The middle class on drugs

TimesOnline columnist Caitlin Moran put together a pleasingly grumpy rant recently about our society's confused reactions to certain drugs. He's a bit moralistic in tone, but he's also pretty funny and frankly, he does have some interesting (and entertaining) points buried under his curmudgeonly affect.

A primary highlight, on the topic of how the middle class is changing how drugs are sold:

Drug-related charities have been observing some recent, modish shifts in the British consumption of drugs – particularly in cocaine. Apparently, there is now a “two-tier” market in place. You can get cheap, cut, “commercialised” cocaine – perhaps we could refer to it as Lidl coke – for £30 a gram. More affluent customers, meanwhile, go for a much higher quality Peruvian cocaine – or Waitrose cocaine – for £50 a gram.

I love the idea of there being middle-class cocaine. Even though it’s an illegal street-drug sold by blank-eyed people, wrapped in torn-out pages of We Love Telly! magazine, which can make your nose fall off or kill you, the middle-classness of its renaming still occurred. Specifying “Peruvian cocaine” – like it’s “Madagascan vanilla essence,” or “the wines of the Loire”. It makes you sound like you know a little bit about the provenance. Like you might have had a driving holiday and found a lovely local strain of drugs that goes nicely with lamb.

This splitting of the market along class lines happened with marijuana a couple of years ago, as I recall. While all the kids on council estates were fostering psychotic disorders on ludicrously strong skunkweed – the psychotropic equivalent of parking a helicopter in your mind and revving it – the middle-classes started smoking pure, “euphoric”, £200-an-ounce, hand-rubbed “gourmet” weed, such as charas and AK47.

Bless the middle classes. They’re always so . . . middle class. I can’t wait until they all get into ketamine – the horse tranquilliser so popular in clubs – and start the one-up-manship about the poshness of the stable it was stolen from. Imagine if you got hold of a supply of paralysing horse medicine stolen from Earl Spencer’s stables! Or Madonna’s! You’d be the best middle-class ketamine user ever!

Teehee. One additional highlight:

Except the only problem is, this lethal new drug is called Cheese. Really. Apparently, when you mix up powdered headache medicine and black tar heroin, it resembles crumbled Parmesan.* So far, there’s been notably little national publicity or action in America over the rise of Cheese – because, I would suspect, it’s very difficult for any campaigner to stand up and, in all seriousness, say: “People of America, there is a new menace that stalks our streets – and it is Cheese. Cheese is coming for our young. Part of the war on drugs must also now be the war on Cheese. Look out for Cheese. Cheese kills.”

Cheese is a word that is both amusing, and quite comforting. It’s therefore, from a law-enforcement point of view, a terrible name to give a new drug. You might as well call a drug Margate, or Mum. No-one’s going to take it particularly seriously.

Of course, the fact that it is called Cheese does also give you a clear indication of how potent it must be: after all, part of the appeal of taking drugs is pretending that you are in some noirish, nihilistic underworld of black-veined rebels. It’s kind of hard to do that in a social exchange that involves the words “I’ve come for my Cheese, maaaaan”.