Another aids awareness ad!
Same thing happened to me. I almost said, 'Ritalin and Dexedrine may have normalized the come market."
It’s tricky to judge the popularity of a drug over time by your own personal experiences and exposure. If I were going by what I’ve witnessed directly, I’d say binge drinking is on its way out. Fifteen years ago, it wasn’t a Saturday night unless someone was puking. These days everyone has a beer or three and calls it a night without punching anyone on the way out. Of course, fifteen years ago I was twenty, which meant not only that I hung out with other twenty-year-olds, but I went to the kinds of parties twenty-year-olds got invited to and the kinds of bars that let twenty-year-olds in. I suspect the new crop of twenty-year-olds isn’t any more responsible with alcohol than we were, but I actually don’t know.
For many people, that day was Oct 19th 1987.
Fifteen years before that, I would have said the same thing.
As of 2016 it’s not, according the data from SAMHSA. Obviously if you’re not in the college environment anymore you’re not going to witness as much. But according to SAMHSA data, even for older adults it’s high.
I’m going to guess you weren’t working at Procter & Gamble.
Cocaine has gone in and out of fashion over the last century.
It was big after World War One and through the 1920s, and was later supplanted in the 40s and 50s by Benzedrine and other chemical stimulants. Came zooming back in in the mid-70s and throughout the 80s, when I enjoyed it in copious amounts, along with most well-off white NYers.
A lady dealer friend would drop over and we’d toot up, roll the ends of our cigarettes in the leavings and smoke it, drink Bourbon whiskey and play cribbage. We were such deviants!
Quit cold turkey in 1990, when my first child was born. The contemporary attraction seemed to decline after that, or maybe the media focused on crack use rather than powdered coke.
I know nothing of meth. Always considered it to be a cracker drug for people whose teeth fall out and think spiders are crawling all over them.
For others it came before that on June 19, 1986.
Damn. I wish I would have run around with you back in those days.
My experience mirrors that of the OP. Coke was huge from about the mid-70s to the early 90s. Then it died rather quickly, at least for me and my circle of dopeheads. We all finally realized that blowing a hundred bucks every other weekend was not really a smart thing to do. And, of course, there were kids to think about.
And, now, if my children are to be believed, even infrequent usage of coke isn’t really popular at all. I was surprised to read that coke is still the second most frequently used illegal drug.
Username checks out.
I have known more middle aged tradespeople who regularly use coke then college aged kids. Not to say it wasn’t around but there was a lot more access to party drugs other than coke.
Yeah, licking packages for the last few crumbs at 5AM on a Sunday morning gets old real fast.
It may be that we don’t hear much about it because its popularity, although widespread, just isn’t causing as much problems as other drugs.
Cocaine kills 10,000-15,000 people a year.
OTOH, opioids are killing about 50,000 people a year. Opioids are also more newsworthy than cocaine because a large part of this epidemic has been caused by the actions and policies of the medical establishment.
Meth makes the news because meth labs are toxic, explosion-prone sites, and because users sometimes experience bouts of paranoid delusion that make them a problem for innocent bystanders.
I was about to post the same thing about Len Bias, I know that was one of the most significant factors that made me refusing to partake in the drug. There were also several major movies that de-glamorized cocaine use, Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City come to mind. I think all of this was more significant than Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No!” campaign in stigmatizing cocaine use.
I remember Richard Pryor talking about how he did so much cocaine that he embarrassed cocaine delaers. He finally talked one into selling him just enough for the weekend.
“Okay, how much do you need?”
“A kilo.”
“Cocaine is God’s way of telling you you make too much money.” - Robin Williams
The OP isn’t exactly wrong as such, cocaine use isn’t as newsworthy as it one was just like we seldom hear about aids anymore.
“I don’t do cocaine, I just like the way it smells” - Rodney Dangerfield