Coming back from the primary school summer fête, all of us – six parents and five children – piled into Emma and Richard’s £2 million house in leafy north London.
While the kids, all aged six and under, headed upstairs to do some face painting, Emma closed the kitchen door, poured out the Sauvignon… then started cutting lines of cocaine.
I tried to style out my shock by taking large sips of my chilled white. Having never taken any drugs, I was unnerved by this casual display.
But, clearly, I was in the minority.
Though my husband and I declined to partake, Emma and Richard and the other parents, Sarah and Eddie, merrily snorted cocaine as they prepared pesto pasta for the children.
While I naïvely hoped the fête night shenanigans were a one off, they quickly turned into a pattern among the parents in my social set. Post-sports day picnics, end of term barbecues, camping trips; any get-together saw cocaine offered around alongside the Kettle Chips and dips.
Nothing – including our ever-growing families – seemed to dampen their enthusiasm.
I always said a polite but firm no, much to their surprise and amusement, and after a few months they stopped asking. But to these middle-class, well-heeled parents, spending hundreds of pounds a week on their recreational cocaine habit was deemed par for the course – alongside yoga on a Saturday, serving on the PTA and intermittent fasting.
They think me an awful square; there have been plenty of jokes over the years about me acting ‘like their mother’.
Figures from last year show soaring cocaine use over the past three decades is being driven by the large number of middle-class, middle-aged users
But a decade on from that summer fête, I’m having the last laugh. Because while I look and feel great for my 48 years, the same cannot be said for them.
Emma, 52, has spent more than £10,000 on dental implants thanks to losing several teeth (multiple studies have found that cocaine use can have a disastrous effect on your teeth and gums).
Eddie, 51, has arrhythmia – no surprise, given long-term cocaine use is linked to several degenerative health conditions including cardiovascular disease, irreparably harming hearts and arteries.
And while Sarah, 50, puts her terrible memory down to menopause, I can’t help but wonder if it’s an early sign of dementia. A 2021 study found using even a small amount of cocaine on a single occasion could cause significant brain changes.
The research found alterations in the prefrontal cortex – responsible for decision making, reasoning and social behaviour – as well as the hippocampus, responsible for learning and memory.
In fact, experts have warned we may soon experience a surge in dementia cases linked to the soaring use of cocaine in Britain.
And generally, my snorting friends all complain of looking older than their years – despite their over-zealous use of Botox, fillers and laser treatments.
By contrast, now a 48-year-old mother of three, I’m in excellent health and very happy with my physical appearance – despite having a much lower-maintenance beauty regimen than them.
‘Generally, my snorting friends all complain of looking older than their years – despite their over-zealous use of Botox, fillers and laser treatments,’ says Annie
My friends are all well-educated people with generous salaries, meaning they can afford luxurious gym memberships, HelloFresh subscriptions and fantastic private health insurance. They eat sourdough and guacamole and ancient grains. The women spend a fortune on their hair and skincare.
But they’ve spent more than ten years systematically destroying their health through their cocaine use – and I fear there are many more problems hurtling down the tracks towards them. Yet they seem utterly oblivious.
Their blasé attitudes are likely because, statistically speaking, their behaviour is increasingly normal.
Figures from last year show soaring cocaine use – and the rocketing number of deaths caused by the drug – over the past three decades is being driven by the large number of middle-class, middle-aged users.
Despite stereotypes about what a drug user looks like, research from 2018 found that while 2 per cent of households with an income of less than £10,000 reported using cocaine, this rises to 3.4 per cent of households with an income of £50,000 or more.
And this trend for rising cocaine use among the middle-classes shows no signs of abating.
At Sarah’s 50th birthday this Spring, I was reminded by Eddie in the pub that they would be going back to their house later to do some cocaine, should I be tempted to finally join them.
As they all bemoaned the consequences of getting older, they teased me that, despite being a few years younger than most of them and ailment-free, I’d soon be similarly afflicted.
I laughed off their comments and tried to resist making some pointed barbs of my own when the familiar white bag surfaced a few minutes later…
- Annie Jackson is a pseudonym. All names have been changed
