“At my lowest ebb, I was drinking 12 to 14 bottles of wine and doing five grams of coke per day,” says Mark, a 47-year-old from London, who runs his own successful business. “I started out using it because I wanted to be a party animal. Then I used it to cope with the stress of work. Eventually I lost all control and became a total recluse, staying at home to snort coke all day.”
UK studies show that people born in the 1960s and 1970s are taking record levels of recreational drugs that span the spectrum from cannabis to hallucinogens.