MADRID — Around dawn on a Sunday, packs of young people are huddled at stoplights, or ambling down Paseo del Prado.
Despite the hour, the day isn't just beginning for them. Like thousands of young Spaniards, they are ending a long night of hard-core partying that very likely included the unbridled snorting of cocaine.
At crowded clubs and throbbing bars along Madrid's Gran Via, and on side streets radiating from the Puerta del Sol, the city's heart, a gram of coke is casually sold for 50 euros -- about $79 -- and quickly consumed in restrooms or nearby parked cars.
"It's easier to get cocaine than to get a library card," said Gustavo Rodriguez, a 31-year-old business student, recalling his nocturnal carousing before he went into rehab.
Spain has become the top consumer of cocaine in continental Europe, according to a recent European Union study on drug use. By a United Nations count, 3% of Spain's adult population consumes cocaine; that's a bigger percentage than the erstwhile leader, the United States, at 2.3%.
Among younger age groups, the number of Spanish users has doubled, even quadrupled, during the last decade, the statistics indicate.
Part of the reason for the dramatic increase is that Spain is the primary transit point for cocaine smuggled into Europe from Latin America. In cargo ships and on airplanes, hidden in machine parts, frozen octopus or just about anything else, tons of cocaine arrive at Spanish and Portuguese ports every month.
And you can't be a transit point forever without eventually sampling the goods.
It was a similar story a couple of decades ago for the world's top producing countries, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia; for years they boasted of being free of drug addiction in their own populations -- they merely grew and processed the stuff and shipped it onward. But it didn't stay that way.
In Spain, the rise in consumption is also linked to a swift transition in Spanish society. In barely one generation, this nation of 40 million moved from a long, repressive military dictatorship to a dynamic, youthful democracy with (until recently) a vibrant economy.
With Spaniards' newfound freedom came a cultural reawakening and fast-paced change, an era called La Movida that also gave way to permissiveness and a breakdown in traditions. And though some of the hedonism of the '80s has evolved into something a little more sophisticated, a fresh crop of young Spaniards won't let go of a firmly held compulsion for frenzied celebration of the weekend.
