Why is cocaine so strong at the moment... and where's it all coming from?

Reports in the UK recently that batches of “100 per cent cocaine” had been found by police in the pensioner-populated backwater of Eastbourne on Britain’s South Coast were eye-catching and unexpected – but reporters missed the real story about cocaine in the UK in 2017.

Britain, from the highlands to the hinterlands, is absolutely awash in cocaine of a higher purity and at lower prices than most users have ever experienced. And the roots of the story lie in a few unexplored locations – in spaces both analogue and digital.

It’s unlikely the cocaine that was seized in Eastbourne was, as police claimed, of 100 per cent purity. The profit margins available both at the coca farm gate and by the time it reaches a street-level user anywhere in the UK makes that statistically and economically improbable.

Furthermore, Eastbourne, with its ageing population and, to say the least, somewhat restrained nightlife scene, is not a town that anyone would associate with abundant supplies of uncut cocaine. So, what’s going on?

First, police and courts can calculate the sentence time served by those caught with the drug in relation to its purity: cocaine is so often so heavily cut that if police catch you in possession of very high purity powder, courts will assume you are going to cut it and sell it on. So if you’re found with 10g of 80 per cent coke, you’ll serve a longer sentence than if you were caught with 10g of lower quality material.

Factually speaking, even the very best produced, least cut product, at import level from Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia to the UK, is typically around 80-90 per cent pure, with common, pre-import cuts including levamisole (a bovine anti-parasitic that rots human flesh). Once it’s in the UK, cheap stimulants such as caffeine and ephedrine or benzocaine (a numbing agent) are added, and the resulting remixed kilo bricks are repressed in industrial vices with bogus stamps on them to resemble Latino branding.

But while it’s true that dealers cut and cops may exaggerate, it’s safe to assume that unusually strong cocaine has somehow been found on the sleepy streets of Eastbourne.

The most significant factor in the glut of high-powered powder seen in the UK in the last two or three years is the recent tumultuous political changes in cocaine-producing countries such as Colombia, which have coincided with – or perhaps caused – a 39 per cent increase in land under coca cultivation in a single year, according to 2016 figures by the UNODC.

“The hectares sown with coca increased in Colombia from 69,000 hectares in 2014 to 96,000 hectares in 2015, an increase of 39 per cent”, according to an annual crop-monitoring UN paper.

To get a sense of scale here, a hectare is 100m x 100m – about the size of a rugby pitch. It takes two rugby pitches to make 1KG of a crude form of cocaine, called “pasta basica”, which when refined further, yields 700g of pure cocaine hydrochloride. In Colombia alone, there are 27,000 more rugby fields of coca than there were in 2015.

Global production of cocaine in 2015 was between 746-843 tonnes, says the UN, – a 38 per cent increase on the previous year. So, you have 40 per cent more fields in Colombia, and 40 per cent more cocaine being produced globally.

This is because as part of the process to disarm the Marxist FARC guerillas who have been at war with the Colombian government over land distribution and inequality since the 1960s, but who are now finalising a peace deal, coca farmers in the steamy southern districts have agreed to destroy their crops in return for investment in infrastructure, and subsidies to plant agricultural crops, such as coffee and yucca.

However, the compensation levels to be paid by the government are calculated in relation to the size of their coca plantations, so farmers have been planting extra coca to cash in on the upcoming subsidies. Naturally, they have processed it into cocaine, which has found its way to the UK in bigger, purer, and cheaper consignments than ever before.

The FARC funded much of its 50-year war with taxes paid by cocaleros [coca leaf growers] in its territory, often levying fees on the growers and traffickers for the safe passage of the drug either as raw leaf, or once it was harvested on-site into pasta basica, before eventual transit to labs, where the powder was purified and packaged for export. Now, with the Colombian civil war all but over, coca farmers are going for broke.

The result of this is that kilogram prices in the UK are down by about 30-40 per cent over the last decade, with a kilogram of high purity cocaine now available for between £25,000-£35,000. Prices have shifted on the street, too. The cocaine market used to divide into two tiers: expensive uncut powder at £100 a gram, and heavily cut material at £40-£50 a gram. Top-quality cocaine now costs around £50-70 a gram on the dark web, often at purity levels above 75-80 per cent. It used to cost £100 a gram, even online, for such quality.

And while drugs of that purity never used to reach towns such as Eastbourne, the dark web’s democratisation of the drug supply chain means a dealer in a seaside town has access to stronger drugs than ever before. Anyone with a postbox and a net connection can be a dealer in Class A drugs today, with very few obstacles.

But while purer cocaine may seem good news from a user’s perspective, the true impact of higher-purity levels of the drug can be seen in a doubling in cocaine-related hospitalisations, according to the Global Drugs Survey 2016.

"Over the last three years the proportion of [cocaine users responding to the GDS 2016] in the UK seeking emergency medical treatment has doubled from 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent,” stud lead Dr Adam Winstock said.

The online survey polled 120,000 worldwide users of all drugs, with 1 in 5 of respondents saying they had used cocaine in the last 12 months.

The advice from experts is simple: do less, less often – and avoid other stimulants and moderate alcohol consumption while using. If a friend complains of or displays an irregular heart rate, extremely high body temperature, extreme anxiety or confusion, psychosis, nausea, agitation or tremors, call an ambulance.

Mike Power is the author of Drugs 2.0 and a regular contributor to Mixmag. Follow him on Twitter

Sam Taylor is a freelance illustrator. Follow him on Instagram