How the Alex Jones ‘Cocaine Train’ Took Off, and Why People Believe It

It often takes just one offhand remark, misinterpreted picture, or joke that doesn’t land to start a conspiracy theory that subsequently never goes away. We’ve seen it happen time after time – World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein’s comment that the firefighting team working to save WTC 7 should be “pulled” serving as “proof” that the building was a controlled demolition, John Kasich mistakenly saying John McCain was “put to death” rather than “laid to rest” being “proof” he was executed, a very stupid joke by Joan Rivers about Michelle Obama being transgender sparking over a decade of conspiracy theories that she’s actually a man, and so on.

Sometimes this happens organically, but many times it stems from a conspiracy influencer seeing or hearing something and deciding it actually is something else – usually something they can use to drive traffic to their website or product.

So it went on Sunday May 11, when Alex Jones announced on Twitter that he had broken a “DEVELOPING SCANDAL,” which was a short snippet of a video that he claimed showed three world leaders getting blasted out of their minds on cocaine while meeting the media on their way back from meeting with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv.

When conspiracists deliberately mistake a tissue for a stash of cocaine

Despite the numerous assertions of Alex Jones, the “bag of coke” was not a bag, nor did it contain cocaine. A cursory analysis of the video showed that the “bag of coke” was a crumpled-up used tissue that Emmanuel Macron hid, with a little bit of embarrassment on his face. And the “coke spoon” was likely either a stirring spoon or a Bamboo Knot cocktail pick.

But conspiracy theories like this aren’t designed to stand up to scrutiny. They’re designed to be shared in anger and loathing, which generates income for their originators. And this one was shared big time, getting over ten thousand retweets in its first day of existence.

Jones spent most of his Sunday show touting his “discovery,” while the story started to draw pushback from skeptics who pointed out that Macron was clearly hiding a tissue. It even received blowback from other conservatives who claimed Jones was making them look like fools. For his Monday show, Jones mentioned “cocaine-gate” only once, but when other conspiracists starting turning against him, he went back on the offensive, structuring much of his Tuesday show about the non-scandal, and declaring “of course that’s cocaine on the table” and hinting that the drug use by Europe’s leaders would contribute to a nuclear war.

Tracing the trajectory of a big lie

In the case of “cocaine-gate,” it’s too early to tell if this is a conspiracy theory that will stick. Given the trajectory of other instant-boil conspiracy theories of the past few years, it likely won’t. It used to take time for a conspiracy theory to worm its way into our brains, but that timeline has now crunched years into days, and we are hit with so many of these things that many never get a chance to take root before they’re replaced by something equally absurd.

But “will anyone remember this in a week” might not even be the right question to ask. The right question, like most other conspiracy theories, is why did people believe this in the first place? Surely, some people were sharing the video out of curiosity or disgust. But it’s clear that many people believed that the most powerful politician in France was hurriedly hiding a bag of blow that he’d accidentally left out – just one thread on r/conspiracy on Reddit has hundreds of affirmative comments agreeing with the hypothesis.

Feeding theories about ‘decadent western elites’

The idea of the leaders of Europe using cocaine while making life-and-death decisions fits in with the general idea that Jones and other far-right propagandists have been pushing for years: these are elites who live in worlds of decadence that the rest of us will never set foot in. This is a huge part of what made QAnon take off: it promised the downfall of the power brokers who waste our money on weird rituals and Satanic ceremonies and drug-fueled anti-family mayhem while the rest of us suffer and fight over scraps.

This one “works” in particular because Jones and his ilk have spent years alleging that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is some kind of drug addict who’s “obviously on methamphetamine and so many other drugs,”  while he orders more helpless Ukrainians to die. It’s a huge part of the opposition to western funding of Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and is all over the media output of conspiracy influencers. To these people and their fans, Putin is the bulwark against evil, and the decadent west is the evil – though it’s fascinating that all of the references to Zelenskyy being a drug addict came after Russia had invaded his country.

And he’s instilled his value system into his fans, pumping out hours-per-day of paranoia and conspiracism, all meant to explain why the have nots have nothing and the haves have everything, how they’re trying to destroy the west and the family and freedom, and how you can stop it by sharing Alex’s videos and buying Alex’s products.

Cocaine conspiracies and selling mouthwash

That is literally what a huge part of his show is about – buying supplements and shirts and survival equipment. Just the 2024 episode where he claims Zelenskyy is “obviously on methamphetamines” features Jones mentioning his “products” dozens of times, overprices wellness shit like “nano super blue toothpaste” and “Ultimate Turmeric Formula” and “Immune Gargle Mouthwash.”

So when people get agitated about the “drug use” of European leaders, they’re really just serving themselves up as marks for the long-running con game of the far right influencer sphere: come for the outrage, stay for the products. In that sense, it doesn’t matter at all what Starmer and his cohorts were doing or not doing. As long as you’re angry about the potential of them doing something, you’re in the right spot to mainline more Infowars and purchase more Infowars swag.

The final question to ask about the “cocaine” clip is also probably the least meaningful: who started it? French journalists tracked the initial conspiracy theory to a French-language comment under a video of the meeting on X mentioning “white bags” on the table. The theory spread throughout French social media on Saturday, May 10, until it crossed over to English on the 11^th. The first major account to pick it up probably was antivaccine and wellness influencer Dr. Simon Goddek, whose one million followers would have seen the following tweet, posted at 6:31 on Saturday morning (Pacific time):

This is the real danger of conspiracy theories like “cocaine-gate.” It’s not that they’re out there, it’s that they are easily worked into existing plots to help perpetuate them. Jones will have moved on from it soon, but it will have become one more example of how the elite ruling class is depraved and evil, and one more thing that the masses “only know” because of the courage of truth tellers like Alex Jones – courage you can support by buying his products.