Tatler UK - 09.2019

tatler.com Tatler September 2019 97

harder than girls; another says girls love keta-

mine; one says Xanax is ‘a thing’; another that

it’s not; while one 17-year-old girl says sagely,

‘Where there’s money there’s cocaine.’ The only

tenet that seems to hold is that ‘Everyone has

their preference.’

One measurable change is in the popularity

of benzodiazepines like Valium and Xanax,

prescribed for anxiety, which have made their

way into teenagers’ drug repertoire – on the

back, perhaps, of their romanticisation in

music by artists like Future, who raps in ‘No

Shame’, ‘I found Xanax and it’s making me

fall in love.’ (Though, following the 2017 death

of American rapper Lil Peep, fellow benzo fan

Lil Xan vowed to come off the pills he’s named

after – as has Justin Bieber.) Addiction treatment

for benzodiazepines in the UK rose from 161

children in 2016-17 to 315 in 2017-18 – while

this is hardly an epidemic, it’s still an

astonishingly quick rise. Indeed, in 2018, the

Oxford Internet Institute found that the UK

accounted for 22 per cent of global transactions

for sales of Xanax on the dark web, making

Britain the world’s second-largest market after

the US. Taking benzos is not dissimilar to

getting stoned – and they’re often taken as a

downer at the end of a heavy night on an upper

like cocaine. However, benzos also cause you to

blackout, which means that it’s extremely easy

to overdose on them, simply by forgetting how

many you’ve had.

Harry, a neon sweatshirt-wearing 16-year-

old on an exeat from boarding school, elaborates

on his school friends’ benzo use over coffee at

a smart Chelsea café. Xanax was ‘a big thing’

among his friends last year, but they stopped

using it as much, as ‘it affected people, work-

wise. Because you’re not remembering stuff.

Which is why I stopped – I wanted to be able

to remember lessons at school.’ It’s also worth

noting that benzos are not sociable drugs:

Harry had a friend who’d be ‘like a vegetable

on a night out.’

Emily is even more damning of her Xanax-

popping peers. ‘I have no idea why they do

it,’ she says, drily. ‘They all say they’re having a

good time, but when you’re on Xanax you’re ]

SCHOOL TRIP

‘I don’t think there were 10 minutes of

the whole trip where one person was sober,’

recalls a 17-year-old boarding school

student of a recent festival

PHOTOGRAPH: MICHAEL HAUPTMAN/TRUNK ARCHIVE. *NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED

09-19WELL-Drugs.indd 97 17/07/2019 08:15