'These people think it's a victimless crime,' said the British Prime Minister. 'It isn't. The country is littered with victims.' Photo / File
If, as it has been memorably asserted, the pandemic and its assorted lockdowns has largely involved middle-class people hiding and working-class people bringing them things, then it should hardly be a surprise that the delivery menu has also included illegal drugs.
After all, there's Ocado for groceries, a host of scooter warriors for meals, and Amazon for everything else.
Why should cocaine be any different?
Covid, official figures reveal, hasn't put a dent in the drugs trade; hasn't stopped those lethal entrepreneurs in the Andes from finding a way to supply the United States and Europe, their most profitable markets.
Above all, it hasn't stemmed Britain's demand for Charlie, the Big C, White Lady, Nose Candy, Flake, or the (misnamed, since the vast majority comes from Colombia and Peru) Bolivian marching powder.
In the past eight years, a near-20-year decline in drug use has been abruptly reversed.
The Office for National Statistics, which tracks consumption through surveys, is clear what's behind it: "changes in powder cocaine use".
Today, 2.6 per cent of British adults admit to using cocaine, an increase of more than 30 per cent since 2013.
And while the Government, in revealing its 10-year drugs strategy this week, said it would target 300,000 perennial abusers with treatment, it offered much tougher words for casual snorters.
"We're not going to sit idly by while we have lifestyle users using Class A drugs," said Boris Johnson, proposing tough new measures.
Plans include removing passports and driving licences to inconvenience middle-class dope dabblers and, the Government hopes, make them reflect on their part in a chain of misery that may end at a Notting Hill shindig, but can begin with brutality in South and Central America, and continue with vicious county lines turf wars in Britain.
"These people think it's a victimless crime," said the Prime Minister. "It isn't. The country is littered with victims."
That drugs kill, though, is hardly news. And guilt has not limited consumption among the smart set so far.
The same people who rave about Netflix's brilliant but ultra-violent series Narcos, which documents the rise of Pablo Escobar, are happy to keep hoovering up the Toot, even as coke-war eviscerations play out on the screen before them.
"When I think about the layers of the cocaine trade and the misery it inflicts on the people involved, I do feel ashamed, but clearly not enough," recounts one newish mother, who gathers with five friends "all pushing 40, for monthly 'cocaine brunches'".
"I compartmentalise," she says. "That is the raw truth. It's a holiday from my life - and for now, at least, I have no intention of changing that."
Not least since exchanging booze for powder actually makes toddler-wrangling easier: "Next morning, there's no hangover. I'm not exhausted from a late night, but I still feel like I've had a blowout."
And she's not alone.
"A large number in my social circle - all middle-class, smart, professional women with children - are at it."
That consumption is booming is in no doubt. The question is why? As with any market, there are two sides to the story - supply and demand.
The latter has been fuelled, says Antony Loewenstein, film-maker and author of Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs, by a host of issues, from a separate epidemic of mental health issues to a collapse of stigma.
"[Drugs] are socially acceptable," he says. But crucially, he adds, they are also "highly accessible".
And that cannot be uncoupled from the end of the civil war in Colombia.
From the mid-1960s, the country's government was engaged in what amounted, at times, to a civil war with communist Farc guerillas.
But by 2013 hostilities had abated, and by 2016, the two sides signed a historic peace deal, under the terms of which many revolutionaries were meant to be found education and jobs.
When those didn't materialise, many turned to farming coca.
"Global cocaine manufacture, which had fallen by 37 per cent over the period 2006-14, more than doubled over the period 2014-19, to an estimated 1784 tons," notes the United Nations in its most recent report on the global drugs market.
"The marked increase," it adds, "has primarily been the result of changes in Colombia."
No one wants to blame a worldwide glut of drugs on a peace deal. But the truth is, Colombia now accounts for almost two-thirds of estimated global cocaine manufacture.
Expanding supply lines have met that increased production.
Once, the Calabrian mafia known as the 'Ndrangheta, which fostered direct contacts with Latin American suppliers, held a European monopoly.
But the post-truce collapse of Farc's stranglehold in Colombian production areas led to a "proliferation of smaller criminal and armed non-state groups" seeking partners to traffic their product.
Albanian gangs, Bosnian Serbs, Croats, Serbs and Montenegrins in particular, stepped in.
Cocaine became a hugely competitive market.
As so often with competition, the consumer benefited: prices dropped, quality increased.
In fact, purity shot up by almost 40 per cent from 2011 to 2018. Britain, long considered the poor cousin of the US, was flooded with coke every bit as refined as that on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then the pandemic arrived and dealers ensured that the regulars were kept supplied with Deliveroo-style service.
Smug snorters had never had it so good.
Indeed, it's not just the pandemic driving drug-dealing diversification.
The so-called "dark web" - an underground internet accessed using special browsers - is home to thriving marketplaces which are capturing ever larger parts of the trade; at least £237m ($463m) in annual sales in 2017, a fourfold increase in six years.
Such direct-to-consumer supplies avoid the hassles of illicit dealers - they are simply posted in the mail.
But that still doesn't answer the question of demand, of why 6 per cent of our increasingly puritanical 16- to 24-year-olds have tried it, for example, even as they shun other stimulants, notably alcohol.
"I've got a 22-year-old and an 18-year-old, and I see it all the time among their friends," says one mother.
"It's definitely normalised. For them it's like going to the pub, but cheaper. When we were younger coke was a yuppie drug, or a hard drug. They view coke very differently. They don't see it as a Class A drug at all.
"They really don't connect the dots" between consumption and wider drugs violence, she adds.
"But most middle-class people don't. I know lots of people who still take it at 50. Sure, they feel bad in the morning, but not as bad as you do with alcohol."
Across all ages, it seems, cocaine is no longer demonised. Universities will be targeted by the new strategy. Offices may be encouraged to follow.
But with coke so widespread, it's hard to preach without being accused of hypocrisy.
One workplace already in the firing line is the Palace of Westminster, whose loos are reportedly plastered with traces of cocaine use, prompting Speaker Lindsay Hoyle to warn that he would be contacting the police "as a priority".
Both the PM and politician Michael Gove have admitted taking cocaine in their youth.
Loewenstein says it is time to admit that half a century of war-on-drugs announcements are not working, and simply provide political cover for policy failure.
"Demand has never been higher, the cost has never been cheaper, access has never been easier. The stats are clear. Drugs are a normal part of many people's lives."
After he rings off, I try to find more details of the Government's new plan.
As if to prove his point, I am halfway through reading its policy document, setting out its priorities to intervene with young people, treat the most addicted, and stifle gangs supplying drugs. Then I realise I am reading the wrong 10-year plan. This one, near-identical in many ways, dates from 1998.
-Telegraph Media Group
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