Coffee shops: a secret place for cocaine consumption
- Unfiltered
- Mar 10, 2019
- 2 min read
By Maria Gomez de Sicart
The closing sign hangs from the main door. It is a cold early morning, filled with the smell of alcoholic drinks and cigarettes.
Silence has taken over the place, and the breath from the drunk inundates the café.
Some men are laying on the floor, while two others stand and discuss whether Billie Jean is a song or part of Levi’s summer collection. Behind the velvet curtain, far from the CCTV, three guys take turns to snort some lines of coke.
Cocaine, white dust, sniff. There are several white lines, two credit cards and a resigned five-pound note whose only sin was to be a mere intermediary between the coward fingers of “the before” and the confused pair of eyes of “the after”.
“It’s part of the human behaviour. The War on Drugs has proven to be a waste of time. When you criminalise anything, you create crime,” says Graham Foster, the director at drug rehab centre Addiction Recovery Centre. That is the constant battle of drug trafficking and consumption.
Coffee shops have become clandestine places for cocaine consumption. They constitute a part of the hospitality industry, which has the highest rate of drug abuse.
Yet, it remains a discredited issue.
Jim Cathcart, Policy Director for UK Hospitality, reckons that: “What we need to concentrate on is creating a better working environment because the hospitality sector doesn’t have a big reputation as an employer.”
In 2017, chef Gordon Ramsay described cocaine as hospitality’s “dirty little secret”.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration states that 19.1 per cent of food workers use illegal drugs at least once a month, and 16.9 per cent of food service workers have a substance abuse disorder.
Higher workplace pressures, double shifts, demanding customer service and the greater availability of alcohol are believed to be the trigger. The solution remains unknown.
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