Hey, Your Bong Water's In My Waste Water

Shocking. Stunning. Horrifying. The favorite adjectives of Nanny Staters were once again tossed around like confetti when it emerged the other day that cocaine use among Londoners is perhaps 16 times higher than the government had assumed. A team of scientists concluded as much after examining the chemicals in the city's sewage water (a stoner might justifiably refer to this method as "some serious shit, man").

Tests found that 37,638 doses of cocaine, or 150,552 lines, are consumed in London every day, nearly 16 times more than the government figure of 2,397 doses. 

Shocking! Stunning! Horrif— Wait a minute.

London has a population of seven and a half million. 37,000-plus daily doses of cocaine means that one in 200 Londoners — one half of one percent — does a little blow on any given day. Sounds pretty un-alarming to me. But if you're a sky-is-falling public-health fuddy-duddy, given to hand-wringing and cries of moral anguish, this news is surely all you need to go into overdrive.

Still, what exactly is the problem here?

Inasmuch as cocaine use leads to increased crime, that's a consequence of drug prohibition and the criminal elements that black markets (with their built-in sky-high profits) inevitably attract.

And the public-health picture? You know, coke users seem to take care of themselves pretty well. The Independent reported last year that slightly fewer than 100 Britons die each year from the use of cocaine. That means that purely statistically, correlated to the U.K.'s population of 60 million, London sees about 12 coke deaths annually — maybe 20 to 25 if you reckon that the swinging capital probably attracts an outsized share of partygoers and risktakers.

Just to add a bit of perspective: Those roughly two dozen fatalities are almost certainly much lower than the number of local deaths caused by entirely legal prescription drugs.

Told about the cocaine levels in London's waste water,

A spokeswoman from the Home Office insisted: "Tackling drugs remains one of the Government's highest priorities and is backed with record investment." 

A "record investment." You don't say. Somebody ought to ask what kind of investment it is when you pump millions of pounds into a holy cause year after year, only to get unfailingly negative returns. (As the Telegraph article points out, albeit unironically: cocaine use is up, and the drug is now almost half as cheap as it was seven years ago.)

Truth be known, I don't like cocaine — I mean, this guy I know doesn't like it. This guy I know tried it once, and between the worrisome heart palpitations and the unpleasant, hard-edged mood it induced, he didn't care for it one whit.

Plus, unlike marijuana, cocaine has serious addictive properties.

But you know what? So does booze. So does tobacco. And between them, those two legal drugs kill more people in a week than cocaine does in a year.

Trying to make sense of the drug war is as great a waste of perfectly good brain cells as getting wasted on coke  — or rum-and-Coke, for that matter.

Comments

[Phelps]

So... there are four lines in a dose? Who's lines? Are we talking Rob Lowe lines or Courtney Love lines?

[George Arndt]

If they want to discourage people from using cocaine, they should just tell people that "Bush used to do it."

That should be warning enough!

[smithy321]

try this excellent website: http://www.smoke-nut.com/