\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>ver since cocaine first emerged as a popular party drug via the shores of Miami in the early 1970s, use of the stimulant has been inextricably entwined with the very essence of capitalist excess and what it is to be American: brash, bombastic and brazen.<\/p>\n The wide-scale use of cocaine in the US has left a trail of destruction in its wake, largely thanks to the illegal nature of the trade and the resultant US government policy of a \u201cwar on drugs\u201d.<\/p>\n But might the decades-long cocaine era in the US finally be coming to a quiet end?<\/p>\n When Al Pacino\u2019s archetypal drug lord Tony \u201cScarface\u201d Montana was etched into the collective memory in the drug\u2019s 1980s heyday, 6.7% of Americans admitted to cocaine use in one year. But now the rate has fallen to just 1.5%, with 4.3 million adults reporting use in the year up to 2024. That\u2019s down from 5.9 million in 2017, when the National Survey on Drug Use switched from counting the data in percentage prevalence to raw headcounts.<\/p>\n Cocaine use is set to fall much further as gen Zers show far less interest in snorting \u201cblow\u201d than their parents\u2019 generation, with 18- to 25-year-old use plummeting from 2.1 million in 2017 to 811,000in 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a presumption that cocaine use is booming in America like it is in many parts of the world,\u201d says Max Daly, the ex-global drugs editor at Vice who first reported on the cocaine fall data in Straight Arrow News. \u201cBut the data shows a marked decline in the last decade, ironically during a time when cocaine production in Colombia has hit record levels.\u201d<\/p>\n Within gen Z there is a feeling that cocaine is not \u201ctheir drug\u201d, Daly adds. \u201cFor them, it\u2019s ethically very dodgy and associated with heavy drinking and nightlife culture, something that gen Z is turning its back on.\u201d<\/p>\n Joel Brierre, an entrepreneur, says he \u201cused to sell and do a lot of coke in the 90s and early 2000s\u201d and that \u201ca gen Z kid would die if they tried to party like gen Xers or millennials.\u201d Originally from Washington DC, he now runs a legal psychedelic-retreat company where he has a ground-zero view of how cultural changes are affecting drug-use trends.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are becoming acutely aware of their health and mental wellness, and the side effects of a coke binge,\u201d Brierre says. \u201cThe world is changing, and many people are realising that the juice ain\u2019t worth the squeeze.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Yockey, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Mississippi, says that cocaine today is widely perceived as more dangerous because of potential contamination with the powerful opioid fentanyl, however unlikely. \u201cIt has made even occasional use feel unpredictable,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n At the same time, cocaine\u2019s once-aspirational cultural cachet has faded, and many young adults have shifted toward alternatives such as cannabis or prescription stimulants such as Adderall, which are seen as more controllable.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to imagine Braden Peters, AKA Clavicular, the 20-year-old \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d guru, taking cocaine. But he regularly boasts of \u201cmeth-maxxing\u201d, that is taking methamphetamine, the chemical cousin of Adderall. In February, he was initially charged with possession of Adderall after an arrest. On Tuesday, when he appeared woozy from unknown drugs at a club in Miami on a live stream prior to being hospitalised, a friend offered him an Adderall.<\/p>\n Accordingly, even while cocaine remains the drug du jour<\/em> at many parties from Los Angeles to New York, it is becoming less common on nights out as ketamine also surges in popularity, along with various psychedelics, GHB and lesser known illegal stimulants like 3-MMC.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people in the club scene are over cocaine,\u201d says a long-time raver in the US north-east, who preferred not to be named for professional reasons. \u201cCocaine can double down on people\u2019s anxiety and depression \u2013 ketamine, even when you\u2019re not doing it \u2018right\u2019, often leaves a more positive mark.\u201d<\/p>\n Around a decade ago, she \u201cstarted telling my cocaine-addicted friends in New York: swap out 50% of the coke for ketamine, and you\u2019ll be a much happier person. Thankfully, a lot of them took me up on that, even though it is also highly addictive.\u201d<\/p>\n The risks of using ketamine are only just becoming better understood at the same time as the panoply of newer drugs in circulation has perhaps never been greater. Ed Sisco, a research chemist who works for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that tracks drug use, told NPR in April that his team were regularly detecting novel drugs which had no history of use in the US.<\/p>\n \u201cThe US drug landscape is shifting from single-drug trends to a messier, mixed-drug environment \u2013 and cocaine just isn\u2019t the star any more,\u201d Yocke adds.<\/p>\n But despite the turn away from cocaine, overdose deaths involving the drug have risen steeply \u2013 from 10,475 in 2016 to 22,174 in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some have attributed part of the increase to fentanyl contamination, despite experts saying that cocaine is rarely adulterated with the potent synthetic opioid and that the phenomenon is limited.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be very foolish for cocaine dealers to add fentanyl to their product, as this would cause it to have the opposite effect to what cocaine buyers want and would kill their sales,\u201d says Travis Wendel, a scholar who studied illegal drug markets for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n Cocaine has also rapidly become more potent in recent years due to a rise in supply from Latin America, with the average purity of seized cocaine 88% last year, v 54% in 2020. \u201cThere is a considerable increase in overdose deaths involving coke and fentanyl,\u201d Wendel adds. \u201cBut this is almost certainly due to deliberate, knowing injection of \u2018speedballs.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Even though use is decreasing and cocaine alone is rarely responsible for overdose deaths, Donald Trump earlier this year attempted to justify his campaign against Venezuela on the alleged role of ruling figures in cocaine trafficking. Meanwhile, the US has continued its extrajudicial campaign to strike small boats off the southern coast, which officials have claimed, without evidence, are ferrying drugs to American shores from the Caribbean, killing at least 177 people.<\/p>\n Washington may still claim to be fighting the dubious cocaine wars of the past, but at home, it appears people have already begun to move on. \u201cAmerica turning away from cocaine could signal a downward shift in the use of the drug globally,\u201d says Daly, the journalist, \u201cat a time when it\u2019s never been so abundant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever since cocaine first emerged as a popular party drug via the shores of Miami in the early 1970s, use of the stimulant has been inextricably entwined with the very essence of capitalist excess and what it is to be American: brash, bombastic and brazen. The wide-scale use of cocaine in the US has left<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48616,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[12505,4033,24300,9863,1253,150,19845],"class_list":{"0":"post-48615","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-cocaine","9":"tag-falling","10":"tag-ghb","11":"tag-ketamine","12":"tag-love","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-psychedelics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}