THE NAKED CITY – AN ILL WIND THAT STILL BLOWS

Kings Cross circa 1987 – a couple of young guys have just scored a deal of cocaine at a local club in Springfield Avenue. In their haste to snort it, the precious powder drops to the pavement, but rather than scoop it up they hit the local convenience store for a couple of straws. It’s 11.00pm on a Saturday night, the streets are buzzing, but nobody is too surprised when they ‘slurpee’ the blow, straight from the sidewalk into their nasal passages.

The story might be apocryphal but one thing’s for sure, ‘coke’ was easy to score in those halycyon days of hedonism unleashed in the late 80s and early 90s. At the popular entertainment haunt, Bennys in Challis Avenue, it was rumoured you could buy ‘blow’ across the bar, discreetly charged to your Amex card as a bottle of upmarket bubbly. Elsewhere in the Cross and Potts Point, in coffee shops, snooker rooms and music venues, ‘coke’ was yours for the asking and the party never stopped.

Police corruption was rife, cocaine was relatively cheap and unlike heroin and other nasty narcotics it carried very little stigma. These days the party people have migrated to Newtown and Double Bay and it’s the latter upmarket hangout, with its string of revamped nightclubs, that has recently reported a surge in cocaine offences. The Bureau of Crime Statistics reports that cocaine offences in the area have increased almost 150 per-cent in the year surveyed post the Kings Cross lockouts.

Whilst custodial sentences for minor possession are rare, dealing and importing cocaine can now bring prison sentences that long outstrip those for murder and other heinous crimes. The so called war on drugs was lost decades ago and all we really have today is a regime of containment. The ice epidemic has probably taken the heat off the cocaine trade, for the time being at least, but cocaine remains universally the most popular illegal drug in the world today.

It’s also the drug that does the most damage, not so much to those that abuse it, but in countries like Mexico and Columbia, where the cartels have run amok and murder rates have skyrocketed. Unlike chocolate and coffee there’s never going to be a product called “ethical cocaine” – sourced in some mythical country where the peasant growers are amply rewarded, crime is virtually non existent and the dealers reinvest their profits in schools and community centres.

We have all seen those shock TV advertisements that highlight the damage that ice can reap, but what about a ‘moral’ campaign as to the evils of ‘coke’. Any number of forensic snaps showing tortured and dismembered bodies could be sourced from the Mexico government along with details of the latest death toll from their ongoing drug war – a toll that has passed well over 150,000 – not to mention the tens of thousands listed as officially missing.

The problem is not coke itself – many people use it and enjoy it without any serious health consequences – and have done so for hundreds of years. Where it comes from is an entirely different matter and one that seems to be largely ignored as the paranoia about other illegal drug use is promoted throughout the community.