Have any of you ever done coke? The question was greeted with some hilarity at our editorial meeting last Monday. Not me, most people said. Me neither; I was always too afraid that something would go wrong in my brain and I would lose control. Not very tough or worldly of me, I added almost regretfully.
But we are not all the same at Observant. One of us had snorted a line of coke once. Everyone else immediately wanted to know what the experience had been like. “It was back when I was a student. I was sitting at the bar with a friend when an American offered us some coke for ten euros. We thought, ‘Why not?’ I wasn’t thinking about the potential risks or consequences at all.” It didn’t really have any effects, “I didn’t feel anything”. So was it really cocaine, we wondered, or had they been conned with detergent or flour?
Cannabis
We’ll never know. What we do know is that students, according to a 2021 Trimbos study with just over 28,000 participants, drink more alcohol and use more drugs than their non-student peers. According to the research report, one third of the participants had used cannabis in the past year; about 13 per cent had used ecstasy; and 7.4 per cent had used cocaine.
Shocked
These statistics shocked the Dutch cabinet last August, during the student introduction weeks – that’s when this kind of news tends to surface. But when our colleague CF recently presented them to our student journalists (ten international students from different faculties), they laughed. The percentage of cocaine users seemed far too low to them. They all knew people who do the occasional bump. It didn’t take them long to find students to interview about drug use.
Drug dealer
Those stories are coming, but first we’ll conduct a poll (“Do you ever use drugs? And if so, which drugs and how often?”) on Instagram and other platforms, and journalist CF will try to find a drug dealer to interview. Of course, the question is whether she will succeed. But wouldn’t it be interesting if she could spend an evening with a drug dealer for an article, and see for herself where cocaine is most popular?
We’ll keep you posted.