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Notes -
Weirdly I would say rich young people want cocaine to be expensive. If you could buy coke at 7-eleven for the price of a Red Bull it wouldn’t be a status symbol having the coke in the club/after-party but a lower class stimulant.
Anything can be a status symbol if it comes in an expensive, fancy bottle.
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"How expensive drugs are" has little to do with how likely the children of billionaires are to experiment. "How likely you are to be arrested and prosecuted for simple possession" has a lot to do with it; we like to think of 18-20somethings as thinking they're invincible, and they certainly have a high tolerance for risk, but upper class kids are actually keenly conscious of living in a zero sum competition to stay at the top of the ladder. I'll bet this kid would never dream of getting a hooker because of the legal risk(which seems like it's probably not that high), despite being young and male and probably wanting some casual sex, because he knew getting prosecuted for solicitation would leave him with a permanent record. Putting drugs in that basket is at least theoretically a thing that strict drug laws can do.
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Rich young people still smoke weed though, and that’s cheap now.
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