Unwitting beachgoers described the scene as “something out of a movie”. A motorised dinghy dramatically ran aground on the golden sands of a Cornish beach last September with police in hot pursuit. Three men made a stumbling attempt to scarper into the dunes before they were collared by officers, who had observed the gang dumping 20 water-tight bales of what they suspected to be cocaine into the Celtic Sea during an extraordinary 28-mile chase.
Each member of the group, including a fisherman who once met King Charles, and a Colombian “enforcer”, was sentenced to at least 15 years last month. The authorities meanwhile celebrated preventing £18m worth of cocaine from causing “grave societal harm”. The jubilation recalled an even bigger bust in September 2023 when 2.2 tonnes of cocaine, valued at £135m, was seized on a cargo ship off the Irish coast. Last month, Border Force claimed it had “outsmarted” gangs after officers discovered a tonne of cocaine hidden inside two industrial generators.
But it has been estimated that no more than 20 per cent of illegal drugs imported to the UK are ever intercepted. And Brits are now the world’s second-heaviest consumers of cocaine. An estimated 117 tonnes of the stimulating, moreish drug were sniffed in England, Scotland and Wales in 2023, and use is estimated to have risen since then. The price, in the UK, is affordable. The wholesale value collapsed after the global supply of coca, the native Andean plant which is the main ingredient in cocaine, increased by 35 per cent from 2020 to 2021. Now, a quality gram of gear, Charlie, blow, bugle, or whatever you want to call it, can be procured swiftly to your doorstep for as little as £50. The rise of dealers on encrypted messaging apps like Telegram has also made cheap wholesale cocaine – say, £750 for an ounce – available to average Joes like never before.
Most of cocaine’s estimated 1.6 million British consumers take it recreationally without significant issues. But it is one of the more potentially harmful “party” drugs. Deaths related to the drug increased 30 per cent year-on-year to 1,118 in 2023. And 55,000 people were in treatment for addiction to cocaine and crack, a more concentrated and more addictive smokable version.
Despite the billions of pounds directed towards law enforcement to disrupt the flow of the drug, cocaine is purer, cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever. Drugs, again, are winning the war on drugs, and coke is the champion. It is in nightclubs, football terraces, stately homes and everywhere else in the country.
A growing number of critics argue that only one, controversial solution can stop the violent anarchy seen on the Cornish coast from becoming a regular sight.
“We either allow responsible health agencies to pragmatically regulate the market for drugs like cocaine, or we leave it in the hands of organised crime groups and accept the inevitable chaos,” says Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst from Transform Drug Policy Foundation. He notes a “generational failure” of drug policies and the resilience of cocaine demand. “There’s no third option in which we somehow win the war on drugs and the market magically disappears. To claim otherwise is either delusion or deceit.”
Increasingly, evidence suggests that, inadvertently, drug policing has negative public health effects. Addicts lose access to safer drugs and gangs are left to compete over the demand. A Home Office-commissioned report by the think tank Rand Europe earlier this year found that “more studies demonstrated an association between drug-related law enforcement activities and increased violence than decreased violence”.
The Amazon rainforest’s tri-border area is one of the most violent regions in Latin America because of cocaine. In August, AmazonWatch, a non-profit which receives Western government funding, released a report detailing how armed groups – flush with cocaine profits – have an unprecedentedly large presence in the Amazon and are now governing whole territories of it. Around 15 indigenous land defenders have been murdered by cartel members deforesting enclaves of the jungle to construct airstrips to export freshly made cocaine, according to reports. There have also been recent assassinations of other social leaders, massacres in communities and forced displacements. “There are no police officers, no authorities,” one indigenous leader told environmental investigations site Mongabay. “The state has forgotten us.”
There is also the environmental harm. “The regulation of cocaine and the dismantling of prohibition are cornerstones to delivering the global climate agenda,” says Clemmie James, international coordinator of the International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice. “We cannot hope to save the Amazon or protect the world’s most fragile rainforests when there is a multi-billion dollar, untaxed, unregulated trade that is accountable to no-one thriving through these landscapes.”
Reports recently made familiar calls for fresh coca substitution programs to offer farmers an alternative to growing the plant, and for greater cross-border coordination between states to beat the cartels. To campaigners, it was just more evidence that policymakers are wildly out of touch and are just skirting around the key – and seemingly taboo – issue of cocaine prohibition.
In 2021, former prime minister Boris Johnson – who once took cocaine but then claimed he in fact sneezed – appeared to call for an ethical boycott of cocaine on the valid basis that the trade is fueling violence on British streets. But for Neil Woods, a former undercover drugs cop who now campaigns for reform as UK chair of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, an international organisation of serving and former police officers, it is the law that at the root of it all is the issue. After all, no one is fighting over the pharmaceutical-grade cocaine that is used medicinally as a local anaesthetic in hospitals.
“If the government was honest about the reality, instead of this ludicrous presentation of ‘success’, then we would get to legal regulated control sooner,” Woods says. “The public needs to know how laughably ineffective prohibition is.”
Even while the glamour of cocaine has rubbed off within certain scenes in the UK who today prefer ketamine or magic mushrooms, for others its use remains integral to cultural life. To such an extent that the current late capitalist, always-on, cocaine-fueled epoch has sired brash and bolshy cocaine-using social media influencers like “Dannyboy83” who openly celebrate their use and misuse of the floury powder. “I’m gonna be out of my canister, mate, you watch,” he said in a recent video to his 77,000 Instagram followers. “Soon as you’re at the boozer that’s what it’s all about. Have a drink and have a ‘shizzle mcnizzle’.”
His startling brazenness reflects the modern ubiquity of cocaine – a drug that first emerged in Victorian Britain amid “wonder drug” claims about its use as an anaesthetic. It was sold openly and legally until the passage of the Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920 before the Misuse of Drugs Act in 1971. But criminals have always found a way around the not-so-long arm of the law.
A significant proportion of barbershops which have popped up on high-streets in a surprising boom during recent years are likely fronts for organized crime groups dealing with drugs like cocaine, heroin and cannabis, according to one hair and beauty expert. “We all know that they’re money laundering,” Neil Scothon, who owns the Rocket Barbers chain across London, told Esquire last month. “There’s generally nobody in them.”
The criminal groups always have a rotating cast of money laundries to introduce their ill gotten gains into the legitimate economy, like sweet shops selling American confectionery in garishly overlit premises on Oxford Street that nobody ever seems to go in. “How did the West End turn into the Wild West for all these cowboys?” the Evening Standard asked in 2023.
The UK cocaine economy is largely controlled by Albanian organized crime groups who have seized control from other domestic and international groups over the last two decades, but Turkish, Kurdish, Pakistan and British groups, especially in Liverpool, also wield significant power in the violent drug trade, with a 9-year-old girl getting caught in the crossfire last year and left with a bullet forever lodged in her brain, and more than 1,600 dead in relation to the drug trade between 2018 and 2023.
But there are always people who wish to face the risk of death for a payday. In July, a Bradford mum was jailed for using her family, including a 17-year-old child, to smuggle £14m worth of cocaine into the UK. Last month a Heathrow airport manager was also jailed for helping drug mules bring cocaine into the UK.
Rather than reckon with the reality that money talks, US president Donald Trump – who in 1990 said the only way out of a failed decades-long drug war was to “legalize drugs to win that war” – last month sanctioned extrajudicial strikes on two boats which killed 14 suspected Venezuelan drug traffickers.
“The idea of ramping up the drug war in a deluded attempt to stop people consuming drugs has never worked,” says Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist, film-maker and author of Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs and The Palestine Laboratory. “Until the US, UK and other states legalise and regulate all drugs, this highly militarized drug war will continue.”
Whether film-maker Guy Ritchie, whose script adviser for 2008 gangster flick RocknRolla was arrested with £100,000 worth of cocaine during production, will make a movie out of the Cornwall chaos remains to be seen. But ultimately the affair is less of a cinematic seaside anomaly, or a law enforcement success, than a preview of a scary new normal on a land conquered by an exotic white powder that keeps you wanting more. Who knows where those nine of the huge dumped bales still missing in the Cornish sea will wash up. Or for how long our politicians will bury their heads in the… snow.
[Further reading: How Britain fell into the K-hole]
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