Just a little sharpener for the weekend cokeheads

Angie and Scott are the sort of class A drug users that Commander Brian Paddick believes should be left alone. Cole Moreton joined them on a night out

Nobody mentions the coke, chopped and arranged in neat lines on the coffee table. "So I was thinking of going home for Christmas," says Angie, kneeling down with a rolled-up banknote to her nose. She inhales, loudly but proficiently. "But mum says she'll be in Madeira or some-bloody-where, so what's the point?"

Madonna sings about a beautiful stranger. We're in the living room of a shared house in a fashionable part of east London. The wooden floors have been waxed, there is original art on the walls and the road outside is lined with expensive cars. We are drinking gin and discussing holidays, work, parents – anything except the Class A drug on the table. This is not due to embarrassment or shame but because the three young, affluent, professional people in the room with me feel it is unworthy of comment. Cocaine is just a routine part of an ordinary Friday night for them; a fanfare for the weekend, just as a couple of pints in the pub or a Chinese takeaway are to other people.

"This is a sharpener," says Scott Christie when I raise the subject. The 28-year-old marketing executive from New Zealand has been in London a year now and is loving it. "If I went for a big night out in a cool bar and there was no coke I would feel something was missing. After work it gets you over that 'Can I be arsed to go out tonight?' feeling."

Scott earns £60,000 a year. His only major outgoing is the rent on his room in this house. "Other people are buying flats and cars, so where the hell is my money going? I like good clothes. Then there are holidays, weekends away, boozing, dinners ... but truckloads of it goes on pills and coke and weed."

Tonight he has a clear plastic resealable bag in his pocket containing a gramme of coke that cost £50; another carrying half a dozen ecstasy pills at £6 each; and a pouch of cannabis, the price of which he cannot remember. "If I go to a house party, coke is usually just laid out on the table," he says. "It's just a nice, hospitable thing to have on offer. Some of my mates are drugs piglets: nobody wants to stop, and it goes on until lunchtime the next day. That gets expensive. We're talking about a few hundred quid right there on a Saturday night, plus cabs, food, getting into clubs, and booze. The myth I used to believe was that if you were on drugs you did not drink as much. I drink like a fish. Coke straightens you out anyway. In a bar the cost of gin or vodka runs away on you."

Scott and his friends are exactly the sort of weekend cocaine users Commander Brian Paddick would prefer to let live. "There are a whole range of people who buy drugs, not just cannabis but even cocaine and ecstasy, who buy those drugs with money they have earned legitimately," the senior London policeman told MPs last week. "They use a small amount of these drugs, a lot of them just at weekends. It has no adverse effect on the rest of the people they are with . . . they go back to work on Monday morning and are unaffected for the rest of the week. In terms of my priorities as an operational police officer they are low down."

The club we are in as midnight approaches has posted a formidable gentleman in a suit to watch the lavatories for signs of drug use – but he must be blind not to notice Scott's frequent nervous scuttling from the dancefloor to the gents, where there are queues for each cubicle.

Scott squeezes past the toilet bowl and wipes the long white lid of the cistern with his shirtsleeve, before pouring out a fat line. "Normally I get a rush straight after," he says. "Half the stuff's still on the end of my nose. There's a lot of tingling going on, heightened senses. Feeling the atmosphere in a souped-up form. The music's louder."

He thinks the drug sharpens his conversational skills, but it actually makes him a bore. Angie has stopped talking altogether. That might be the gin. Or the ecstasy. The longest Scott has gone without drugs since coming to England was three weeks, when he saved enough money to pay off a "horrendous" Visa bill.

He buys from an Australian dealer called Mick, whose number was passed on by a friend. "I text him what I want: '5+20' is five bags of coke and 20 pills."

Mick turned up outside Scott's office in the West End yesterday afternoon and handed over a cigarette packet stuffed with drugs in return for £500. The switch was made quickly because they were next to a police station. "If you got snapped red-handed that might get messy," says Scott, giggling. "There are heaps of cameras. But I can't see the cops coming down on a guy like me."

Mick acts like he wants to be Scott's pal. "Oh, he's a pain in the arse. Awfully matey. I just don't want anything more to do with him than a quick encounter."

English people worry about the effects of ecstasy, he says, but it is cocaine that worries him. "It's more insidious, way more of a rot." Two of his friends destroyed their careers and are now in rehab clinics trying to kick the coke habit. "I don't actually see myself there," says Scott with the confidence of youth. "Drinking is my biggest vice."

He would not consider dating a woman who refused to take drugs. We call it a night in the early hours and Scott heads home in a taxi with his girlfriend, who wakes up a little when the cold night air hits her face. Cocaine is supposed to enhance sexual performance. "Oh mate, it decimates mine," says Scott as they leave. "It gets you in the pulling mode, but my cock just shrivels up. I go completely flaccid. I have to get my scoring done during the week."

The names in this article have been changed