Interview someone for a story about drug use - as I have done many times over the years - and ninety-nine percent of times they will not want their real name used.
It doesn’t matter whether they are in their 20s and use MDMA at music festivals or are thirty-something parents who use cocaine on ‘special occasions’ or workers who misuse prescription drugs for performance reasons: strong diet pill to get focused and pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline, a Valium to come down.
None of these people would say that they had a drug problem – if anything it’s their alcohol use that causes them the most anxiety - which they monitor and try to control.
But there’s still a stigma about “outing” yourself as drug user, even a twice a year dabbler who’s never grappled with addiction – a drug tourist who say in their twenties may have visited Ecstasy Island and stayed off and on for a year or two, then had a long-weekend here and there on Cocaine in their 30s.
Drugs are of course illegal, and admitting use comes with consequences – both legally and socially – but there is a disconnect with how we talk publically about drugs and the lived experience of them.
Not all drug use is the path to ruin – and of course not all dabbling leads to addiction.
Fix the disconnect between the experience and the rhetoric and there is a chance of destigmatising drug use. But this too remains a problematic proposition. There remains uncertainty that if in destigmatising drugs we are condoning and normalising their usage, and whether this can lead to abuse and addiction.
But there are signs that there are changes afoot in how we are talking about drugs.
Barack Obama talking about dope to the New Yorker this year took a mellow, pragmatic approach.
“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,” Obama told reporter David Remnick. “I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”
Obama went on to point out that drug laws are enforced more heavily against black and Latino kids.
“Middle-class kids don't get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do. And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.”
He supported the legalisation of marijuana in states such as Colorado as “it's important for it to go forward because it's important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”
Leaders such as David Cameron (allegations of youthful cocaine use) and Barack Obama came of age in the 1980s, the era of the start of widespread availability of chemical drugs.
In roughly the same age group as Cameron and Obama, celebrity chef Nigella Lawson was recently outed as a later-in life cocaine user, according to evidence at the trial of her former personal assistants,
Famously Nigella retorted that she didn’t have a drug problem, she had a life problem.
She was not prosecuted over her drug use.
Noting illegal drugs’ journey from being an underground, secretive subculture (from Lou Reed Waiting for the Man, to Nigella taking cocaine and staying up to write cookbooks in one generation) to the mainstream, last month US Vogue asked ‘Are Drugs Passe?’
“Rehab—if you have not only the need, but also the means and time—is a destination up there with the Maldives, St. Moritz, and Burning Man,” according to Vogue.
They note in the opening scene of Girls Season Three, Jessa (Jemima Kirke) is in rehab for heroin use, a fact not remarked upon as unusual or troubling by her friends.
This nonchalance is reflected more widely. Figures as unlikely as Canadian politician Rob Ford have become infamous for his crack video – but also just as seemingly unlikely the video did nothing to dent his popularly.
It’s a far cry from the Kate Moss coke scandal in 2005. After pictures of the model doing cocaine were published by the Daily Mirror the model lost most of her lucrative contracts.
Vogue pointed out that recently when model Cara Delevingne in full view of photographers dropped a packet of what appeared to be cocaine from her purse onto the ground, it scarcely caused a ripple.
In Sydney the Daily Telegraph recently noted the “democratisation” of cocaine use. Although arrests are still high in the wealthy Eastern suburbs, crime stats showed cocaine was moving beyond its traditional image as a wealthy party kids’ drug.
The Telegraph crunched the BOSCAR (Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research) numbers on cocaine use in Sydney and found that “While police have been battling a steady rise in use in wealthier areas such as Woollahra and Waverley over the past decade, there has also been a surge in more suburban areas such as Parramatta, Auburn and Bankstown.”
“In the year to September 2013, there were 25 cocaine incidents in Parramatta, compared to just three a decade earlier, according to the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.”
The recent death of Philip Seymour Hoffman prompted a mostly sympathetic response – that he died alone, that he was clean but then relapsed, that if perhaps attitudes to drugs were different it mightn’t have happened. His death prompted a fresh look at enduring grip of addiction, as well as first person essays by people who like Hoffman, were middle-aged and functioning but still had to be careful about the monkey of their back (although it should be noted most heroin addicts don’t fit Hoffman’s profile and tend to be impoverished and marginalised.)
Maybe it’s a good thing for “drugs to be passé” as Vogue notes with ennui - that there is the possibility that talking in a more “real” and open way about drugs will save lives. Slowly, carefully – this seems to be the road we are taking.
Brigid Delaney is a journalist and author.
