Professional people and drug use

[Beebee6]

I work in banking and moved to London a year ago for a career opportunity. I’m in my early 30s and have never thought of myself as particularly naive but I’m genuinely shocked by how many of my colleagues regularly use drugs. By drugs, I'm mostly referring to cocaine. They all talk about this very openly as if it’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do at the weekend, after work or when they have spare time without the kids. On the rare occasions when I have been along to social events after work, it’s always offered around and I appear to be the only one not partaking. None of these people are particularly ‘young’ either (most 30s-40s) and are all very successful professional people, who in my (perhaps judgemental) opinion, aren’t the typical drug using types. Some are single but many have families. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who seemed to think that this is now commonplace amongst many working professionals, particularly in the city. I’m curious as to whether this sort of thing really has become more normal and accepted now?

I used to live in a commuter belt town and cocaine was in common use with some of the school mums at my dcs infant school. I distanced myself from them as drugs aren't my thing. One of them was one of my closest friends, until she got into it and I dropped her. I think cocaine is as popular as drinking alcohol. For that group it was normal for a social gathering.

@Bagpuss I completely agree. The drug users are either naive or totally selfish.

Inliverpool1

Yep. About 10 years ago I managed a respected & popular city bar / event venue and it was the norm. City boys mostly banking & insurance industry. Very open about it.
Found the majority of our clients to be absolutely obnoxious!! We were rarely police searched by the police either, they completely turned a blind eye.

This is so sad. When I was a student nurse many years ago I remember a beautiful young lady who died of a massive heart attack from cocaine use. She was a professional and not at all what I thought a drug addict would look like. It has always stayed with me and hence I have never wanted to try the drug. I remember whilst working on her in resus one of the senior doctors begging her to 'stay with us' it was utterly heartbreaking and I can still see her face. We were there but she died without her family. Her dad got there too late it was so so awful. Apparently she had only used it socially whatever that means. At the debrief one of the consultants said every time you use cocaine it kills a little piece of your heart. I have never forgotten that day.

think I must have been living under a rock!

I live in a village near a small market town, it's easier to get coke delivered than a pizza.

I know what you mean fizbo, I think 6 momths in A&E would put anyone off tbh. But yes IME common in meedja circles.

My husband died from heroin use. He was a professional man with a child, as far from the stereotype of a heroin user as you could get. I got a huge shock as I had no idea

Fizbo what a sad and sobering story. That must have been harrowing 😢. Unfortunately though to respond to OP when I worked in London 20 years ago it was very commonplace. I won't say I was exempt myself when Iot younger as I was a bonkers clubber but now in my civilised surburban environment I don't think anyone around me here ever did. I think certain activities become normalised when everyone's doing it. If I'd been aware of the colossal damage it did I don't think I'd have been quite so blasé.

I life in the London burbs, I don't know anybody (or I think I don't) who do drugs. But today I went to a new hairdressers and the owner (family man, early 40s) said that most of the people he knows do cocaine. He said it is rife, and crosses against all ages and professions. He said he has been very shocked about who was using, people he would never had dreamt would be regular drug users. He recently had to let an employee go who was doing it in his loos, several times a day.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Middle-class cocaine users are turning a blind eye to the link between their drug habit and sex trafficking, slavery and murder, said the former head of UK drug strategy.

“These are middle-aged, middle-class people at dinner parties,” Tony Saggers, former head of drugs threat at the National Crime Agency, told The Times on Tuesday, in his first interview since leaving the post.

“They will find sweatshops abhorrent, slave labor a brutal, terrible thing to be happening in their neighborhood, and the news that a 16-year-old has been knifed to death in London will shock them,” he added.

Britain has one of the highest rates of cocaine use in Europe, according to the European Commission and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – with 4.2 percent of young adults having taken the drug in 2015.

Saggers said this was funding the exploitation of women in the sex industry, as well as slavery and gun violence.

“The consequences of buying cocaine are more abhorrent than most of what the people using it find abhorrent,” he said
In Britain, there are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, most of them from Albania, Nigeria, Poland and Vietnam.

Saggers said there was a lack of action among employers in tackling the prevalence and acceptance of cocaine use in some industries, particularly among banks and other companies in the City of London, Britain’s financial center.

Companies should address the problem through schemes that educate their staff about the impact of cocaine abuse on their health and wider society, he added.
Tamara Barnett, projects leader at the Human Trafficking Foundation, said “we need to do all we can to emphasize the role the public can play in eradicating human trafficking.”

“Highlighting the exploitation and abuse behind certain drug production could make some people think twice before they purchase drugs, or at least twice before boasting about doing something that has for too long been seen just as a fashionable lifestyle choice,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In 2015 a report by the National Police Chiefs’ Council found that commercial cultivation of cannabis was used to fund human trafficking.

Reporting by Zoe Tabary, editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visitnews.trust.org

It's been commonplace in the city since at least the mid-80s.

At 21 I started my first job at an insurer. Coke was rife at every social outing, people were queing up for a line at the company Christmas do.

:O I really am shocked!!

How utterly depressing that there are people being part of a chain of misery, starting with the growers and ending with the kids selling it on the streets, and seeing it as being "common", "social" and "normal". Can I ask those people who use Coke - do you ever think of the harm your actions take? Not to you but other people - those left to pick up the pieces after a child has died on the end of a knife war or the families trapped in the violent space between cartels and enforcement.

A thirties/flurried professional working in London is your seterotypical cocain ussr.

Yes! At at least one in four of us are popping Class As of a weekend: probably more if we're looking exclusively at 'professionals'

I think its more 'normal ' now than it used to be
I suspect how expensive alcoholic drinks are is helping that culture along.

I agree with this:

They sound like the stereotype cocaine users

this:

Probably the same people who tut about stabbings in drugs wars and county lines yet don’t acknowledge their part in it. No time for people like that. And yes, lots of us do still think it’s druggy and sad

and this:

Middle-class cocaine users are turning a blind eye to the link between their drug habit and sex trafficking, slavery and murder

These ARE your typical drug users and they’re scum of the earth, they cause far more damage to society than benefit recipients or whoever else we’re demonising this week.

Lol yes you’re naive.

Overt cocaine culture has calmed down a little bit in many finance institutions since the GFC, but still a v popular pastime for many.

It’s not and will never be ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ and you haven’t been living under a rock. I have never encountered the majority or a large amount of people who donit and neither has anybody I know, save a select few here and there.
It is NOT normal to do cocaine. It IS still seen as ‘druggy’ to normal people!

I work for an engineering firm with random drug tests (even for people who are entirely office based) so it's not common amongst the professionals i know

I don't do recreational drugs anymore but it was common place when I started work 20 years ago in London.
Most of those people will be in their 40s now so I'd not be surprised if they were still doing it.
I don't think it's physically more harmful than drink but I don't like the criminality it props up. I'd like to see it legalised to take the supply lines and money away from the criminals. I think the war on drugs is lost.

Pretty standard among bankers I would say. I mean - i know a lot of bankers and 98% do recreational coke.