Stories from the sewers reveal the mundanity of London’s excess
This is not about the supercharged pace of life, but something existential, says Gautam Malkani
After last week’s European elections, the results of the continent’s collective urine test.
Mercifully, the EU drugs agency has been taking samples straight from our sewers, not fumbling about with half a billion warm plastic pots. But the researchers could have spared themselves even that bother. London already knew it was the cocaine capital of Europe, and its citizens would not be proper cokeheads if they did not brag about it (no matter that Antwerp actually scored higher). Earlier this month, the capital boasted that a separate study found traces of the drug in the UK’s drinking water. What is more, Londoners like snorting on school nights: the city’s consumption appears to peak on Tuesdays.
As if to underscore the new normality of all this, two days after the EU reported its findings from city sewers, the Office for National Statistics announced it would be adding proceeds from illegal drug deals to the UK’s national accounts.
London’s work-hard, play-hard ethos has always put the city in overdrive – and nostrils have long been a favourite fuel inlet. But this week’s developments have brought home the increasing mundanity of the capital’s excesses.
Cocaine used to be the champagne of illegal narcotics. Now, even champagne no longer feels like champagne when you can order a glass of Dom Pérignon in the middle of a Westfield shopping mall. Ubiquity and wider social acceptance have put the devil’s dandruff on a shoulder-shrugging par with supermarket sushi. Even scoring the stuff no longer holds the same illicit thrill when you can just find a dealer in your local pub.
This is not substance-abuse snobbery. It is just the numbing that happens when a global city needs bigger and bigger hits just to provide the same fix for residents, visitors and inward investors. When West End theatres have to cast Hollywood A-listers just to get productions off the ground and when their neighbouring cinemas replace popcorn with “grilled polenta, tomato fondue, wild mushrooms and parmesan sauce” – duly served by waiters who will top up your wine glass in the middle of the car chase.
Just as the capital sustains that excess by segmenting between the cheap seats and deluxe sofas, so coke dealers have maintained London’s relatively low street price by splitting the product into two tiers – typically cutting the cheaper variety with benzocaine. Like high-end fashion designers producing ranges for high-street chains, London’s coke has managed to be both affordable and aspirational at the same time.
Even champagne no longer feels like champagne when you can order a glass of Dom Pérignon in the middle of a shopping mall
As our Cocaine Tuesdays suggest, the city’s charlie habit is not about living it up so much as trying to keep up. It is no longer only stockbrokers who list the drug in the same workaday toolkit as a can of Red Bull, caffeine pills and isotonic sports supplements. This is not just about the supercharged pace of life, but something more existential. Digital living and social media networks allow us to appear more confident, gregarious and sharper than we actually are. Perhaps cocaine helps our offline selves catch up with the idealised personas we present online. I have heard many a twenty-something male admit they only do coke so that they do not need to rely on LinkedIn profiles, cue-cards and other digital crutches when trying to impress women.
Being a cocaine capital of Europe therefore does not necessarily mean London is the continent’s party capital. More a swirling pit of angst.
When asked about the apparent spike on Tuesdays, addiction specialists suggest it may be linked to the comedown more commonly known as “suicide Tuesday” – the cokehead’s time-lagged equivalent of the hungover Monday blues. Just as some drinkers will ill-advisedly substitute Alka Seltzer with another round of alcohol, so cocaine users rack up another line. Indeed, some swear by the drug as a morning-after cure following a weekend bingeing on booze. Either way, we are getting even further from the dust-fuelled hedonist blowout and closer to the banal.
More prosaically, the high weekday use suggested by our sewers probably also reflects the fact that central London swells with commuters, who presumably spend their weekends decanting suspect chemical compounds into less polluted suburban drains.
The thinking behind analysing wastewater is that, unlike surveys, sewers do not lie. London’s effluence contained 711mg of benzoylecgonine – the metabolised form of cocaine – per 1,000 people, compared with 393mg in Amsterdam and 538mg in Barcelona. But here is the catch: the survey, carried out last year, has an uncertainty realm of about 40 per cent. Still nascent, the approach may one day yield lots of other useful data for a city more accustomed to taking its pulse by measuring a property market coked up to the penthouse windows.
In the meantime, as London’s restaurants, bars and clubs continue streamlining their washbasins and hiding their toilet cisterns, the capital’s populace will doubtless carry on snorting off the seats. Because unlike other legal and illegal substances, cocaine does not have that natural break-off point where you just have to stop and either pass out, vomit, gulp a gallon of mineral water or munch bumper bags of cheese puffs in the aisle of an all-night Tesco. You might, however, die of a heart attack. London, you have been warned.