The “woke coke” story surfaced again last week. Like it did last month. And last year. It’s the one about how middle-class users are buying very expensive, ethically sourced cocaine from dealers who allege their product is fair trade and cartel-free. The media obviously love the story, and not just because it rhymes.
Stories about drugs have always been used to sell papers. They’re usually the perfect mix of the forbidden, the immoral and the shocking. These days they’re clickbait. The British media has re-published the same two stories — “what to do if you suspect your neighbours are smoking weed” and “how cocaine can make your skin rot” — thousands of times since 2017, because they never fail to get traction. But the tales of “woke coke” provide an extra twist: they serve as culture war missiles aimed at the metropolitan liberal elite.
The problem with these stories, like many others lobbed around in the war on drugs, is that they are mainly bullshit. Woke coke doesn’t really exist. It’s largely a media invention based on the fact that occasionally a dealer might try and claim their powder is whiter than white, to give them an edge in a competitive market. But you’ve got to be fairly gullible to believe that Barry from Bermondsey or Snow_Flake on Telegram have really been to Bolivia to ensure their wares are 100% ethical.
The only tangible evidence, to date, offered by the media of fair trade coke being sold outside of South America has been an advert on the dark web posted in 2013. I’ve been investigating the drug trade for 20 years, and I’ve only heard of one case, now five years old, where a UK dealer had convincing proof his powder was ethically sourced from a small group of cartel-free Peruvian farmers. Bona fide ethical supply chains like this are extremely rare, especially in Europe: virtually every grain of the 117 million grams of cocaine consumed in Britain each year will be the usual rain forest-damaging, cartel-linked product. That’s just the nature of the industry.
“Organised crime groups invest direct with Latin American sources and control domestic wholesale,” says Tony Saggers, the former head of drugs at the National Crime Agency. “Why would they be interested in ‘woke coke’ concepts when they’re already shifting hundreds of kilograms to a market disinterested in the consequences?”
Most of the ‘evidence’ regarding woke coke, then, comes from unsubstantiated claims made by dealers, and parroted by users to journalists. But the reality is, newspapers aren’t that bothered about whether ethical coke actually exists. The real point of these stories is to have a go at hypocritical liberals who buy organic shoes but are happy to snort a drug that — whether or not it’s fair trade — stems from an illegal, inherently exploitative industry.
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