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It’s true that the first few times it’s funny. Baise-moi wouldn’t have been finished without coke, because we would have been more conscious of all that was happening around us, we’d have had more normal sensibilities … It helps you keep going all night. I wrote my novel Les Jolies Choses in 3-4 days coked up, it unblocks things. You quickly get high for a short amount of time, then you have to take it again straight away and after a while the brain gets confused. […]

In the last two years, it’s really spread everywhere, in squats as well as in the [internationally renown academic institutes] Polytechique and Ecole Nationale d’Administration, it’s as if in people’s minds it’s on the same level as cannabis or alcohol. If I want to buy some, I can buy it any time, in many ways. It’s easier to find than grass.[...] It’s the same in the provinces, before people didn’t take it much in Nancy or Lyon or Rennes. Now when I go there, I see that people are using it a lot: teachers, social workers, social welfare employees, lawyers. They tell me that in Lyon, it’s even found in public high schools […].

In some quarters I’m sure that eight out of ten people are using coke and are affected by coke. But they don’t say it, because this is France. We are Catholics, we do things, but on the sly … A guy like X … a trendy writer, isn’t really going to say how much he spends on coke. If people knew the amount certain privileged people spend on coke and compared it to what they earn, they’d see that they’re being fucked over. X … drops ten times the minimum wage on coke each month. But he’s not going to say: I spend 10,000 euros a month on coke and fuck you … no one could hear that. What’s more, in these circles coke is completely idealized. But me, I’ve never seen anyone made brilliant by it long term. Cocaine just turns people into idiots: arrogant, talkative, very confident, aggressive, paranoid, certainly not great. […]

It’s a drug with includes you in society, a drug for white people, politically very marked. Basically, it’s the drug of advertising, and people in advertising are pricks. You don’t have to go far to find it, Coke, for keeping control over people is great. Once you are into cocaine, the only thing that counts is to buy it, so you work for it no matter what the conditions. You think less, work more, you need more money. Less sleep, a lot less self-reflection and no margin for rebelling, you can’t rebel when you have to take coke the next day. In addition, coke clouds your judgement, so if the boss talks to you, you’ll do what he says, because whatever else tomorrow you have to have coke.

People that I knew and liked are not the same, they have changed. I even see 16 year olds who are at it, sons of the middleclass… The most desperate cases that I’ve seen, are the girls who have more problems to deal with than the guys. There must be a thing with estrogen and coke, they don’t go together. The women are also more vunerable because it makes them thinner. They say to themselves, if I give up I’ll gain weight, obviously the first trap. Personally, I don’t think that I’ve returned to myself, I’m not the same emotionally. Something in me has changed, a chemical balance has been altered: breaking into tears, anxiety… I want to see a discourse that will happen ten years from now when we begin to pay for the damage. And not just for the heart attacks in people aged 55. We don’t talk about the depression that will be created. This drug is total suicide [...].”