Hello

Sorry for not sending one of these for ages, I’ve half-written a bunch and then ended up having to do other things and then it hasn’t felt timely anymore and oh, you know how it is.

Normally I’d be aiming to do something whimsical about the intrigues of running a pub and the current Guinness 0.0% market (whhhhy is it in short supply again @ Diageo you have basically one job here) but actually this summer sees a looming problem that reflects - blinding, needing a visor to get over it - on one that’s been building for years and years in pubs.

We’ve gotta talk about gear. Packet. Sniff. Whatever the fuck cocaine’s called in your circles.

I am old and boring and already way too much of a dickhead for the idea of cocaine to have ever appealed. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve even thought about doing it and tbh I’d assume I was in the average-normal percentage of people for that. Like, probably a lot of us know someone who does it but it’s not an everyday staple.

Partly, to me, that’s because coke is an expensive drug. Was. Isn’t anymore. And it isn’t an exclusive drug, either. Now if you go out at all you probably know a lot of people who do it, not just at 2am when the house party’s getting sleepy, at like 6pm on a Tuesday in a regular pub. Midday on a Sunday at a football match.

I don’t want to sound too pearl-clutching, here. I work in a trade that plies a substance that’s not only addictive and proven to do harm to people and those around them in the process of that addiction but is also, even at its most casual use level, an intoxicant. Ok a few beers might seem different from snorting lines but on the sort of chemical principles it’s not radically different, really. Or the social ones, currently.

Ask anyone who runs a licensed establishment and either they’ll tell you that coke’s become a bit of a nightmare or they’re lying. There’s maybe some pubs that are gentrified enough to have avoided the problem - although I’d doubt anywhere has entirely - but from £11.50 a pint joints pursuing Michelin stars to queer-friendly brew pubs to basic-ass boozers like mine I’ve seen and heard the same thing: you just can’t stop the customers doing lines.

You can do all kinds of things to reasonably put them off: reduce the number of flat surfaces in toilets (although this is also inaccessible for anyone who needs to put stuff down) and make sure you’re checking them regularly. Enforce a zero-tolerance policy, kindly remind people that this is a licensed premises and so we have to have a zero tolerance policy or else we can be shut down (in fact, rampant drug use is one of the many things previous publicans have got my place in trouble over) and just cross your fingers people take it onboard enough to at least be subtle about it.

Thing is I’m sure a lot of customers in pubs I’ve worked in have always been doing it. Well ok, not a lot but probably there’s always some - whatever the rule about how far away you are from a rat in London is has always probably been true about how far away you are from someone on coke if you’re in Zones 1-2.

It’s just that I’m sure people used to have some sense that they were meant to at least hide it. Instead sometimes I walk into the loos - not just in my pub - and it looks like Motley Crüe just had a confusing time-slip drive through from 1986. People aren’t just doing cocaine, they’re doing it like if Cookie Monster from the Muppets had a really tragic drug arc, spraying it out of his closed-off mouth in a frustrated fountain every time he wanted a bump.

I don’t know what the industry can do about this. Coke’s now cheap enough and widely available enough to have been absolutely normalised. It’s so routine the last person I had to pull aside was a sixty-something geezer on his way back from a match who had one nostril like Antarctica. It’s students, it’s Gen Z, it’s millennials, it’s people who’re eligible for senior bus passes. I don’t know how you put this one back in the box.

On the one hand I am guessing most of this gear is err, heavily diluted to say the least. Presumably why there’s so much talcum powder lumping on the floor. And I’m not particularly worried about anyone overdosing in the loos or something - that doesn’t seem to be the problem.

The problem, from a licensing perspective, is that if most people who run pubs (in London, at least) were being absolutely honest I think we’d all have to admit it’s a liability for our venues. You can only do the best you can to stop people taking it on the premises but short of searching them down to the knickers (and like, no thank you, I could give an old geezer a heart attack a lot quicker that way than with a few sniffs) I don’t know how you stop it getting in. And you really can’t constantly watch them.

There’s been a few stupid times when eg: someone’s offered me a line and I’ve had to be like really? You think that will work? But actually, yeah, sure, I also know there are plenty of people who work in the trade - and publicans themselves - that use it.

It’s partly to cope with the tiredness, the boredom, the long hours and sometimes the amount of sheer pain you’re in. It’s easy to think oh I’ve done it out of desperation a couple of times and then that becomes a habit. I know of plenty of people who do both theoretically enforce a zero tolerance policy and do it regularly themselves, even at work.

In many senses I’m lucky I’ve never really had any interest in drugs beyond alcohol. But what all of this is making me think about is this bastard World Cup we’ve got coming up. Late kick-offs, including a potential all-nighter if England top their group stage, customers are likely to be using it (if they’re out at all, of course but that’s a different problem) and even if not in my venue, staff will be in plenty of them.

Coke doesn’t just make people happy or chilled out, is the thing. At the low end it can just make people obnoxious (loud, bothering other people, exactly the sort of thing you don’t want them doing in pubs) and at the worst stage it’s aggression fuel. So there is actually a problem with it being so prolifically taken in venues, especially when you add on the risks of late nights and emotionally charged football games.

It’s become intrinsically linked with alcohol, too. This post from Sober Girl Society backed up something I’ve seen anecdotally, which is that increasingly people I know, customers and even people I have never seen before in my life but my publican-radar has gone off about while I’m trying to have a nice time out somewhere else for once, cannot have a drink without wanting a line. Or five.

I get that. I can not really want a ciggie for ages and then have two glasses of wine and suddenly I’d chew your arm off about it. But I have a longstanding nicotine addiction built up over decades - which does imply even this low-grade gear isn’t not habit-forming. And the Sober Girl Society post points out that when you mix the two substances repeatedly, over time, your brain sees alcohol as the trigger for coke, even if you genuinely had no intention of doing it when you sat down for a normal pint.

I genuinely don’t know how you address this problem. I don’t know what the answers are; I already make sure we offer as extensive an alcohol-free range as we can and that there’s as little pressure to drink as you can put on people entering what is, at the end of the day, a commercial pub. I make sure staff are briefed to not let customers insist on buying someone a drink if they’re saying no (there’s lots of reasons they might say that and you’ve got to respect it) and that we don’t pressure people towards doubling up spirits. If we upsell, it’s on a nicer gin rather than more of a cheaper one.

Clearly there is a link between supplying alcohol and people wanting cocaine. But equally we don’t want them to be doing that. So I don’t know how you put this one back in the box. And with June looming, I don’t know how we get through this one without the problem getting even bigger.

What I’d really like is for the industry to have an honest conversation, both between ourselves and with groups that support people to get sober from drugs and/or alcohol but also with the people who are using it. That’s going to be a tricky group to engage but we have to do something.

I don’t think cold, hard prohibition is either a realistically achievable goal or even one that’d be desirable - in order to even try and achieve it we’d have to get so restrictive the idea of atmosphere would be long gone out the door. Along with an awful lot of the remaining customer base of pubs.

But clearly there’s got to be something we can do, even if it’s just work out better ways to deal with a night time economy where cocaine is so incredibly normalised.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll have something interesting to say that isn’t kind of a huge bummer next time. And write another one in less than six months. Who knows.

Hazel

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