock for the kids. My godson, celebrating his exam results with friends, walked out on the party because “drugs make people boring”. At the music collective Sault’s “utterly astonishing” debut live show last week there was no alcohol on sale. Featuring some of today’s more credible young British musicians, it is symbolic of a trend for sobriety among their peers that would have been anathema to the Xers.
ONS figures show that whereas well over a quarter (28.5%) of young people took drugs in 2003, today that figure is closer to one in six (17.6%). These are some big shifts. What should we take away from all this? Are they tut-tutting, anxiety-riven party poopers afflicted by a bad case of Saffy syndrome, named after the sensible daughter of Absolutely Fabulous’s coke-snorting, Bolly and Stolly-swilling Edina? Or are they just higher beings instead of just being high like their parents.
I did not know what to say to Bob’s fierce denial that cocaine played any part in the serious decay of his health. We are entering sniper alley, as my friend Derek calls our 50s. The more excessive of my middle-aged friends are starting to go “pop” physically and mentally, and even if they appear pretty healthy they have come to realise it’s really quite hard to stop. As the old coke joke goes, “It’s very moreish”.
Cocaine has lingered far too long in the lives of people who should be old enough to know better.
There was no “sober soc” when I was at university. Today’s wellness and alcohol-free festivals would have been considered completely weird. We were Generation eXcess and in hindsight irrationally proud of it. The culture of that time was one that revelled in drug use. Rock stars boasted of doing lines in Tony Blair’s No 10. Socialites appeared on talk shows completely off their box. Some of the most high-profile names in the media were known users. What fun we had spotting those tiny snow-white particles adrift in the nasal cavities of showbiz personalities and plastered across the tabloids.
Ask any shrink what the most important question in any therapeutic assessment is and they’ll say: “Who did you go to for comfort as a child?” The answer, clearly, should be Mum or Dad, or Granny, or at least someone. But ask addiction therapists like Josh Dickson what the answer is for addicts and “It’s usually ‘no one’, or ‘the dog’. What comes up again and again is that Gen-Xers say they had no one, often adding a shrug and the word ‘obviously’.”
Gabor Maté says in his study of addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: “Addiction is neither a choice nor primarily a disease. It originates in a human being’s desperate attempt to solve a problem.” I’ve known Bob a while now, and get occasional glimpses of his childhood: the brutal boys’ school, the abusers in plain sight, Dad a little too handy with the slipper.
Dickson says: “I think what’s missed about cocaine is that big dopamine release it gives helps a user feel connected to people, helps them feel they and their ideas and plans have value. Gen X has a real deficit of that in their life; that’s what’s missing, connection.”
“Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf,” as Philip Larkin said in This Be the Verse, about the parental role in fucking you up. Which perhaps isn’t the ideal poem to have buzzing in your head as you’re driving home for Christmas. But it probably beats having an eightball of bugle in your top pocket as a cure for a broken heart.
• Kate Spicer is a freelance journalist
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