A few weekends ago I attended a good friend’s 50th birthday party at a luxurious mansion. One friend provided the fizz, another organized the Daylesford Organic food delivery.
And I was entrusted with bringing the most important ingredient for our celebrations. Not the cake, but the cocaine.
Five small packets to be precise, each costing £50 per gram. The six of us plowed through it for two gloriously long nights.
We ate most of it on Saturday, after the birthday meal. That’s when most middle-aged people start thinking about going to bed, but we buzzed and danced until the early hours and ended up in the hot tub.
As shocking as it may sound, I have been using cocaine for 25 years. Not even a month has gone by where I haven’t snorted the drug. It’s not without reason that I’m known as Hell’s Bells.
I am now 50, have a high-powered marketing job and am happily married to my husband, also 50, and have a 22 year old daughter. We have a cottage in south-west London with a gravel driveway and a pistachio green front door and a beautiful retreat in Portugal too. In short, we are the epitome of middle-class privilege.
My partners in crime are largely the same: they include a TV director, a banker and even an NHS director. All successful, upstanding members of the community… except for this one illegal habit that we can’t quite give up.
You would be right to be shocked, as what we are doing is against the law. But we are far from the only middle-aged drug users.
Cocaine deaths have reached a record high thanks to a wave of middle-aged users, the so-called ‘silver sniffers’
Because while cocaine is normally associated with young city workers and clubbers, figures released last month show that cocaine deaths have reached a record high thanks to a wave of middle-aged users, the so-called ‘silver sniffers’.
It is a somewhat bleak picture. The downsides of cocaine are well documented, from horrible side effects that leave me feeling nauseous and irritable for days, to nasal disfigurement and the aforementioned risk of death from your habit.
I realize that I am very lucky to have never experienced anything worse than a severe nosebleed over a white dress.
So why do I take the risk?
Well, the noise it releases in my brain makes me feel alive. I honestly feel invincible. Unlike alcohol, which dulls the senses, cocaine sharpens mine.
I love the ritual that comes with it. The feeling that you are part of a special, select club – discreetly passing around the shawl with the powder in it feels exciting and daring.
How did I get hooked on a Class A drug? After all, I grew up in a loving family home, both my parents are still together and my older brother works in banking. There was no need for me to push the boundaries in my life. Or was there?
I first tried it when I was twenty, at a party in Norwich. When friends forced me into it, I was nervous, convinced I was going to fall over and die.
Cocaine is normally associated with young urban workers and clubbers, but is also used by middle-class workers
But I enjoyed becoming a more gregarious version of myself. I didn’t feel like eating it the next day, but after that I used it whenever the opportunity arose.
By the time I moved to London in 1995, I was a regular social user. Although I never considered myself an addict, nights out started to feel pointless without it, which should have set alarm bells ringing.
I quickly discovered that if you’re a single girl in London, you don’t have to buy it either. Men offer it to you the same way they offer you a drink. The only time I stopped using the drug was when I was pregnant with my daughter in 2002. I told myself that the fact that I was able to quit meant that I wasn’t addicted.
I had met her father through work and his attitude towards drugs was very much ‘take it or leave it’. The first time I used it again was when my daughter was six months old and no longer breastfeeding.
Understandably, my partner wasn’t very happy about it, but despite his very valid concerns, it felt good to reclaim that part of ‘me’.
I made it very clear to him that my social life would not end just because I became a mother.
Not his – so why mine? No wonder we broke up when our daughter was four.
Although our breakup wasn’t due to my drug use, we both wanted our social lives to continue as if we weren’t parents. My career went from strength to strength. I had carved out a niche in media marketing, where networking and cocaine use went hand in hand. This was the early 1990s, when everyone was using it.
However, not everyone agreed with my lifestyle choice. An old school friend invited me for dinner and when I arrived, two other friends from school were there to ambush me.
When drinking prosecco they said to me: ‘You act like a clumsy idiot when you take it, repeating the same things over and over again’ and ‘You’re turning into someone we don’t like.’
One even called me an addict. At this point I stood up and refused to listen to any more accusations, with a “How dare you?” I ran away and told them I didn’t need their judgment on how I was living my life.
When I got home, glowing, I blocked them all out. I didn’t want to admit that they were right, and it was clear that they had my best interests at heart by trying to get me to stop taking a drug that was causing so much damage.
I was in my early thirties when I split with my daughter’s father, and 38 when I met my husband Eric at a party in Los Angeles; a fellow Brit, we came at each other. And we also made some lines together. The sex we had that night was incredible.
That’s the problem with cocaine: it lowers your inhibitions. No doubt the drug is a big part of why we’re together.
After our wedding ten years ago, we traveled to cocaine-friendly locations like Colombia. Ironically, my cocaine use has increased since I became a “respectable” woman.
However, not all our holidays have been a success. We ended up with such horrible cocaine in Barcelona – it seriously hurt my throat and nose – I shudder to think what was in it. Things could have turned out very differently that evening. But it didn’t deter us.
I’ve never tallied up how much money I’ve squirreled away over the years. But when the quote for our new dream kitchen came in recently, I realized that if I hadn’t spent thousands of dollars on cocaine, we wouldn’t have needed a loan to cover the costs.
Not that I beat myself up about it; after all, a decent bottle of champagne costs £70.
Now that my daughter is grown, I have been honest with her about my drug use. She wasn’t surprised, but she’s worried about me, which I understand, but still find annoying.
I taught her the motto: everything in moderation. I know she’s tried cocaine too, but it’s not something she would do regularly, and she certainly wouldn’t take it if me and Eric were doing it.
I know I should worry that it might lead her down a different path, but we’re not that kind of family.
As for me, after all these years I don’t see myself stopping. Cocaine, like many other middle-class mothers my age, is right up my alley.
Helena Beech is a pseudonym. Have names changed.