Ever since cocaine first emerged as a popular party drug via the shores of Miami in the early 1970s, use of the stimulant has been inextricably entwined with the very essence of capitalist excess and what it is to be American: brash, bombastic and brazen.
The wide-scale use of cocaine in the US has left a trail of destruction in its wake, largely thanks to the illegal nature of the trade and the resultant US government policy of a “war on drugs”.
But might the decades-long cocaine era in the US finally be coming to a quiet end?
When Al Pacino’s archetypal drug lord Tony “Scarface” Montana was etched into the collective memory in the drug’s 1980s heyday, 6.7% of Americans admitted to cocaine use in one year. But now the rate has fallen to just 1.5%, with 4.3 million adults reporting use in the year up to 2024. That’s down from 5.9 million in 2017, when the National Survey on Drug Use switched from counting the data in percentage prevalence to raw headcounts.
Cocaine use is set to fall much further as gen Zers show far less interest in snorting “blow” than their parents’ generation, with 18- to 25-year-old use plummeting from 2.1 million in 2017 to 811,000 in 2024.
“There’s a presumption that cocaine use is booming in America like it is in many parts of the world,” says Max Daly, the ex-global drugs editor at Vice who first reported on the cocaine fall data in Straight Arrow News. “But the data shows a marked decline in the last decade, ironically during a time when cocaine production in Colombia has hit record levels.”
Within gen Z there is a feeling that cocaine is not “their drug”, Daly adds: “For them, it’s ethically very dodgy and associated with heavy drinking and nightlife culture, something that gen Z is turning its back on.”
Joel Brierre, an entrepreneur, says he “used to sell and do a lot of coke in the 90s and early 2000s” and that “a gen Z kid would die if they tried to party like gen Xers or millennials”. Originally from Washington DC, he now runs a legal psychedelic-retreat company where he has a ground-zero view of how cultural changes are affecting drug-use trends.
“People are becoming acutely aware of their health and mental wellness, and the side effects of a coke binge,” Brierre says. “The world is changing, and many people are realising that the juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
Andrew Yockey, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Mississippi, says that cocaine today is widely perceived as more dangerous because of potential contamination with the powerful opioid fentanyl, however unlikely. “It has made even occasional use feel unpredictable,” he says.
At the same time, cocaine’s once-aspirational cultural cachet has faded, and many young adults have shifted toward alternatives such as cannabis or prescription stimulants such as Adderall, which are seen as more controllable.
It’s difficult to imagine Braden Peters, AKA Clavicular, the 20-year-old “looksmaxxing” guru, taking cocaine. But he regularly boasts of “meth-maxxing” – that is, taking methamphetamine, the chemical cousin of Adderall. In February, he was initially charged with possession of Adderall after an arrest. On Tuesday, when he appeared woozy from unknown drugs at a club in Miami on a livestream prior to being hospitalised, a friend offered him an Adderall.
Accordingly, even while cocaine remains the drug du jour at many parties from Los Angeles to New York, it is becoming less common on nights out as ketamine also surges in popularity, along with various psychedelics, GHB and lesser-known illegal stimulants like 3-MMC.
“A lot of people in the club scene are over cocaine,” says a long-time raver in the US north-east, who preferred not to be named for professional reasons. “Cocaine can double down on people’s anxiety and depression. Ketamine, even when you’re not doing it ‘right’, often leaves a more positive mark.”
Around a decade ago, she “started telling my cocaine-addicted friends in New York: swap out 50% of the coke for ketamine, and you’ll be a much happier person. Thankfully, a lot of them took me up on that, even though it is also highly addictive.”
The risks of using ketamine are only just becoming better understood at the same time as the panoply of newer drugs in circulation has perhaps never been greater. Ed Sisco, a research chemist who works for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that tracks drug use, told NPR in April that his team were regularly detecting novel drugs that had no history of use in the US.
“The US drug landscape is shifting from single-drug trends to a messier, mixed-drug environment – and cocaine just isn’t the star any more,” Yockey adds.
But despite the turn away from cocaine, overdose deaths involving the drug have risen steeply – from 10,475 in 2016 to 22,174 in 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some have attributed part of the increase to fentanyl contamination, despite experts saying that cocaine is rarely adulterated with the potent synthetic opioid and that the phenomenon is limited.
“It would be very foolish for cocaine dealers to add fentanyl to their product, as this would cause it to have the opposite effect to what cocaine buyers want and would kill their sales,” says Travis Wendel, a scholar who studied illegal drug markets for more than 20 years.
Cocaine has also rapidly become more potent in recent years due to a rise in supply from Latin America, with the average purity of seized cocaine being 88% last year, v 54% in 2020. “There is a considerable increase in overdose deaths involving coke and fentanyl,” Wendel adds. “But this is almost certainly due to deliberate, knowing injection of ‘speedballs’.”
Even though use is decreasing and cocaine alone is rarely responsible for overdose deaths, Donald Trump earlier this year attempted to justify his campaign against Venezuela on the alleged role of ruling figures in cocaine trafficking. Meanwhile, the US has continued its extrajudicial campaign to strike small boats off the southern coast, which officials have claimed, without evidence, are ferrying drugs to American shores from the Caribbean, killing at least 177 people.
Washington may still claim to be fighting the dubious cocaine wars of the past, but at home, it appears people have already begun to move on. “America turning away from cocaine could signal a downward shift in the use of the drug globally,” says Daly, the journalist, “at a time when it’s never been so abundant.”
