Story of a Cocaine User

Probably influenced by the glorification of drugs in the media and classic films like Al Pacino’s Scarface and Matt Dillon’s Drugstore Cowboy, there came a point in my life (when I was about 15 years of age) where my curiosity got the better of me and I decided I wanted to try every drug. (Of course famous films continue to glorify films even nowadays with the likes of Cocaine Cowboys and American Gangster hitting the big screen and theatre.

I achieved this ambition by about 21, starting with cannabis and LSD - very cheap in the 1990s. When I was old enough to shuffle past doormen I progressed onto ‘party-drugs’ like amphetamine (speed), and MDMA/MDA (ecstacy). Ecstacy was my favourite. I dabbled with heroin and ketamine before settling on the ubiquitous white powder: cocaine.
My personal experience of cocaine use is a story about overcoming the addictive pull of cocaine. I wouldn’t say I was a ‘hard’ user by any stretch of the imagination. I was probably using everyday or every other day at my peak; sometimes using the toilet cubicles at work to have a morning snort. I cringe at thinking of this nowadays as it seems I had the life of pond-scum. Despite having some warped perception that I was somehow part of the elite and better than everybody else I was actually quite low. The more I did the more I felt low. In the end it led to me feeling as though I had lost my identity; like I’d forgotten who I was.

Cocaine Blues

I remember that after heavy weekends using cocaine how it made life much harder and cocaine blues. I mean, life is hard enough without class ‘A’ drugs isn’t it?? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday seemed particularly challenging. Monday evenings or Tuesday evenings I usually ended up on the phone to a friend, who didn’t know I used cocaine, moaning about how bad my life was. If only someone had said “listen mate, life’s much easier and much better if you don’t use drugs at the weekends - or mid-week” - but they didn’t and I had to find this out for myself.

Lack of sleep is definitely a torment. After extreme weekend sessions on the ‘Columbian export’ you could often be too wired to sleep. (There’s probably so much rubbish added before the end-user gets the coke that it could be anything in there keeping you awake really). Then there’s the insomnia but with a blocked up knows due to the copious amounts of crap recently shoved up it.

My observations, here in the United Kingdom, are that there are users of cocaine everywhere. The most proliferate users are in the 20s-30s age range. I’ve found that despite moving to several different cities around England I still end up making friends with other users and re-igniting the party lifestyle. Cocaine users come from all parts of society I’ve partied with lawyers and dentists but also there are hundreds of thousands of kids/people doing it from less affluent parts of society. There’s a small town I know where all the young men wear trainers and baseball caps in the 2 bars in the town. These men mostly finished their schooling at 16. The majority of these are cocaine users on a daily basis.