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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> While traditionally cocaine was a rich man’s drug (due to the large expense of a cocaine habit), by the late 1980s, cocaine was no longer thought of as the drug of choice for the wealthy.

This phrasing seems to suggest that something else displaced cocaine as "the drug of choice for the wealthy."

If something did, what was it?

And if nothing did — i.e. if young-rich-people parties just shifted away from being drug-fueled — then what caused that? Because that feels like a very surprising shift; drug-fueled parties were a staple of decadent wealth for hundreds of years as of that point. I wouldn't expect that a single drug losing its perception of "classiness" would lead to a wholesale abandonment of drug use by an entire class of people.

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Coke never went away but the quality went down substantially, not aided by the fact that it's all produced in the jungle under some guys plastic boots who just eyeballs the reagents used to make the end product. So you'll never get "pure" stuff like you would meth or mdma.

In his bio Keith Richards says he quit all that stuff when the quality when down. All those 80s bands that were fueled by coke ... you don't get that anymore. Basically because it's not that "nice" of a drug anymore.

In S-America from what I've heard is that all the posh party people take mdma to go out and coke is more for the low to middle class. So it's definitely less classy there, probably not in the least because of all the horrible crime associated with it (something that's out of sight for Westerners).

If something replaced cocaine, my guess would be pills, both repurposed medical grade ones and things like ecstasy. Being completely manufactured allows for an arbitrary distinction in quality based on packaging, and that's obviously something people like to buy into.

That said, I'm not sure I believe cocaine ever lost favor with the wealthy. Maybe they just shifted from open semi-public use to more private and small groups doing it within the whole? Instead of open use in the big common room, maybe people just split off into side rooms in small groups that are interested to do it and rejoin the main group later.

I remember learning this fun fact from a Netflix documentary. Nominal prices for coke have remained stable since the 70s. So adjusted for inflation, it's gotten progressively less expensive. I've witnessed 5his personally. A gram in the 2000s would run about 70 bucks in my area, and that's still the case today.

So it's likely that over time more and more not so rich people entered the market and coke lost its cachet. But I'm sure the rich remained quite fond of it.

I take it to mean that the primary cultural association with cocaine was no longer “rich person drug,” while not saying anything at all about the drug of choice for the wealthy.

I also share this doubt, however I can believe that people who are wealthy but not wall street types, have moved on to pills like MDMA etc.

There's a difference between wealthy-wealthy and wealthy-enough to retire early and live like a 19-year-old until they "retire" properly: The latter category I would imagine is not the kind to do Coke on holiday versus some pills.

Cocaine never really went away.

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