The level of cocaine flooding the UK streets is at an unprecedented high, marking a significant concern, as revealed by an investigation conducted by the Daily Mail.

For the first time, this Class A narcotic is being sold in its purest form, a stark contrast to previous years when it was commonly diluted with other substances to increase profits for dealers.

This surge in purity means that casual users may unknowingly encounter a more potent version of the drug than they anticipate, posing serious health risks.

These revelations emerge shortly after an inquest earlier this month, which detailed the tragic case of a champion equestrian who ended her life following a dispute with her husband while under the influence of cocaine, during their first anniversary celebration.

Abigail Garside, aged 30, had shared joyful images and expressed her contentment just hours before the incident. The coroner concluded that her actions were not premeditated but were driven by the powerful effects of combining the drug with alcohol.

Currently, the UK holds the title as Europe’s largest consumer of cocaine per capita and ranks second globally, trailing only behind Australia.

And widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that the pernicious white powder is now widely used across all social groups – from football hooligans to the town and country set.

After hearing widespread anecdotal evidence of a surge in strength of the drug being peddled across the country, the Daily Mail undertook a special investigation.

Undercover reporters bought wraps of cocaine from dealers at locations around the UK and took the samples to be analysed at a Government-backed drug-testing laboratory, where it is being stored securely.

The results were shocking: every sample came back with only cocaine detected and no mixing agents used to weaken its narcotic effects.

As one scientist remarked: ‘It’s a cliche for a drug dealer to say ‘This is good stuff’ but now it seems it’s actually true. The problem is that this can have dangerous consequences.’

And they added: ‘This has happened because Albanian gangs have developed their own smuggling routes from South America which have slashed the cost of wholesale cocaine in Britain – and they are passing on the ‘benefit’ to customers, not out of any generosity but to keep them coming back.’

We even found drugs freely available in one of the most exclusive towns in the country, Chipping Norton in the Cotswolds, where one regular user told us: ‘People here are happy to pay top dollar for the very best so pure, uncut cocaine is what’s on offer.’

It’s believed that this rise in purity levels has been driven by a number of factors – from the opening up of those new smuggling routes from South America to a concerted attempt by dealers to compete with more intoxicating but cheaper alternative highs like ketamine.

However, when taken, uncut cocaine can cause a more rapid onset of cardiovascular damage, seizures, paranoia, psychosis and respiratory failure – and there has been a rise in hospitalisations as users unknowingly take a much stronger, and therefore more dangerous, product.

In 2023, drug-poisoning deaths in England and Wales hit their highest level in 32 years with 1,118 cocaine deaths alone, nearly seven times higher than a decade earlier.

By the following year, 2024, the most recent for which figures are available, those numbers had dramatically risen again – to 1,279, an increase of almost 15 per cent in a single year.

And it’s thought that there is a direct correlation between these soaring numbers and the fact that cocaine – which was previously cut with substances including benzocaine, boric acid or novocaine – is now sold pure.

We started our investigation in the last place you might expect to find a thriving drug scene: the Cotswolds.

And not just the wider area but its sought-after heartland: the celebrity hotspot of Chipping Norton – where the likes of the Beckhams, Jeremy Clarkson, David Cameron, Blur’s Alex James and Kate Moss all have homes.

And there we found a particularly strong batch of cocaine on sale – for £100-a-gram.

This is significantly more than the street price paid in poorer or more urban parts of the UK, but apparently wealthy yummy mummies and high-flying city executives visiting their weekend retreat are happy to pay this amount.

It seems this market is happy to pay a £20-60 premium over the usual price for a gram because it is ‘high-quality’ – and because it’s the Cotswolds.

A dealer whom we identified via a tip off told us how he routinely sells his drugs to this type of very wealthy customer when we met him by agreement in the carpark of a supermarket in the town.

He is understood to be one of a network of street level dealers around Oxfordshire whose supply is dropped off weekly by a courier from Kent who uses the cover of a lorry driver job to disguise his true purpose.

Our source revealed: ‘The highest quality coke will be found where people have the most money and the super rich in the Cotswolds demand very high purity drugs.

‘Don’t forget this is where wealthy Londoners with second homes come to party, it’s basically Chelsea with hills.

‘So to fuel their weekends they’re happy to pay £100 a bag for the good stuff. They’re not going to hoover up any old rubbish.’

He went on: ‘In the old days the dealers at the top of the chain would import pure cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia or Peru and then cut it with other stuff, usually novocaine – which is what dentists use to numb your gums.

‘And as the product went further down the chain it was further mixed with baby teething tablets, aspirin and anything white that has a similar consistency.

‘But that simply won’t do in the Cotswolds. The cocaine in Chipping Norton isn’t cut with anything. If it was, people wouldn’t keep coming back and paying a premium.’

Our reporter bought five grams of Cotswolds cocaine for a bulk discount price of £350 – it would have been £100 if bought as a single gram (the most common single unit form the drug is sold as).

Subsequent testing at a lab in London proved that it did indeed have a very high concentration of the active narcotic – with no impurities detected.

But we later found that this high purity is by no means confined to the wealthy Cotswolds.

For example, we bought a gram of coke outside a gastropub in Brighton – this time paying £80 for powder which came in a folded National Lottery ticket – and which was later found to have a similar purity to that we had bought in the Cotswolds.

In the capital, 50 miles north of the Sussex seaside, our reporter was able to quickly arrange to buy two grams of cocaine from a dealer in fashionable Hoxton who was offering ‘top gear’.

After visiting several of the busy bars that line the streets of the bustling east-of-central area, we were instructed to meet a man in the back of a dark coloured Audi which pulled up on cue.

The Albanian driver asked: ‘What do you need?’ before offering a price list for his cocaine – £50 for a gram, £80 for two grams or £120 for three.

We paid cash for two small gram clear plastic bags.

And, although we would later discover that he had been disingenuous about the amounts offered – each ‘gram’ turned out to weigh just a little over 0.5 of a real gram – he had not lied about the quality of his offering: again the cocaine was uncut.

The Daily Mail has previuously met with an Albania drug dealer who boasted about how much money he is making by flooding the UK with cocaine.

Kosovan-Albanian dealer Erik told us he built a network of middle-class cocaine addicts by working in Oxford Street and Soho’s fancy bars. 

In Manchester, a half-gram priced at £50 was handed over to our reporter within fifteen minutes of texting a dealer’s number – a number we had easily found online.

Back in the Cotswolds, on its western borders in the market town of Cirencester, we were able to buy two grams of cocaine for £70.

For a further £30, we were offered a ‘bargain of the century’ three grams of the drug.

All it took to arrange the purchase was a phone call to the dealer, who arrived within 15 minutes at the arranged location in a residential street.

The reporter was beckoned inside a silver BMW, in order to make the cash deal.

After carefully counting our money and adding it to his wad of banknotes, the dealer placed the sealed sachet of cocaine in his cupped hand and passed it to the reporter sitting in the passenger seat.

‘Keep my number and give it to your friends’, he urged as the reporter left the car with the drugs.

Meanwhile, another of our reporters managed to obtain a precisely weighted gram of cocaine for £100 near the North Yorkshire market town of Thirsk, distributed by dealers based in Middlesbrough, Teesside.

The deal was brokered by a young man who actually warned that what we were about to buy was the strongest cocaine he had ever encountered.

‘I thought it would just give me a buzz, but instead it absolutely ruined me,’ he said. ‘I was messed up for 48 hours. I was convinced it had been cut with something because it was so different from the gear I’ve had in Manchester or London.’

In fact subsequent testing would confirm that the exact opposite was apparently true: it was because the drugs hadn’t been cut with anything that they affected him so much.

Indeed none of the drugs we bought and tested around Britain were found to show any ingredient other than cocaine.

We consistently found that it is almost as easy to obtain as a takeaway, with dealers advertising on social media and WhatsApp using combinations of emojis – like snowflakes – as euphemisms for the product they are offering for sale.

And the seismic shift in purity levels has coincided with the takeover of the cocaine market by gangsters from Albania – when previously it had been controlled by native British criminals like notorious Liverpool gangster Curtis Warren.

A case study example of how this has happened is provided again in Brighton – where in the last decade or so Albanians have taken over the city’s narcotics trade.

The first warning of this came in 2017 when a gang of nine Albanian drug dealers were jailed for ‘flooding’ the city with cocaine, with ringleader Mevlan Dema, 32, whose cover was his job as a catering manager, jailed for 13 years.

And now those coming before Brighton courts for dealing offences are increasingly from the eastern European country – most recently Ervis Doksani who was jailed in November following a National Crime Agency investigation.

Doksani, 22, was apprehended by armed NCA officers in Clarence Square, Brighton, on October 2 last year after surveillance teams had monitored a series of meetings which led them to suspect that he was dealing in drugs.

He was found with 12 deal bags each containing small quantities of cocaine inside a mint box and a cigarette carton.

A subsequent raid of his flat in Brighton uncovered a further 108 grams of cocaine, worth an estimated £7,000, some of which had been placed in a frying pan, along with approximately £1,000 in cash.

Last year Brighton and Hove City Council (BHCC) launched a plan to tackle drug abuse in the city by improving treatment and recovery services, and reducing the availability of illegal narcotics – but our findings suggest it remains easy to buy drugs in the city.

And the dealer we met there was, again, Albanian.

A source at a laboratory where some of our drugs were tested for purity told us: ‘Most of the cocaine in the UK now comes in via and is sold by Albanian gangs.

‘They reduced their costs significantly several years ago by taking over transport from South America. With this saving, the purity of cocaine in the UK increased and it seems they do not take kindly to down the chain dealers cutting their product with anything.

‘This may be why we are now rarely seeing anything other than pure cocaine itself in samples – and we rarely do with cocaine now.

‘There is also the fact that other drugs, like ketamine, have grown more popular with young clubbers recently and so making the cocaine stronger and cleaner is one way of keeping their customers onside.

‘Our analysis will detect pretty much any active ingredient present in the samples as diluents, adulterants or mis-sold substances. They won’t detect some of the inactive ingredients cocaine is sometimes cut with, such lactose and glucose. But these are harmless diluents.’

And the National Crime Agency also believes Albanian gangs – such as the London-based group known as the ‘Hellbanianz’ – are now the consolidating power within the UK criminal underworld and dominate the UK’s £5billion cocaine market, lowering the price of the drug and increasing its purity.

Traditionally wholesalers, often based in the Netherlands, as much of Curtis Warren’s network was, sold cocaine at £22,500 a kilo – until the Albanians started procuring cocaine directly from the South American cartels for as little as £4,000 to £5,500 a kilo.

Meanwhile production rates of cocaine in South America are already at record levels and increasing year on year – with Colombia alone now thought to have 253,000 hectares of agricultural land given over to coca growing.

The result of all this has been frequent massive shipments of the drug directly into UK ports, arranged by Albanian gangs, and then distributed out to their vast network of street level dealers.

While the cost of alcohol has soared, cocaine has become cheaper.

Before Covid, a gram of cocaine would typically cost £60-80 or more but now it is being touted for between as little as £30-50.

The Daily Mail has recently highlighted repeated anecdotal accounts of how cocaine is increasingly popular among the middle classes who formerly shunned the street drug scene as tawdry – with even school run mums succumbing.

And one of those Chipping Norton celebrities, Alex James, the bassist with Blur has previously told how he believes he personally spent as much as £1million on cocaine and champagne during his hedonistic band days.

But rock stars aside, perhaps no case better illustrated the new prevalence of cocaine among those who once would have shunned it than the sad death of Abigail Garside.

The 30-year-old was a veteran equestrian who had won the Ridden Heavy Horse Of The Year championship at the prestigious Horse Of The Year Show in 2019, among other titles.

And, as well as being a respected trainer, judge, and rider in the equestrian community, she was said to be happily married and looking forward to the future with an imminent move to Australia all arranged.

But last August she hanged herself in a park in Harrogate during a spa weekend to celebrate their first anniversary after arguing with her husband Samuel.

Mr Garside had said they were both ‘a bit drunk’ and had taken cocaine, something he admitted was ‘not out of the ordinary for either of us’.

Sarah Middleton, the assistant coroner for North Yorkshire, said at the inquest: ‘That weekend should have been special because it was her wedding anniversary.

‘You were in Harrogate celebrating, you had a lovely day. You went to the spa, celebrated with Champagne, had some food, had some drinks.

‘Alcohol was consumed and you may have taken some cocaine. Abigail took cocaine as well.

‘There was an argument in a bar….’

Northallerton Coroner’s Court heard Ms Garside had not intended to take her own life following the row, but had tragically acted under the combined influence of alcohol and the cocaine.

Having heard details of how she then took her own life in the early hours, Ms Middleton added: ‘Abigail was a girl who loved life. She loved her husband, she was planning a life in Australia and loved her animals.

‘She had no chronic health conditions, no regular medications and no mental health issues at all.

‘She had everything to live for.’

Mrs Garside had earlier that day shared images on social media of the couple clinking Champagne glasses in a hot tub, writing: ‘Lovely day in Harrogate celebrating our first wedding anniversary with my love.’

Mr Garside also marked the milestone online, sharing wedding photographs and writing: ‘1 year since you became my wife!! I love you more and more every day, happy anniversary.’

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people in over 100 countries, has found that the UK is now the largest consumer of cocaine per capita in Europe.

A 2023 report found that 2.7 per cent of adults aged 15 to 64 take the drug at least once a year.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) say that powdered cocaine is now the second-most popular drug in Britain, after cannabis.

Meanwhile the NCA estimates that England, Scotland and Wales consume 117 tonnes of the drug per year – enough to ‘fill a football stadium’.

Analysis of wastewater suggests that consumption grew by 7 per cent between 2023 and 2024 alone.

Britain’s problem with cocaine is getting bigger – and more dangerous.