Robyn had been watching the gradual uptick in cocaine use from survey data out of the corner of her eye for a few years, but the event that galvanised her interest came in 2021 when thousands of ticketless football fans stormed Wembley stadium during the postponed Euro 2020 final.
A review published in the aftermath of the disorder found that more than half of fans said they had seen cocaine use either inside Wembley stadium or on the way from the station. “I thought ‘God, that’s remarkable that people felt confident to take it so openly’,” Robyn tells me.
Then came the anti-immigration riots of 2024: Robyn noticed that some of the perpetrators of violence were also facing cocaine-related charges. She later observed open cocaine use among marchers at Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in London. And when she covered Glastonbury for the Guardian last year, “people were taking coke in the crowd in front of everyone,” – par for the course at a music festival, you might think – but Robyn noticed a difference: “a few years ago people were a bit more careful about hiding it.”
Robyn began to wonder whether cocaine use might be at an all time high – and, considering its well recorded effects as a drug that causes paranoid and impulsivity, she asked herself: what might the overall effect on society be from all this?
From theory to numbers: ‘It was one of those journalistic hunches’
Those were the ideas that Robyn brought to Michael, who began to dig into the available data, first sending freedom of information requests to all 45 territorial police forces in the UK. (Please don’t skip over this bit: as someone who has FOIed the 45 herself, and chased up, and chased again, I appreciate what a task that is.)
Michael discovered that police forces across Britain had recorded a 10% rise in recorded crimes in which the class A drug was mentioned since 2019, while the Home Office estimates that cocaine use at sites across England has risen by 26% since 2021.
The data also showed that the record-breaking rise in cocaine use was associated with crimes ranging from assault to dangerous driving, and Robyn had a particular theory she wanted to explore about domestic abuse: “It was one of those journalistic hunches: what’s it like to be in a relationship with somebody who is taking a lot of cocaine?” She contacted domestic violence specialists who explained that, while cocaine use doesn’t make a non-violent person violent, it can make an offender more likely to act on their impulse to do harm.
Again, Michael’s data work suggested Robyn’s suspicions were correct: Home Office figures show nearly six in 10 police drug tests carried out on people arrested on suspicion of domestic abuse tested positive for cocaine use between July 2025 and June this year.
Parsing the data: ‘sewage doesn’t lie’
Assessing data on illegal drug use is tricky, Michael explains, because some people may not want to admit to taking drugs. Crime survey data – which asks individuals about their habits – suggests the number of people reporting cocaine use has fallen slightly since the pandemic. But that’s completely different to analysis of wastewater by Home Office scientists, which shows a significant rise in cocaine levels in sewage, up 26% between 2021 and 2025.
“It’s always important to speak to experts in the field about which data they think is more representative,” Michael tells me. One such expert is Dr Josh Torrance, a specialist in drug markets, who thought the direction of travel shown in the wastewater analysis was broadly accurate. “Sewage doesn’t lie,” says Michael.
The plummeting price of cocaine – apparently the only consumer good exempt from the cost of living crisis – was evidently a factor in its growing use, but assessing this data presented another challenge. Torrance shared price data he had gathered from online drug dealers who ply their trade on Telegram channels and other forums. “Obviously that’s illegal behaviour, so we had to agree with him about which data he was willing to share, and what we were able to publish, to make sure we weren’t exposing any sources in the process.”
‘People thought I was a cop’
A running theme of the reporting is the way that cocaine use has become normalised, moving from being the drug of choice for the affluent to something snorted off the toilet cistern in the local pub. But its apparent omnipresence doesn’t make it any easier to talk about.
Robyn struggled to find anyone willing to be interviewed about their cocaine use, past or present, without using a pseudonym. During her research, she headed to a music festival in the north of England. “I was chatting to people about what drugs they were on, and people just thought I was a cop. People are so cagey about it – understandably – which does make things difficult in terms of reporting.”
All of her interviews for this investigation were done anonymously. “You’re working for the reader and want to give them all the facts you can, but you also want to make it easier for people to speak to you. Sometimes it doesn’t matter precisely what someone’s name is or where in the country they are located.”
Illegality can also be a barrier to seeking help, as she discovered when she interviewed a survivor of cocaine-fuelled domestic violence. It can also prevent businesses affected by cocaine use from working together. She spoke to one pub manager who told her the ubiquity of cocaine has become “significantly worse” over the past five years. “She sees it causing fights and conflict between customers in her pub, but she can’t turn to colleagues for advice on dealing with it because the rules are so strict, she’s worried she’d lose her licence if it got about that there was drug-taking on her premises.”
What next?
Michael tells me he’d expected to see a rise in crime in the datasets he was examining, “but the thing that I hadn’t considered before was the age of the cohort taking cocaine.” People in their 30s were the largest age group seeking help with problematic cocaine use. “It is older people now who are taking it for longer, and we’re seeing record deaths. I didn’t expect that, but sadly it makes sense.” Experts told Michael they’d like to see more investment in earlier drug education and addiction services to stem this rise.
It’s a seam that Robyn is keen to mine in future reporting. “When you look at the detailed demographics, there are a lot of young black men that die from overdosing on cocaine.” Robyn suspects these lads are working as drug mules, and die when a package of powder cocaine bursts inside them.
“In this investigation, we’ve focused on the crimes perpetrated by the users. Next I want to look at the crimes and other harms that are happening because of the drugs trade itself,” she says.
Thousands of ticketless fans stormed Wembley Stadium ahead of the Euro 2020 final between England and Italy, in 2021. Photograph: Alex Pantling/Getty Images
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