“Do you mean the drink or the drug? It’s Oxford so I have to check!” said one person I was telling about this week’s Icon of the Week.

 

 

“You’re doing it on cocaine?” another asked, presumably assuming this would be a 10,000-word article typed up in about 30 minutes.

 

 

It’s an understandable confusion, and one I found myself in when the trailer for the documentary Gordon Ramsay on Cocaine dropped, but neither is this article about the drink, nor have I been up for days on end. It bolsters Anglo-Colombian economic relations, causes people to overestimate the hilarity of their anecdotes, and is probably behind a lot of your favourite music. Shackleton and Scott took it to Antarctica with them, Sherlock Holmes injected it between cases, and the man who brought it to Europe said he would rather live 10 years with it than 10 quintillion without it. Then again, he also wrote sex stories about diseased people and wrote a hierarchy of races, so he probably should’ve got a hobby or something. It’s actually something of a British icon rather than just an Oxford one, with the UK being the second-heaviest consumers on the planet behind the USA. We’re also, incidentally, the third highest binge drinkers in the world, losing the silver and gold to Romania and Denmark, respectively. England never gets the top spot at anything!

 

 

As I’m sure my parents will be happy to hear if they happen to read this, I don’t really know the mechanics of dealing drugs. I know that it’s a logical career switch for a terminally ill chemistry teacher and that, generally speaking it doesn’t have a great pension plan. To fill the gaps in my knowledge, what better than to get the insights of someone who knows more about how it all works in Oxford?

 

 

“It’s a drug that brings you temporary happiness, makes you more sociable and that can really make a good night out,” I’m told. Sounds pretty much the same as alcohol. “People usually associate it with having a drink.” Ah, there you go. “Most people who buy this are drinking whilst doing it. If people do one or the other then it’s around the same price, but it’s pricey when you combine them like most people do.” It’s also, apparently, “extremely” profitable in spite of punishingly expensive startup costs. People want to buy it, and people want to sell it. Isn’t young entrepreneurship in the free market a beautiful thing?

 

 

Besides, it still has some of its glamour: “I think it also makes people feel rich or feel like they’re more than just students” they say, “It has that feeling of living the high life.” The overriding impression I’m given is that, however common you think cocaine is, it’s inevitably even more common. “People are surprised with how normal it is and how many people really do take coke very regularly”

 

 

Oxford and cocaine have a long and illustrious history. Boris Johnson, Balliol alumni championed for his consistency and honestly, admitted to using cocaine in an interview with Janet Street-Porter—I can’t think of a room I would like to be in less to be honest. He’s been occasionally quizzed about it over the years, saying that he used it at Oxford aged 19, but sneezed so it had no effect on him. Part of him had a sneaking suspicion that it may in fact have been icing sugar. He later walked this back, saying that nothing went up his nose. Photographer Dafydd Jones recalled pretty liberal use of “hard drugs” at Oxford compared to stuffier Cambridge, and David Cameron has been notoriously cagey when questioned on the subject. Contrarily, conservative commentator James Delingpole has since lamented the lack of cocaine in Oxford during his time here.

 

 

Not that Atik was exactly Miami Vice, but it still seems somewhat paradoxical that cocaine use is increasing alongside club closures. It’s also growing in popularity as Gen Z ditches alcohol. So, who’s buying it now? “Mainly students,” I’m told, “mainly students with more money. I think when people get to university they try more stuff. It’s not that more people are doing it but there’s a steady stream of students who want it.” Like a less intense upper-middle-class retelling of The Wire, drug use in private schools is significantly more prevalent than it is in state schools. Not only do private school kids drink earlier and heavier than their state school counterparts, but all drugs are also more common. And, just like cocaine, there’s no shortage of them here either.  “I think students mainly buy it because it can be a nice break from studying, or just life,” I’m told.

 

 

Cocaine is changing. Once the monopoly of the middle- and upper-classes, cocaine’s use has been—for lack of a better word—democratised in recent years. I’m not a mathematician, but let’s do some quick sums. The average price for a gram of cocaine in England is £50, and the average amount used by someone on a night out is 0.7g. That means the average cocaine user is spending about £35 per night on their fix. Oxford’s average real ale pint price is £5.42—and this is for probably the cheapest drink you can get out. That means that if you drink any more than six and half of these, you’d be saving money by buying cocaine. Obviously, this isn’t perfect maths. College bars are cheaper, and Tesco is, for many, ground zero of the entire city—and, anyway,  people tend to mix the two —but it still illustrates that the days of cocaine being just for bankers are over. Again, it’s that wonderful free market in action.

 

 

The Isis Magazine doesn’t condone illegal drug use. Obviously.∎

 

 

Words by Albert Genower. Image courtesy of Tom Magliery.