‘Celebs are glamourising cocaine use’

Europe at higher risk as abuse in US declines

LONDON: Models and actors are glamourising cocaine use and encouraging young middle class middle class professionals to start using the addictive drug, according to George Bush’s drugs tzar.

John Walters also warned that European countries like Britain were now the destination of choice for central American drug producers like Venezuela. On a visit to London, Walters said that impressionable young professionals in their 20s were being sucked into drug addiction because celebrities were using them and not coming to any harm.

Earlier this year a UN report partly blamed the police and courts for making matters worse by treating celebrities “leniently’’ and failing to make an example of them.
Kate Moss, the fashion model, escaped prosecution following the publication of photographs of her snorting cocaine. An internal Scotland Yard report found cocaine abuse was rife in celebrity and modelling circles.

Walters, who is the director of National Drug Control Policy at the White House since 2001, said: “I am surprised that cocaine is still seen by well educated people as something to be toyed with. It is favoured by young people who see it being used by fashion models and actors. People follow the actresses and models and then they do it too.”

Cocaine use is declining in US, making Europe—where its street price of can be twice as much as in the US—far more attractive to central American drug barons, he said.