Tis the season to be jolly and for many people that means lots of parties and plenty of white powder. If recent figures for the rising consumption of cocaine in Britain are right — Britons now consume more coke than any other European nation — I suspect that for every couple grabbing a kiss under the mistletoe a dozen more will be behind closed bathroom doors huddled over a rolled banknote. But not me. I’ve decided that it’s time to say no.

God knows I’ve done my fair share of coke over the years. But it hasn’t been a regular part of my life since the mid-1980s. Since then I can count the number of lines I’ve had on one hand. Okay, maybe two.

But now I quit and it isn’t for the usual reasons: the expense, parenthood or just getting too damn old. No, this time I’m quitting because I believe that the cocaine trade is one of the great evils of our time. In buying coke you are handing over money, power and legitimisation to the most violent and corrupt forces in Latin America and, increasingly, to the drug gangs that roam and kill in this country. Put simply, your coke pleasure is built on other people’s pain and misery.

There was a time when I would have said there was nothing worse than an ex-coke head lecturing people to stop doing a drug they once did. But last week I realised that there is something worse — and that’s an ex-coke head who remains silent because he fears being labelled a bore.

I’ve always known that the coke trade was run by dodgy people. But last week the extent of it came home to me when I read about Olinda Giro, 20, a Colombian who at the age of 17 lost her sight when she stepped on a landmine, planted by a cocaine cartel to protect their crops. It’s something that happens often in Colombia. In Britain in 2003 a seven-year-old girl, Toni-Ann Byfield, was shot dead by a gunman who had just killed her coke-dealing dad. A life for a few lines?

We who grew up in the Sixties were the generation to make the use of cocaine fashionable. (Before then, in the 1920s, it was confined to Mayfair debutantes and doomed aristocrats.) Coke’s modern fashionability began with the success of the film Easy Rider in 1969. It featured two motorcycle-riding dealers played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. As a result of that film we all thought coke was cool — the outlaws’ drug.

But we had no idea that one day it would spread so contagiously and wreak such devastation. People like me are being mugged so addicts can pay for a drug I once thought was cool. So in the spirit of the season of goodwill to all men I thought I might try to do a little bit of good by getting people to join me in my ethical stand to stop taking coke.

My first attempt was with Yummy Mummy. A former actress/model in her mid-forties, she has two children, an ex-husband and a nice house in the country. Yummy was once a serious coke user but tells me, “since I became a mum, I hardly do it any more”. During the party season she expects to give herself a “little treat: a few lines”.

So I begin with the moral case. I point out that last year more than 1,000 innocent people were killed or maimed by cocaine production related landmines and that 65% were children. “As a mother,” I say, “don’t you have a moral obligation not to give money to people who kill children?”

“Of course,” she says. “But when you’ve had three glasses of champagne at a party, landmines don’t exactly come to mind.”

“Okay,” I tell her, “what about stopping on health grounds? They spray terrible pesticides on coke crops, and even cancer-causing chemicals like phenacetin. And listen to this — Professor John Henry, a leading drug expert, has said, ‘People need to know that not only can you die from first use but that you’re also going to end up with arteries like a 60-year-old and have brain damage’.”

Mummy seems moved. “How awful! I don’t see why they can’t make organic cocaine. And thank heavens no man will ever see the state of my arteries!”

My final point was to try to appeal to her as parent. “If you take coke what will you say to your children when they say, ‘Mummy, you took it, so why can’t I?’”