Coked-Up And Head Fucked

I was reading a story online last night and it underlined to me the distance between what I regarded as a good night out in my youth and what some young people now see as normal.

The headline was “Coke and drink ’causes heart attacks'”.

Now, I read the headline and clicked the link from the site’s front page. It was only when I started to read the story that I realised that this wasn’t some hyped-up scare story about mixing rum and coke and how it might increase the risks of myocardial infarction in young people … it took a moment for the realisation that the coke they were referring to was cocaine.

Am I that naïve?

Apparently yes I am. I’ve never done cocaine and have no interest in doing so. That fact in itself has left me in some ways innocent when it comes to the highs that some people regularly indulge in. I don’t feel left out, just an outsider. It frightens me in a way, not that I’m not included but that the words coke and cocaine are now interchangeable in newspaper headlines as well as on the street.

Are drugs that pervasive? Am I that removed from what happens on a Saturday night in the clubs?