Cocaine may be ubiquitous in Britain – but it’s hardly cool: in fact it’s becoming cringe

There is one thing that defines London socialising, which is noticed by tourists and visitors from across the globe. It’s not the price of pints. It’s not even the lack of late-night venues. It’s the proliferation of gak. Londoners, famously, love coke so much that five years ago it began seeping into the River Thames, stoking fears about hyperactive eels who all want to tell you about their ideas for a new podcast. As far back as a decade ago traces were being found in the city’s sewage, the cokiest greywater in all of Europe.
Despite its obvious ethical issues – violent drug deaths both in the UK and at the drug’s organised-crime controlled sources – and financial ones – a gram of cocaine in the capital can cost about £100 – cocaine, long associated with the City due to long hours and finance bros, is everywhere, still. These days, it’s a way to supplement rounds in pubs that would cost the guts of a gram anyway. No longer an aid to a big night out, it’s a Thursday after-work thing. It’s part of many parties, every festival, and every football tournament abroad – videos from the Euros attested to this – with fans cheering each other on to do bumps in Trafalgar Square, before losing in the final anyway.
This leaves us in a strange, cognitively dissonant landscape where cocaine is everywhere – one in 40 British adults take coke, more than anywhere else in Europe and the second highest rate of use of any country in the world. And yet, its ubiquity is the very thing that undercuts its appeal. As with all things – the one exception perhaps the glorious invention that is the Lime bike – familiarity breeds contempt. With cocaine it seems, we’re growing, if not sick of the stuff, at least phenomenally bored with the routine of it. Figures released last year show that student drug use has halved since the 90s, with just 5.1% of 16- to 24-year-olds identifying as coke users.
Of course, when the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures were released, researchers did not report a reason for the change. They never do – but in this case, they also don’t have to. Who, historically speaking, wants to take the same drugs as their parents?
Gen Z may have something to do with this, although they don’t explain all of it. As is often reported, they are more sensible than their millennial predecessors. They drink less, gamble less; they experience fewer teen pregnancies. They don’t eat meat (43% are vegetarians). They have a healthier relationship to work. As digital natives, they supposedly know the value in not posting their wild nights out (which they’re less prone to in the first place) all over social media. They’re more likely to have a burner phone than a 700-picture Facebook album entitled Freshers’ Week. In general, it’s fair to say they have a healthier attitude towards consumption and wellbeing than generations past. Which is why they’re taking fewer drugs too, cocaine included.
Drug trends have always adapted themselves along generational lines, managing to retain their specific hedonistic countercultural cachet precisely because they weren’t popular with the generation right before. Hippy boomers brought marijuana into the mainstream. Their children, 80s yuppies determined to get rich, loved coke because it made it easier to work while partying. The 90s subverted this again, with a second summer of love, except this time with pingers instead of weed.
For each generation, in other words, a drug reaches its pop-culture peak before being superseded. Cocaine seems to be finally reaching that peak too – perhaps to be replaced with hallucinogenics, mushrooms and microdosing. ONS data for England and Wales released in December reported that 260,000 people aged between 16 and 59 had taken magic mushrooms in the previous year, 100,000 more than in 2020. If it’s taken longer for the drug-based generational shift to come than it did in the past, perhaps that makes sense. Cocaine’s peak coincides with the coming-of-age of a generation that refuses to grow up. Millennials aren’t buying houses (we can’t), aren’t having children (same thing) and aren’t getting married (see above). There’s no real incentive for the party to end, nor for us to slow down as we lurch towards middle age. But popularity cannot be confused with cachet – anyone who once loved an indie band who only then got too mainstream can tell you that.
That middle-aged generation, the one slightly ahead of mine (gen Xers) are another generation still wholeheartedly embracing coke, in all its stay-up, drink-more, work-more, consume-more, pre-2008-crash mentality. This mentality is no longer in vogue, nor is it aspirational for a younger generation coming of age in a world that is slowly getting hotter and more expensive. The perceived coolness of cocaine as a drug has been delivered from gen X to millennials as an unpleasant hangover, like Alex James’s cheese farm, from a generation that still believes in the concept of meritocracy, pays to use the pool at Soho House and wants to work at Vice one day. As gen Z come of age behind them, hyper-attuned to the concept of “millennial cringe”, it’s little wonder they want to put some distance between their ancestors and themselves.
Given their reputation for being a more sober generation (both ethically and substance-wise) this makes sense – as coke has become more and more widespread in Europe, it’s harder for younger users to ignore the human cost of the trade and its trafficking.
Of course, what is dead can always be reborn, what is cringe can always become cool again. Since June Charli xcx has inspired legions to extol the virtues of bumping that and having a little key and a little line. In a return to the Facebook oversharing era, millennials are now posting videos of themselves snorting lines on Twitter. Perhaps 365 was an unwitting swan song, a eulogy, a dirge for our generation’s cocaine party culture. Perhaps its peak saturation in pop culture means the comedown is finally on its way. Only the rest of brat summer will tell. If there’s one thing cocaine remains, in spite of its waning coolness, it is moreishly persistent.