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When I embarked on my MSc in Development Studies two years ago, the secretary at my university told me that the course is greatly oversubscribed. This didn’t surprise me. When I told members of my parents’ generation that I was taking Development Studies, they looked confused and asked, “developing what?” But when I told my peers, they invariably responded: “Cool!” I am part of a trend. A craze is sweeping my generation. We’re all desperate to live ethical lives.
Those of us who aren’t studying Development, volunteer in Latin America or Africa. When we must work for money we carry clipboards for Concern on Grafton street or build websites for Amnesty International. We buy clothes at Oxfam, chomp Fair Trade chocolate, go for the organic milk.
As trends go, it can’t be the worst. But as trends tend to be, it’s superficial. And when it’s not superficial, it’s a recipe for paralysis.
Here I stand, a bundle of paradoxes. I drink Fair Trade coffee, but I drink it from a disposable cup with unnecessary cardboard holder and plastic lid. I drink Fair Trade coffee and try not to think about the fact that most Fair Trade contracts actually pay less to producers than the market price. I separate my rubbish for recycling and don’t question the vast amount of energy that recycling it will use; the contribution that recycling my rubbish will make to the hole in the Ozone layer. I try to buy cosmetics that aren’t tested on animals but I’m not quite brave enough for a moon cup. If I choose organic food, it’ll have notched up thousands of environmentally unfriendly air miles to get to me. And I’ll gleefully notch up thousands of air miles myself in order to do volunteer work in some developing country on the other side of the globe. I return a beautiful, and beautifully cheap, Oriental dress to a high street shop, having read an article in the New Statesman about the exploitation of poor Chinese workers that allows us to have cheap clothes. Later I ponder the life of prostitution that faces those who aren’t lucky enough to have badly-paid jobs in clothes factories. Should I go back to the shop and buy five dresses? What do you do? How can you win?
Some choices are simple, though. That’s why I don’t think much of another trend that has been wending its way through the Dublin of my generation for a little while now. In the wake of the Kate Moss ‘scandal’ (Shock! Horror! Celebrity indulges in celebrity lifestyle!) the Irish media has been reporting breathlessly on cocaine use in the city. The price of cocaine in Dublin is dropping, the Sunday Tribune says, and almost 10 million euro worth enters the country every week. And, although it was always its high price that made it a status drug, it’s showing no signs of going out of fashion.
I don’t think that my circle of friends are as blasé about cocaine as they are about hash just yet. But then, unlike hash, it’s not really something you pass around at a house party, so it’s harder to say how much of an eyebrow-raiser it is. Certainly I know cocaine users, and none of them are particularly outrageous people. They’re no different from, or less accepted than, my friends who drink alcohol, those who puff away at nicotine sticks, those who prefer ‘funny’ cigarettes or pills, or those slightly awesome friends who manage to negotiate the social whirl on nothing harder than a glass of orange juice. And it does seem to me that I know substantially more cocaine users than I used to.
At a pot-luck picnic, I produced a large bottle of Diet Coke (one of many vices to which I can personally lay claim). Several picnickers rejected it on the grounds that Coke is ‘evil’. One of them is a dedicated trade unionist. He certainly approved, a couple of years ago, of the decision by students at my university to boycott Coke, over claims that the company bore responsibility for the murder of trade unionists who worked at a bottling plant used by Coke in Colombia. But he only very recently stopped using cocaine – and when he told me why, he didn’t mention Colombians. He said that he was growing weary of the crazy, wasted nights.
Now, this simply doesn’t add up. Why go to the effort of having Fair Trade coffee with your free-range eggs in the morning, and boycotting Nestlé and Proctor and Gamble all day, only to spend your evening with a drug that finances the deaths of thousands of Colombians annually? In the last two years an average of almost 70 people a day have been murdered in the conflict fuelled by cocaine.
Sir Ian Blair made London’s left-leaning upper middle class very uneasy when he pointed out this contradiction. He said he’d happily raid the Groucho club, and implied that cocaine use was equivalent to buying oranges from apartheid South Africa or taking a holiday in Burma. But it hasn’t come up much in the Irish media’s feigned horror at Dublin’s love of charlie. It’s something we
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Writer Profile
Ailbhe Darcy
Ailbhe Darcy was born in Dublin and currently lives in Cambridge. She has published poetry widely in Ireland and Britain and will make her US debut with a poem in the next issue of The Cortland Review. She writes critically for a number of journals and websites and co-edits an online journal of new Irish art and writing at www.moloch.ie.
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Comments
Angus Lambkin | Oct 1st, 2008
seems to be a gap in the market for a dealer with farm to flim traceability
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