Basel Tickt Anders…
December 8th, 2005This should serve as an update to High Tide, where we discovered that London is swimming in part-digested party powder. Just to clarify one point though, the substance in the river is not actually cocaine, but a waste product of coke's metabolisation through the body – Benzoylecgonin. By measuring the levels of Benzoylecgonin in river and sewage water, the weight of cocaine consumed per day can be calculated.
Intrigued by London's story, I looked around to see if any other cities' rivers had been analysed and discovered that they had. One of the rivers in question runs through my home town, so I feel compelled to share their results. [in English here] So that's 18,700 lines consumed a day in Basel, compared to 150,000 in London… For a bit of perspective, we should compare London's population with Basel's.
London. pop 7,465,100 (a true metropolis)
Basel. pop 200,000 (about the same size as York)
With a little bit of maths it is revealed that, per person, per day, the supposedly ultra-Conservative Swiss are consuming over 4 times as much bouncing powder as the Londoners. Consequently, there are an awful lot of Albanians driving Maseratis over here…
FURTHER UPDATE
Looks like the rest of Switzerland takes off into the mountains for a powder day. [English version]
1400 lines a day in Oberengadin, home to St Moritz – holiday village of the rich and famous. Unsurprisingly no action is planned and the local authorities are blaming the high test levels on Christmas time. If it had been tramps smoking skag in the toilets instead of beautiful people snorting angel dust there'd have been a dfferent reaction entirely…