The Reason that, although I Adore the Exhilaration of Cocaine, I don't do it any more, and might even Refuse it now if it were offered to me, is, simply,

that I don't at all like myself when I'm stoned on cocaine.  You see the left-hand white-bitch figure in the so-exquisite, infinitely campy Mucha poster, portraying the Goddess of Coca(ine)?--full of disdain, snottiness, derision and utter self-absorption:  That is me when I'm stoned on cocaine. You see the humble, suppliant, brown-skinned native kneeling before her?  That is everybody else, as far as I'm concerned, when I'm high on cocaine. It isn't just that I blush, when I reflect, appalled, on the assholery I've committed when I was high on coke, it's that I feel a strong need to leave the country and hide out in a monastery in a foreign land for a couple of decades, till the panic of shame and self-loathing has subsided.