This is a guest post by Cotswold Charlie
Cocaine kills. This much we know. It kills bankers, magazine editors and television PR men – but this is not usually front page news. It kills tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans and Caribbeans every year through the complete infiltration of its trade into every level of life – but we think this is at worst regrettable or at best funny.
It also kills people here, when kids involved with the gangs whose lifeblood is the drug trade and off their heads on coke and hydroponic skunk cross the tracks and hurt someone outside their estates. THEN it’s news. Or rather, it isn’t: not the cocaine. Why on earth could that be?
The cocaine trade is the core of “gang culture”. It CREATED the Jamaican and American gangs the children in our estates model themselves on. It is the key method for funding the “mindless, nihilist” avariciousness we hear so much about right now. The effect of the drug itself on the user is precisely to increase greed, self-centeredness and remove all human sympathy. There are whole musical genres now dedication to detailing its trade. It is a vile drug (and yes I have used it many times in the past – and been an utter arsehole while under its influence). So why is it not mentioned in any of the reports or analysis? Why are parliamentarians and broadsheet writers not asking how it became so rife? Could there possibly be a vested interest for anyone in keeping it off the agenda?
David Cameron must surely now answer those long-dodged questions on drug use among his circle. Perhaps be questioned about how close he was to ex colleagues who, like a parody of media figures that Armando Iannucci would baulk at, snorted vast rails of gak from their desks wearing gold medallions emblazoned with the word CUNT. Or asked whether the fact Andy Coulson used to rock up to parties with Tara Palmer Tompkinson at the height of her self-proclaimed debauchery ever rang any alarm bells. We all know the rest of the rumours. But most of all he must be asked what he thinks the effects of middle-class drug use are on our cities.
Cocaine and mugging are the only points of direct contact between people like David Cameron and people like the rioters. How many people up in court tonight look up at the TV screens, see MPs pontificating on “mindless criminality” and think “I sell coke to you, and your friends, and your kids.”? How many have sat down and done lines with the traders and bankers they sell to and listened to their macho banter about how they fill their pockets with ordinary people’s money (and if you think I’m satirising or over-egging this one iota, you have never done coke with a banker)? How many care about morality as long as people with a head full of cocaine are willing to pay them money that allows them to keep their heads full of it too? It’s time to stop burying our heads in the snow.