“It was like I had pure joy coursing through my veins.” That is how Sarah, a pretty management consultant in her early thirties, describes the feeling when she took her first line of cocaine at a party 10 years ago. “I felt excited and confident and fit to burst. It was as if a previously undiscovered part of my brain had been switched on, or perhaps an existing one had been switched off. Every worry just vanished as soon as I snorted it.”
But just three years later, this “joyful” drug had come close to devastating her health and ruining her closest relationships. It had also left her thousands of pounds in debt and close to losing her job. Not exactly what one might expect from a privately educated woman brought up in the sleepy town of Marlow in Buckinghamshire.
Yet Sarah (not her real name) is just one of an increasing number of middle-class women dabbling with cocaine, among them the opera singer Katherine Jenkins, who has admitted taking the drug on a number of occasions several years ago, though she has now spoken out against drugs.
