A few weekends ago, I attended a good friend’s 50th birthday party in a luxury country cottage. One girlfriend took care of the fizz, another organised the Daylesford Organic food delivery.

And I was entrusted with bringing the most important ingredient for our celebrations. Not the cake, but the cocaine.

Five little packets, to be precise, each costing £50 for a gram. The six of us ploughed through it all over two gloriously long nights.

We consumed most of it on the Saturday, after the birthday meal. That’s when most middle-aged people start thinking about sloping off to bed but we were buzzing and danced into the early hours, ending up in the hot tub.

As shocking as it might sound, I’ve been using cocaine for 25 years. In fact, not a single month has gone by when I haven’t snorted the drug. Not for nothing am I known as Hell’s Bells.

Now 50, I have a high-powered marketing job and am happily married to my surveyor husband, also 50, with a 22-year-old daughter. We have a cottage in south-west London with a gravel drive and a pistachio-green front door and a gorgeous bolthole in Portugal, too. In short, we are the epitome of middle-class privilege.

My partners in crime are much the same: they include a TV director, a banker and even an NHS executive. All successful, upstanding members of the community… save for this one illegal habit that we can’t quite give up.

You’d be right to be shocked given what we’re doing is against the law. But we’re far from alone in being middle-aged, middle-class drug users.

Cocaine deaths have hit a record high thanks to a surge of middle-aged users, the so-called ‘silver snorters’

For though cocaine is normally associated with young City workers and clubbers, figures released last month showed cocaine deaths have hit a record high thanks to a surge of middle-aged users, the so-called ‘silver snorters’. 

It’s a somewhat bleak picture. The downsides of cocaine are well-documented, from terrible comedowns that leave me feeling nauseous and irritable for days, to nasal disfigurement and the aforementioned risk of dying as a result of your habit.

I realise I’m very lucky that I’ve never experienced anything worse than a bad nosebleed over a white dress.

So why do I take the risk?

Well, the whoosh it releases inside my brain makes me feel alive. I honestly feel invincible. Unlike alcohol, which dulls the senses, cocaine sharpens mine.

I adore the ritual that comes with it. The feeling that you’re part of a special, select club – the discreet passing round of the wrap with the powder inside feels exciting and daring.

How did I end up in thrall to a class A drug? After all, I’d grown up in a loving family home, both my parents are still together and my older brother works in banking. There was no need for me to push the boundaries in my life. Or was there?

I first tried it when I was 20 at a party in Norwich of all places. Pressured into it by friends, I was knee-knockingly nervous, convinced I’d keel over and die.

Cocaine is normally associated with young City workers and clubbers, but is also used by middle-class workers 

But I enjoyed becoming a more gregarious version of me. I didn’t find myself craving it the next day – but after that I did use it whenever the opportunity arose.

By the time I moved to London in 1995, I was a regular social user. Though I never considered myself an addict, nights out began to feel pointless without it, something which should have rung alarm bells.

I soon discovered that when you’re a single girl in London, you don’t need to buy it either. Men offer it to you in the same way they’d offer you a drink. The only time I stopped using the drug was when I was pregnant with my daughter in 2002. I told myself the fact I could stop meant I wasn’t addicted.

I’d met her father through work and his was very much a take-it-or-leave it attitude towards drugs. The first time I took it again was when my daughter was six months old and weaned from breastfeeding. 

Understandably, my partner wasn’t very happy about it, but despite his very valid concerns it felt good to reclaim that part of ‘me’ again.

I made it very clear to him that my social life wouldn’t end just because I had become a mum.

His hadn’t – so why should mine? Little wonder we split by the time our daughter was four.

Though our break-up wasn’t down to my drug use, we both wanted our social lives to continue as if we weren’t parents. My career went from strength to strength. I had carved out a niche in media marketing, where networking and cocaine use went hand in hand. This was the early Noughties when everyone was taking it.

Not everyone agreed with my lifestyle choice, though. An old school friend invited me for dinner and, when I arrived, two other friends from school were there to ambush me. 

Over prosecco, they told me, ‘You act like a boorish idiot when you take it, repeating the same things over and over again’ and ‘You turn into someone we don’t like.’

One even called me an addict. At this point I stood up, refusing to listen to any more accusations, with a ‘How dare you?’ I flounced out, telling them I didn’t need their judgment on how I lived my life. 

When I got home, incandescent, I blocked the lot of them. I wasn’t willing to admit that they had a point, and clearly had my best interests at heart in trying to get me to stop using a drug that does so much harm.

I was in my early 30s when I split with my daughter’s father, and 38 when I met my husband Eric at a party in Los Angeles; a fellow Brit, we made a beeline for one another. And we did do some lines together, too. The sex we had that night was incredible.

That’s the thing about cocaine – it dampens your inhibitions. Doubtless the drug is a large part of the reason why we’re together.

After our wedding ten years ago, we travelled, going to cocaine-friendly locations such as Colombia. My use of cocaine has increased, ironically, since I’ve become a ‘respectable’ wife.

Not all of our holidays have been a success, though. We ended up with such terrible cocaine in Barcelona – it hurt my throat and nose badly – I shudder to think what was in it. Things could have ended very differently that night. But it didn’t put us off.

I’ve never totted up how much money I’ve snorted away over the years. But when the estimate came through for our new dream kitchen recently, I realised if I hadn’t spent thousands on cocaine, we wouldn’t have needed a loan to cover the costs.

Not that I beat myself up about it; a decent bottle of champagne is £70, after all.

Now my daughter is an adult I have been honest with her about my drug use. She wasn’t surprised, but she worries about me, which I understand but find irritating nonetheless.

I’ve taught her the motto: everything in moderation. I know she’s tried cocaine, too, but it’s not something she’d do regularly and she certainly wouldn’t take it with me and Eric.

I know I should worry it might lead her down other paths, but we’re not that kind of family.

As for me, after all these years, I can’t see myself stopping. Cocaine is, as with many other middle-class mothers my age, just my thing.

Helena Beech is a pseudonym. Names have been changed.