Cocaine is increasingly becoming a marker of the UK’s socioeconomic divide, official figures suggest.

Figures from the crime survey of England and Wales show that use of cocaine is up in wealthier homes and down among the poorest.

The statistics show that the use of cocaine in powder form among those in the richest bracket in the Home Office’s annual drug misuse report - households earning £50,000 a year or more - has increased from 2.2% in 2014/15 to 3.4% in 2017/18.

In the lowest income category, households earning less than £10,000 a year, the proportion who reported taking cocaine was down from 3.4% to 2% over the same period.

The analysis comes after the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, hit out at middle-class users who fret over fair trade and global warming “but think there’s no harm in taking a bit of cocaine”.

“Well there is,” Britain’s most senior police officer said. “There is misery throughout the supply chain.”

Her remarks followed similar interventions by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and David Gauke, the justice secretary.

Powder as opposed to crack cocaine was the second most commonly used drug in England and Wales after cannabis in 2017/18, according to the Home Office report published last week.



The percentage of adults who said they had taken the drug the previous year was 2.6%, or about 875,000 people, the highest figure since 2008/09.

The rise in the popularity of cocaine has come at the same time as an increase in its purity, said Fiona Measham, a professor of criminology at Durham university and founder of The Loop, a drug testing charity.

“Therefore it’s back on the radar of people who have money and can make a choice about what they are going to consume,” she said.

The latest figures do not break down the change in the levels of crack cocaine use among different income groups. Measham suggested the use of crack may be on the on the rise again in poorer communities. This would again be driven by a rise in purity, because impure cocaine is difficult to cook into crack rocks.

The number of people seeking help with crack addiction was up nearly a quarter in a year, according to the latest official figures.

Steve Rolles, a policy advisor at Transform, which campaigns for a reform of drug laws, said Dick and others were passing the buck by trying to blame users for the problems caused by the drugs trade.

“Middle class people have been doing cocaine forever,” he said. “If there’s violent crime associated with the cocaine market, it’s because it’s illegal. Policy makers have made a decision to abdicate the market to criminal entrepreneurs, and they shouldn’t be surprised that there’s crime and violence associated with it.”