Stuff Rich People Love

#31 - Cocaine

Cocaine
Price: $23,000 per kg

Rich people have strains and stresses that the middle class do not understand. While the middle class worry about their jobs and their 401(k) plans, the rich have to worry about which boarding school the children will attend, Bentley or Rolls and custom Italian or English suits. Despite these ungodly pressures, they must maintain confidence and alertness across global time zones. Fortunately nature provided just the product and as such, the rich love cocaine. Naturally, not all rich people use cocaine just as not all poor people smoke crack, but the fact remains that funding the Colombian economy is happening by the kilo, not the gram.

Coke, blow, candy cane, Angie, Flake, Aunt Nora, Scottie, Charlie, and dream are all names that the rich use when talking about their recreational drug of choice. Why not call it cocaine? Using pseudonyms for nose candy gives young millionaires “street cred” among their WASP friends and renaming cocaine is a game of sorts; while you were studying at college to improve your life, wealthy frat boys were coming up creative monikers for the primary use of their trust funds. Think of it as a rite of passage for the wealthy to help overcome the crassness of discussing illicit substances. Truthfully, if it wasn’t for this South American powder, most wealthy college attendees would hardly have had the stamina to attend class after an all-night kegger, would lack the ability to concentrate during exams and may not have been interesting enough to their sycophantic colleagues to have had friends at all.

Cocaine wasn’t always the popular drug it is now. While Freud is most often associated with more despicable habits like the Oedipus Complex, the modern world can thank his research and his early use of cocaine for its general acceptance. His paper On Coca or Über Coca was well received and led to a virtual explosion of cocaine’s inclusion in products such as colas, cigarettes, wine and analgesics. As with most controlled substances, too much of a good thing can be very bad indeed. Its highly addictive properties and availability in numerous forms means the estimated market in the US exceeded $70 billion in 2005 and today is popular as a club drug. Surprisingly, while many people won’t sit on a toilet seat in a club, snorting lines off of them is perfectly acceptable.

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