The Thames: awash with cocaine

telegraph

By Nina Goswami and James Orr
(Filed: 06/11/2005)


The Thames is awash with cocaine as Londoners snort more than 150,000 lines of the class A drug every day.

The figure is 15 times higher than official Home Office statistics and equates to four out of every 100 people regularly taking cocaine, or up to 250,000 of the capital's six million residents.


Londoners snort over 150,000 lines of cocaine a day

An investigation by the Sunday Telegraph found that, after cocaine had passed through users' bodies and sewage treatment plants, an estimated 2kg - 80,000 lines - of the drug went into the river each day.

Anti-drug campaigners said last night that the findings showed that cocaine use was a ticking "health-care time bomb" and called for the Government to take drastic action.

The Thames investigation, the first of its kind in Britain, was conducted by scientists using the latest technology. It is regarded as the most accurate large-scale drug-detection method available.

Britain's illicit cocaine trade, estimated to be worth £352.8 million a year, is thought to have caused 139 deaths in 2002, the last year of available figures - a seven-fold rise on the 1996 figure of 19.

Doctors fear that, with little routine testing for the drug in heart attack and stroke cases, the real toll may be much higher.