The self-importance of being a coke-addled rock'n'roll star

This year's T in the Park festival in Scotland (the sister festival to our own Oxegen) will be hosting stalls set up by drugs advisory bodies warning about the perils of cocaine use.

The warnings won't be of the usual "it's illegal/bad for your health" variety but instead will focus on how "every last gram of cocaine is soaked with innocent blood". By drawing attention to the murder gangs involved in the distribution of cocaine, the authorities are hoping to appeal to the conscience of cocaine users by rebranding it as an "unethical" drug.

That's all very good, but I would hope that proportionally more stalls are set up backstage so that all the acts on the bill can be educated about the criminal provenance of the drug that rock musicians so love to snort (or, as in the case of one well-known band, fabricate an addiction to the drug just to "toughen up" their milksop image).

Given the enthusiasm with which most rock bands indulge in cocaine and given the general solipsistic nature of yer average rocker, you can't help thinking that appealing to the conscience of people who engage in unconscionable acts almost daily just won't work.

There is one compelling argument, though, for musicians not to do cocaine and that argument, which can be supported by empirical evidence, has it that cocaine use and music simply don't add up on either a commercial or creative level. Cocaine-fuelled albums (of which there are plenty) are execrable, potentially career-ending affairs.

Some of the very best albums ever released have been written and recorded while the artists have been whacked out on drugs. You can start with all the great heroin jazz albums from the 1950s and work your way up to today's bunch of snorters and pill-poppers. Most bands will talk openly about what they were ingesting at a particular stage in their career and how that particular substance directly impinged on the type of music they were making. For a while, particularly during the punk/New Wave years, it was almost de rigueur to record your debut album while staying awake for days/weeks on speed.

As bands progress, though, their choice of drug tends to get a bit more refined and this is where the real musical damage is done. Noel Gallagher is a self-admitted poster boy for what cocaine can do to a band's music - and their career. After the global success of (What's the Story) Morning Glory, he began taking cocaine by the bucketload. Oasis's third album, Be Here Now, was, at the time of its release, heralded as their masterpiece. Gallagher believed this because he had developed that cocaine mindset which allows you to convince yourself that black is actually white and bad is actually good.

Be Here Nowwas a dog of an album. "It's the sound of five men in a studio on coke, not giving a fuck," admits the now cocaine-free Gallagher. "There's no bass to it at all, the songs are too long and the lyrics are shit."

Bloated and over-heated (much like the band themselves at the time), the album has all that dreadful braggadocio that is so characteristic of a cocaine user. At the time, Gallagher thought his songs were so world-beatingly amazing, he wanted to make it a double album and was only talked out of this by his eminently sensible manager, Marcus Russell.

And, for conclusive proof that cocaine and rock music should never mix, consider the fact that when Oasis came to release their 18-track greatest hits album Stop The Clockslast year, not one song from the cocaine-addled Be Here Nowmade the cut.