The thin white line reveals its dark edge

Decca Aitkenhead on a death that has shaken cocaine users; If the drug can kill by itself, then its 'safe' image is up for review

ON THE morning of 30 August this year, at the peak of a long, sweltering summer, London's media set awoke to a chilling piece of news. The editor of GQ magazine, Michael VerMeulen, had been found dead in bed in his own vomit. That drugs were involved was never at issue. But the suspicion so disquieting tothose exchanging scandalised rumours down office phones that morning was specific. Could it, conceivably, have been just cocaine?

At St Pancras coroner's court last Tuesday, the coroner gave his answer. Yes, VerMeulen died of a massive cocaine overdose. This was duly reported. But in all the coverage, no mention was made of one medical fact: it is almost impossible to overdose on this drug alone.

That one of their own managed it all the same is currently preoccupying a considerable number of middle-class metropolitan minds. Within hours of 38-year-old VerMeulen's ugly death, talk of heroin, tranquillisers and other nasties had been assured, and reassuring. But if cocaine has claimed a life unassisted, then the drug's whiter-than-white image among affluent whites is up for review.

It is notoriously difficult to establish how many people use cocaine. The press love to whip up periodic frenzies over an imagined "fashionable" drug of the day but cocaine usually escapes such interest because it kills very few people. While Ecstasy and heroin can always seize lives and headlines, there have been only 10 recorded cocaine fatalities in the past six years, says the Home Office. This compares with 226 from opiates - heroin and related drugs - in the past two years alone.

Emily Finch, a clinical lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, said: "Opiates stop you breathing, it's as simple as that. Side-effects from cocaine are much more complex. It takes a lot to make your heart stop."

Most deaths involving "coke" are caused by other drugs - inthe case of the film star River Phoenix, for example, a fatal mix with Valium - and high tolerance to cocaine develops rapidly.

There are signs that cocaine use among the middle classes is increasing. "It's absurd to suggest people take a drug because it's fashionable," said a London scriptwriter. But just as there were clear reasons for cocaine's fall from favour in the late Eighties - the advent of Ecstasy, unease about association with crack, the crash of the City and its attendant slicker lifestyle - so its recent reappearance on dance floors and at dinner tables is explicable. Ecstasy, once the smart "designer drug", is now an off-the-peg number of shoddy quality. Britain is the dumping ground for Europe's dud pills. But high-quality cocaine is readily available.

Peter, suave and softly spoken, spends his weekends delivering good coke to good homes. He said: "My clientele are in their twenties, thirties, forties - they're nothing flash, they're not rock stars. They've got kids, steady jobs, mortgages. But they've got a bit more money than they had a few years ago, and they like a line. I deal to teachers, lawyers, nurses. It's not just the flash City-boy scene any more."

Coke is still a feature on the trading floors, though - a police raid on a City exchange in September found nothing, but one broker commented afterwards: "Thank God they didn't come on Friday afternoon." Total cocaine seized by the police last year was up by190 per cent.

VerMeulen's overdose was deeply disquieting for those who saw in his hedonistic lifestyle a reflection of their own. But a robust defence is not hard to find. "Michael got hideously unlucky, but I'm not about to set off down some hysterical road to self-imposed abstinence," said Marcus, a London advertising executive in his mid-twenties. "What you pay for with cocaine is not what you get but what you don't get. The extra money isn't for an extra thrill - it's for not having a come-down, not getting withdrawal, not having a hangover. I don't glamorise coke, I don't fetishise it. I just like it."

Marcus will point out that middle-class recreational cocaine consumption, in the main, incurs few of the costs of other illegal drug-taking. People like him do not steal to feed their habit; their dealers deliver to the door; there is no risk of HIV infection; they go to work in the morning and suffer little more than the occasional nose bleed.

This is a seductive slant on drug-taking, but one which has invited charges of racism in the United States. The weight of the state there is committed to combating crack users - predominantly black - leaving, it is claimed, whites enjoying their white lines with impunity.

"There is a great deal of hypocrisy, I suppose," the script-writer said. "People get very cranked up about the lower classes taking cocaine derivatives but see no problem doing it themselves. How can you restrict a pleasure from other people that you indulge yourself?"

The demise of Michael VerMeulen is unlikely to alter the London literati's attachment to cocaine, any more than the death in 1983 of Pretenders guitarist Pete Farndon - the first recorded cocaine overdose - curbed pop stars' prodigious appetites for excess. At most, it might encourage less conspicuous consumption for a while.

"People have always been quite discreet, actually," says the scriptwriter. "But it's just a matter of manners. You don't want to say that the only reason you are enjoying this rather tedious media party is because you've had some rather nice coke."