Don’t tell me you’re woke if you do coke

Children are being murdered, rainforests destroyed, and criminal networks bankrolled, so don’t pretend you care about social justice or the planet if you take cocaine, says Oliver Keens

We consistently find it impossible to take cocaine seriously: Al Pacino in 1983’s ‘Scarface’ (Sky/Universal)

Recently, I’ve started to become obsessed with thinking about the things that young kids will – inevitably – give us a massive amount of s*** for. Ice cream vans, for example. “Let me get this straight: there used to be big white vans that would run their engines all day, belching out fumes next to kids’ playgrounds, and you’d pay them to give us diabetes-inducing processed sugar sticks?!”

If I learnt anything from watching millions of Millennials and Gen Zs (fairly, I think) turn the word “boomer” into a slur to decry a generational shrug from their elders, it’s that age stalks us all. Lately, my crystal ball has been glinting. I think I can hear the future, and it’s saying: “I can’t believe you and your friends used to buy cocaine even though everyone knew it was killing children and killing the planet.”

In the middle of office party season – that traditional time of the year when Karen from finance, Seb from marketing and the IT guy all weirdly go into a loo together – BBC News last week ran a heartbreaking report, worked on for months, about the shocking abuse children suffer in county lines gangs. One victim, recruited to deliver drugs across the country aged 11 and then trapped in a world of violence and abuse, asked “Why didn’t someone step in sooner?”

Competing for online traffic that week was the trailer for Cocaine Bear – a knockabout horror-comedy directed by Elizabeth Banks that is already one of 2023’s most anticipated movies. It’s based on a true story from 1985, when an actual 175lb bear ate a duffel bag full of coke in a North Georgia forest and went on a rampage. The internet has aided this movie’s gestation since its announcement, and has been rewarded with a trailer packed full of meme-able moments. “There was a bear… it was F*****,” says a young boy at one point. But prise yourself from the lols for a second and two things spring to mind. First, the poor, real-life bear actually died a quite appalling death. “Cerebral haemorrhaging, respiratory failure, hyperthermia, renal failure, heart failure, stroke. You name it, that bear had it” was the verdict of the medic who performed the bear’s autopsy. Second, though, is that Cocaine Bear is just the latest example of how we consistently find it impossible to take cocaine seriously – which is odd, given we’re at a point in history when we’re actually taking a lot of things seriously.

Despite the word “woke” originating from the Black American struggle of which I have zero experience, and then being mangled at warp speed into being a pathetic little sneer that right-wing bullies toss out like a teenager uses a mum-cuss, I kind of love it. Do you take injustice, prejudice, discrimination and social inequality seriously? Then you’re woke. It’s a no-brainer. And even if not all of us choose to wear a Christmas jumper saying “Santa’s Little Wokie”, polling in the UK shows that we as a society are all becoming more liberal, more supportive of equal rights and immigration, more woke essentially.

Yet all this awareness and activism comes to a screeching halt when it comes to cocaine, which is the second most popular drug in the UK after cannabis (itself grown here thanks to an army of trafficked and enslaved Vietnamese minors, in case you think that weed was somehow better). Eighty per cent of the cocaine in this country comes from Colombia, where the trade for the cultivated coca plant creates deforestation, a devastating trail of toxic waste, thousands of murders and an unstable economy that affects the whole of Latin America. In this country, cocaine sales help fund extremism and have been linked to an epidemic of gang violence and juvenile murders, while county lines operations groom children or even take over whole homes of vulnerable people. Drugs used to be seen as bad because they did bad things to you. I think it’s time to tweak that logic: drugs are bad because they do bad things to other people.

For the amount of hurt the cocaine industry inflicts on the most vulnerable, you’d think concerned liberal people would organise rallies, marches, demos and campaigns every week against anyone who bankrolls it. But we don’t, because in the Venn diagram between “woke” and “coke” is a huge, problematic mess of hypocrisy.

Now I’m not blinkered. I know we’re all hypocrites. You might be saying to yourself: I bet he wears sweatshop clothes. I bet he’s fine with China using the oppressed Uyghur people to manufacture goods. But even so, it’s the most brazen and high-profile coke hypocrites I’ve seen first-hand who make me fume the most. The A-list actor synonymous with their impeccable right-on credentials. The Corbyn-era left-wing icon. The boss of that cool brand that boasts a super-ethical shtick. The holier-than-thou DJ who posts non-stop about activist causes. I think it’s time to start calling BS on it all. But all woke cokeheads surely have that damning hypocrisy undercutting their progressive beliefs and activism. How can you promote veganism yet know that cocaine production leads to whole species being wiped out? How can you care about inequality yet not care about kids dying in your neighbourhood? How can you care about plastic waste when that coke you’re taking destroys rainforests? How can you be anti-globalisation yet fund a globalised network of criminals? How can you be anti-austerity yet finance networks that take starving children and enslave them? How can you advocate more PTSD awareness yet invest in a system that sees children’s friends murdered before their very eyes?

Of course, blame should be shared with the Tory government of the past 12 years, whose cuts have left a generation of children so destitute that they are tragically able to be scooped up by county lines operations on the promise of food or shoes. The same government that performatively makes the gangs behind Channel crossings public enemy number one whilst doing nothing about the much bigger gang crisis on their high streets. Westminster as a whole still has questions to answer about its own drugs problem, too. Last December, a Sunday Times report found traces of cocaine in 11 of the 12 bathrooms they tested with drug detection wipes. The report talked about a brazen “cocaine culture” in Westminster. Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle contacted the police over the matter. It threatened to become a big story, until the Partygate story exploded, frustratingly pushing it off the news agenda.

High office: A damning 2021 report exposed Westminster’s ‘cocaine culture’ (Getty)

But blaming politicians can’t serve as an excuse for your own moral disengagement this time. It won’t fool the kids of the future. Shifting blame onto the clichéd British bogeyman of the “middle-class dinner party drug user” is honestly laughable at this point too. Anyone with a pulse knows that drugs permeate every single age, class and social strata in the country. If you can’t see that, you may as well replace the UK’s emblematic lion with an ostrich burying its head in the sand – and make the football fan who was cheered doing massive bumps on the way to Wembley into the new John Bull while you’re at it.

My uncle apparently looked just like me. He had the same body shape as me, as well as the same sense of humour. My mum said our laughs were identical. He died as a junkie in Iran when I was a teenager. So for this and a bunch of other reasons, Class A drugs never become a major part of my life. Despite that, I work as a DJ most of the time and thus have a billion friends who take drugs. I love my friends and love them when they’re on drugs too. I’m not here to shame people who use drugs, at all. All I’m hoping for is a reset: a point where we at least start to acknowledge that cocaine is the absolute worst and then try to adjust our behaviours. Perhaps coke users with a few quid to spare might start habitually donating to charity every time they call their dealer – like carbon offsetting, doing it openly and proudly too, de rigueur, so it becomes an established part of the process. Something needs to change. As highlighted in that BBC report, a common theme amongst those exploited by county lines is: why didn’t anyone listen to me? To be woke is to be alert. Yet this repeated deafness is a disgrace. We must do better. Because otherwise, the generational clock is ticking: someone very soon will start getting called out for their hypocrisy...