#EveryLineCounts: Cocaine recipe video asks users with 'social conscience' to consider real impact

The National Crime Agency claims users will be 'shocked' to discover cocaine's wider impact

The NCA say: 'Cocaine production is one of the most violent and environmentally destructive industries on earth' (National Crime Agency/ YouTube )

A major campaign aimed at cocaine users with a "social conscience" is highlighting the wider harm caused by the production and distribution of the drug.

Targeting recreational users, #EveryLineCounts from the National Crime Agency, aims to reveal how casual cocaine use can have devastating consequences for children, communities and the environment.

The NCA claims users who "care about social justice issues" will be “shocked” to discover the wider impact.

Launched on Wednesday, the campaign includes the animation “How to make cocaine” showing the negative sides of the cocaine trade from its production to its arrival in the UK.

The video cites the destruction of the rainforest, gun violence and organised crime as part of the wider devastation involved in cocaine trafficking.

Tony Saggers, Head of Drugs Threat at the NCA, said: “Recreational users, who perhaps care about the exploitation of workers in sweatshops or environmental abuses, often have no idea of the damage funded by their occasional line.

“We think many of them would be shocked by the reality. When they use cocaine, aside from putting their own lives at risk, they are feeding an industry which routinely uses death, violence and destruction in its production process.

“Buying cocaine funds the exploitation of impoverished people, destroys and pollutes large areas of rainforest, forces people from their homes so coca can be grown on their land, and results in the murder of police officers and others who stand in the way of powerful crime groups. Those harms are usually out of sight of the end user, and we don’t think they should be."

The annual social and economic cost of the UK’s drug supply is around £10.7bn, the NCA estimates.

More than 70 tonnes of cocaine has been seized around the world as a result of the NCA’s work between 2014 and 2015, the agency says.

The NCA’s campaign is also being supported by authorities in Colombia.

Major General Ricardo Alberto Restrepo, from the Colombian Anti-Narcotics Police, said: "We see criminal activities due to drug trafficking such as killings, extortion, theft, money laundering and smuggling.

"Each pound spent to buy drugs in the UK is money which will be used to buy firearms, which will kill policemen and women as well as other victims linked to drug trafficking.”

Earlier this year a report found Britain has the highest rate of cocaine use among young adults in Europe.

About one in 24 (4.2 per cent) of people between 15 and 34 in the UK admitted taking the drug in the last 12 months, figures for 2013/14 showed, the largest proportion of all countries for which statistics were available, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction found.