How the UK’s Coke Habit Spiraled Out of Control
Article by Simon Doherty
It’s 2025 and the UK is marinating in a huge vat of coke. More Brits are squelching around in it than ever before; it’s the second most used illegal drug in England and Wales (after weed), we’re the largest consumer of it per capita in Europe (second in the world, after the Aussies), and tests of toilet water in England and Scotland found that cocaine consumption had increased by 7% between 2023 and 2024.
According to the Office of National Statistics, 2.1% of people aged 16 to 59 and 3.8% of those aged 16 and 24 in England and Wales use coke. Head to the nearest pub toilet right now, they’ll probably be a cluster of sesh heads in a cubicle railing lines of gak the size of cocktail sausages. Listen closely: snnnnnnnnnnffffff, “that’s good gear, actually”, snnnnnnnnnnffffff, “shut that door”, snnnnnnnnnnffffff…” The soundtrack of the British pub toilet.
With an increase in use, of course, comes an increase in harms. We’re sadly seeing that. More Brits are entering treatment for dependency on coke, and it’s tragically involved in more deaths than ever before. Last year, in 2024, there were 1,279 coke-related deaths registered in England and Wales. That figure has increased from 1,118 in 2023 and it’s eleven times higher than in 2011 when there were 112 deaths.
Things have changed in the world of coke, that’s for sure. Once a nectar exclusively reserved for the rich and famous, it’s now also available to anyone who wants to maroon themselves around a kitchen table and pummel someone into oblivion with grossly intense oversharing. You know, the sort of 7AM ‘deep chats’ that make you want to whack yourself in the head with a cricket bat when you remember them the next day.
Depending on who you ask, coke in the UK is either the strongest it’s ever been or the weakest it’s ever been; the purest it’s ever been or more stepped on (adulterated) than ever before. It’s astonishingly expensive these days according to some, or cheap as chips according to others.
Prices for a weighed-out gram can generally range from £50-100 in the UK, depending on various factors such as purity, location, how it is bought, and what connections the user has. “You can get economy coke down the pub at £50, or premium, posh coke in the City of London for as much as £120,” Professor Adam Winstock, founder of Global Drugs Survey and Staying Safer, told EZ Test. Although the difference between these two options can sometimes be, um, somewhat of a grey area. “I work in prisons so I’ve worked with a lot of dealers over the years,” he added. “I once asked one what is the difference between premium and economy coke and he said, ‘It’s often just the pocket I pick it out of. But when you’re flogging an expensive gram to a posh twat what are you going to do, say it’s shit quality?’”
For many Brits cracking open a packet on a Friday night, the coke is undoubtedly stronger in recent times. You can test how pure your coke is with an EZ Test Cocaine Purity kit. You can also find out if it’s cut, with an EZ Test Cocaine Cuts kit (they test for common cutting agents like levamisole, phenacetin, and ephedrine). If your coke is rocket fuel, you’re going to want to adjust your dose accordingly, perhaps think ‘a small key’ instead of ‘a fat slug off the back of your phone’. “Coke acutely increases your risk of getting an abnormal heart rhythm and heart attack, because what coke says to your heart is, ‘beat faster, I’m being really active’,” Winstock says. “And normally when a muscle works harder the blood vessels open, but what coke does is it squeezes the blood vessels. So it’s like putting your foot on the accelerator and squeezing the fuel line. That’s bad.”
He added: “It speeds up the development of atherosclerosis in both your heart and your brain. Which is why last year we had over 1,000 people die from coke. What’s that, 20 percent of drug-related deaths? We’ve never had that [before]. Coke-related deaths have gone up ten-fold in the last decade.” He sighed. “That’s massive.”
A huge factor driving this is how available quality coke is to everyone now. Whatever way the user chooses to acquire their stash, it’s more available than ever before. But for those adopting more modern ways to buy it, this has accelerated, giving some people access to quality they could only have dreamed of before (more on that in a minute).
For those who choose the more traditional way of buying a baggie, the dial-a-dealer method, which has been popular since the turn of the millennium, the process is more swift and efficient than it’s ever been. That’s due to the speed and efficiency of the Albanian drug networks, who have used extreme violence to pretty much take over the entire coke market in the UK over the past five years or so.
This process invariably begins between the consumption of the third and fourth pint of beer. A familiar declaration––“Shall we call it in?”––is announced with a hint of artificial spontaneity in the tone, as if the person delivering it hasn’t been planning the monologue since the latest round of pints were plopped down on the table. As if this shtick isn’t as predictable as the passage of time. Thanks to the 24/7 conveyor belt of quicktime drop-off options from the Albanians, the packet is at that point only a short, albeit decidedly awkward, phone call away: “You about, mate? Cool, I’ll meet you at the usual spot.” Done deal.
And for the more enterprising and technologically-savvy sesh heads, coke is even cheaper and more readily available now. They simply order it using either the dark web or an encrypted messaging app. They make the order using a chat bot, pay the robot in crypto, and just get the postie to deliver it. Not only do those users get it cheaper than ever (at the time of writing a gram of “90-94% pure cocaine” is £28.50 on the dark web), but any amount of drugs are now available to them. In the past, you would have had to have some pretty wild underworld connections to get hold of, say, a kilo of it. Now, thanks to technological shifts that have given way to this new era of dealing, it’s only a DM away for absolutely anyone.
Not only that, the legal risks are much lower––the customer doesn’t know who the plug is and vice versa, so they could never grass each other up. The customer doesn’t have to meet strangers in potentially dangerous pub car park situations, and the courier is completely oblivious to the fact that they’re part of the deal.
With every iteration in the evolution of drug dealing (from standing on the street corner whispering “charlie” in people’s ears, to the dial-a-dealer in a second-hand Mercedes-Benz, to the crypto era with postal drops) it has become safer, easier, and more readily available for anyone. So it is not surprising that more people are spending the weekend hoovering up baggies than ever before.
“A big misconception about coke is that it’s a rich man’s drug,” Elliott Wald, a therapist and psychologist, tells EZ Test. “I think that was very true back in the 1980s, but it’s not now.” He’s been specialising in treating coke addiction for three decades. “All types of people are clients of mine––people in the building industry (from bricklayers to plumbers to plasters), a paediatric surgeon, a judge, multiple police officers, and teachers. These days, it isn’t contained to any one type of person, whether that's financial, educational, or occupational,” he says.
But whether you’re a millionaire or have just spent your last £50 on 0.7g of pub grub, the risks are the same for everyone. “The harms are related to dose,” Winstock says. “The bigger the dose, the more often you take it, and if you whack it on top of a bad diet, smoking, and alcohol. Plus, I think coke dependency creeps up on people over a number of years; ‘I just get a gram on a Friday night’, turns into ‘I had a bit left over so I’ll just use it on Saturday’.” Wald agrees: “It’s a sneaky fucking drug.”
Technological advances feel like they are leaping forward right now in every aspect of society, so I assume we can expect that traffickers and dealers and movers on the drug scene will continue to come up with ingenious ways of flooding the country with their products. If someone would have told me ten years ago that people will be ordering a gram of coke from a bot in a decade, I’d have raised my eyebrows. Drugs will be more available and more pure going forward I’d bet. Unless the archaic drug laws are addressed, users must do all they can––test their drugs, educate themselves around the topic, and look out for one another.
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