November 17, 2005

A model is caught on camera snorting a line and is vilified; a would-be prime minister refuses to deny using it in the past ––- and nobody seems to care. Cocaine used to mean moral degeneracy or metropolitan indulgence. What on earth does it stand for now? writes Nicholas Lezard

Kate Moss’s preferred method of cocaine delivery is on the back of a CD case. We know this because it was revealed in a grainy photograph published by the Daily Mirror in September. This was surely one of the most exciting images ever to grace the front page of a newspaper; I bought it, and I tend to avoid the tabloids. I bought it despite the obviously tawdry, hypocritical and dishonest impulse behind the story. I bought it because I had been titillated into buying it.

That is what drug stories have always done: and a drug story can supply a thrill like no other. I have always recognized this, ever since my mother expressed hopes that the latest episode of Kojak to reach our screens would have, as its central theme, a story about drug-traffickers; the show just wasn't the same without them.

We used to think we knew what cocaine meant — it meant a bad, dangerous habit, a short-circuit to pleasure that was indulged in by those on a fast track to ruin. Unless, of course, you indulged in it yourself, in which case you were able to keep your sordid little habit under control and besides, it wasn’t sordid, on the venerable principle that an alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you. It has, alone among the pharmacopoeia, the property of turning its users into hypocrites.

But the fuss, or rather, the non-fuss, about David Cameron’s drug use has changed all that. Although it is perhaps too early to say whether Labour or even the Tories will decide to capitalize on his near-admittance of cocaine use before becoming an MP (and there’s a sentence that I could never have imagined writing, even six months ago), it seems at the moment as if he is going to get away with it.

A few weeks ago, in response to the affair, the Daily Telegraph journalist Sam Leith presented his readers with a list of the drugs he himself had tried: “speed, dope, acid, ecstasy, MDMA, ketamine, amyl nitrate, cocaine, nitrous oxide, magic mushrooms, temazepam, Valium, Salvia divinorum and khat”. This was the roster of the “average, middle-class drug tourist”, and if Leith got into any trouble for it with any authorities apart from his mother I have yet to hear of it. It used to be said by the Persians that there were four cushions on the divan of pleasure: coffee, wine, opium and tobacco. It would appear now that there are at least 18.

That said, admitting cocaine use still does carry its risks. I have talked to several people who will admit to me that they take the drug, but they are not keen to be identified; this is not simply a matter of anxiety about the law catching up with them, although that is a factor. Most are self-employed and so do not have to worry about drug tests in the workplace.

If there is one sentiment in common, it is this: it’s fun, but not entirely harmless fun, and every so often the habit has to be reined in. “No, I’ve knocked it on the head,” came up more than once, about half the time with the words “for good” added. As the habits were never very large –— by, say, Kate Moss’s standards –— no expensive rehab was needed, but this still testifies to the feeling of shame that attaches itself to the drug. I have heard rumours that a secondary school near me is “rife” with it, but further investigation has failed to define how rife “rife” is, or whether the rifeness is among the pupils or the staff. It seems just to be one of those things that people say about an institution to pass the time; idle gossip with a twist to it.

“I would never tell anyone else not to do it unless it was interfering with their mental state,” said one friend, now a psychotherapist, who could not decide what fake name she wanted to be known as. “I now take it very, very rarely, and I am never as excited about it as I used to be. Maybe it’s lost its glamour. It’s gone down-market.”

This is a pity, as far as the pushing of a certain kind of narrative goes. There has always been a frisson attached to drug use, even before the Defence of the Realm Act, Regulation 40B, came into place on July 28, 1916 forbidding possession of cocaine or opium to the general public. With no native, specific ceremonial attached to the substance (unlike with tea or alcohol), setting and rituals regarding drug use are still largely provisional. It always looks a bit out of place and therefore seedy; besides, the posture — hunched over a flat surface with a furled banknote up the nostril — is not dignified or becoming; it looks like a kind of grovelling.

If you’re doing it in a toilet, then you will probably feel even more furtive and squalid. Felicitously, the drug is designed to banish, if only temporarily, such feelings. If it didn’t, no one would do it any more. These matters used to be handled with a little more dignity.

Compare the image of someone crouched over a bog lid with paper currency up their hooter with the one offered us at the beginning of The Sign of the Four:

“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

It’s bad, and he shouldn’t be doing it — but it isn’t half glamorous. Just look at the adjectives and adverbs: “neat”, “delicate”, “thoughtfully”, “velvet-lined” -–– even “long, white, nervous” attests to a very refined, aestheticised excitement. Doyle and Watson may have disapproved of Holmes’s cocaine habit, but the disapproval is bound up with a strong, sensual awareness of the excitement that even the thought of the drug can

generate. And it is this which we thrill to when we are presented with images of hard drug use. The iconography has a malevolent pull to it -–– and Doyle was writing at a time when the drug wasn’t even illegal.

The Mirror’s report of Moss’s studio bender opened thus: “The Daily Mirror today reveals shocking pictures of supermodel Kate Moss snorting a fat line of cocaine during a debauched drugs-and-drink session with junkie lover Pete Doherty. As the white powder induces a sudden rush to her brain, she rocks back in her seat and laughs hysterically. The coke is kicking in. Within seconds she leans forward and again sniffs into a tightly rolled-up £5 note, hoovering up every last grain of the Class A drug.”

It is, of course, a little unfair to compare the prose of a sanctimonious and allegedly hypocritical newspaper with that of one of the most enduring fiction writers of all time, but the issue is not so much the style as the tone. The Mirror might directly mention Moss’s brain and what is happening to it, but the effect on Holmes is the more cerebral one. Moss, on the other hand, is made to appear demented.

“Between lines of cocaine, she repeatedly twitches her nose and rubs her nostrils. On five occasions she expertly prepares the lines of cocaine, carefully using a credit card to cut the powder into neat rows for her, Doherty and the others. In long, high-heeled black boots, shorts and a low-cut vest top, Moss begins the night with shots of vodka and whisky. She then pours herself large glasses of wine and beer and chain-smokes cigarettes.”

And here is a report from the Evening News in 1922, where the reporter describes a cocaine addict in a nightclub, “a frail-looking creature . . . in a flimsy frock that left three-quarters of her back bare”: “During the intervals of her vivacious dancing in an underground room, she gave herself over to almost hysterical attacks of inane, purposeless laughter, and now and then stroked the man sitting with her.”

There is a remarkable continuum in the description here. Four-fifths of a century separate the accounts, but you couldn’t squeeze a razor blade between them in terms of attitude or technique, right down to the fascination with how much of each woman’s body is revealed.

The key word is, I think, “hysteria”, that condition which was once thought to apply exclusively to women (Greek: “hustera” = womb) and which represented, to the male medical profession, their hopeless, incurable irrationality. Also, men do not like it when they don’t know what it is that women are laughing at, unless it’s a joke a man has told them. And they can come out with the most ungenerous conclusions about the woman’s sanity. If drugs are involved, then the argument is over.

The problem is that you can’t do that any more. Drug use — and cocaine use in particular ––- has saturated the public in sufficient concentration to make the business of demonising the takers all the more difficult. Take the fuss over David Cameron’s alleged drug use. He has more or less admitted to having taken cocaine before becoming an MP. His response to Alex Thomson, the Channel 4 news reporter, when asked if he had used the drug since entering parliament, even has the faint, evasive ring of political statements such as “Read my lips: no new taxes,” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.

Thomson: “So that’s ‘No’?”

Cameron: “I’ve absolutely answered your question.”

Thomson: “Say ‘No’. “

Cameron: “I’ve just said ‘No’.”

Leaving aside the fact that he had not, in fact, just said “no” (strange how his choice of words echoes the famous anti-drug line coined for Nancy Reagan to inspire a generation: “Just say no”), Thomson and pretty much everyone else decided that that was the time to move on.

And we have done just that, remarkably, even if we pause to reflect that it is a strange society we live in, in which a model who has taken drugs is placed under more censorious scrutiny than someone who aspires to be prime minister. Perhaps people are mindful of the example of the president of a country on the other side of the Atlantic, about whom rumours of youthful cocaine use have buzzed like mosquitoes; it doesn’t seem to have done him that much harm, not in the way that rumours of drug use harmed the former vice president Dan Quayle.

It would appear the public is growing up fast. If four million people in England and Wales between 16 and 59 admit to taking a Class A drug and 11 million to taking any illegal drug (which, by the way, may be more people from that demographic than the number who smoke tobacco, go to football matches or to church put together), it means that many fewer people are going to jump in fright when the government or the tabloids go “boo” at them.

The news that the overwhelming majority of banknotes now contain traces of the drug gave everyone an opportunity to reflect on the drug’s current place in society, whether as metaphor or simple fact. Did anyone, for instance, take any pleasure in the pictures of Boy George’s recent arrest for possession in New York -–– in which he looked anxious, defeated, as unlike the person we remember as Boy George as you can get -–– or in the fact that he faces a five-year prison sentence in an American jail if convicted? Once upon a time the brouhaha would have been deafening. Now all there is is a quiet sympathy.

I had thought, at first, that questions about David Cameron’s drug use would sink his career like a missile barrage. In fact, at first, I even thought he was being asked about pot. That he has managed not so much to shake off these accusations as persuade others that they are not worth pursuing shows a certain maturity among the public at large (I asked Ian Hislop, at the height of the scandal, whether he had any inside dope, so to speak, on the matter; as far as he was concerned Cameron was actually being evasive in order to make it look as though he had once taken drugs, which certainly represents a turning-point of a kind in British political life). Certainly, more obloquy has been heaped upon the reporters and supplier of the Kate Moss story than on the woman herself.

And it all seems to be ending happily for Moss, rather than in shame, despair and exile: there she was on the front cover of the Sunday Mirror, looking gorgeous (as usual). “Kate On A High” reads the headline. “Kate Moss is back and in sensational form.” In the accompanying picture, Moss is wearing much, much less than she was when the Mirror reported on her doing all those lines in the recording studio. Strangely, they haven’t mentioned this at all. Dawn/Guardian service

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)