Christopher Walker: City must combat white mischief

"Do you use this?"

New York, 1988. The trader standing next to me at the Wall Street bar had a white line neatly stretched out on the black marble counter. He proceeded to snort it.

They say the first offer is the easiest to resist. For me it was not a problem, then or now. The shock of a friend choking to death on their own drug-induced vomit is enough to keep you drug-free for life. I tapped my glass with a polite, "This is as far as I go".

London in 2002 reminds me more and more of New York in the Eighties. The traffic's impossible, the streets filthy, and "crazies" have appeared on every street corner. At the top end of the scale, City slickers now earn the kind of money that was once confined to Wall Street. At the bottom, social dislocation has created a Bronx-like underclass.

And then there is the cocaine. An incredible 46 per cent of Londoners aged 18 to 30 admit to having snorted at least once. If you extended the survey to include ecstasy, God knows what the figure would be. When researchers went to one London club they found that 97 per cent of respondents admitted to having taken ecstasy. As the gateway drug, this does not augur well for the future.

Any of us who work in the Square Mile would not have to think very long to list a large number of acquaintances with varying levels of drug use. In my case, I think of the stockbroker who left the table five times during dinner last week, or the Home Counties trader whose nasal membrane is so eroded that when I first met him I assumed his accent was South African. The hyper activity of the young, new users, and the tell-tale irritability and white faces of the old ones, are a too-familiar City sight.

The reasons for the creeping white tide no doubt relate to the general failure of UK drugs policy. But in seeking symptoms, there are some peculiar City-related reasons. The mega financial mergers of the past few years have dramatically raised productivity in the sector and improved incomes. But they have done so at a cost of decreased job security and generally increased workloads. A vicious circle of high pressure, hard work and higher income creates a natural environment for cocaine.

A few weeks ago, a fund manager boasted of a particularly heavy binge culminating in coke. He admitted that the next morning he had been trading away without any real sense of what he was doing. This is serious stuff, for both clients and employers. You would notice if a member of your team turned up drunk from breakfast, but could you tell if he was still high on drugs from the night before?

One more feature of New York life may be about to enter the London scene: compulsory and random drug testing in all offices. This procedure has come a long way since the urine tests of the Eighties. A quick hair sample is all that is needed now to weed out the drug-dependent worker. Currently, only 10 per cent of firms employ drug testing, and this mainly at the recruitment stage. It must inevitably become random and more widespread to be effective.

The bizarre side-effect of this white mischief is the extraordinary size of the drug industry in financial terms. Cocaine on the streets of London has a 20,000 per cent mark-up at present, leaving more than enough room for a whole string of profitable middle men. The UN estimates that the drug trade is worth some $400bn (£268bn), an astonishing 8 per cent of world trade. Against such numbers, the efforts of law enforcement agencies will prove futile. It can only be through employer-triggered changes in social behaviour that we have a chance.

The drug trade plays nearly as large a role in the UK economy as manufacturing. Unless something is done, there is a danger we will disappear up our own noses.