Oh, mainstream media, you never cease to amaze us. Following on from such face-palmingly misguided moments in which major media outlets have pole-vaulted onto their high-horses about drugs in club culture such as the infamous Herald Sun beat-up about cocaine now being cheaper than heroin, Sydney’s Sunday sheet The Sun-Herald has jumped into the fray with a startling report detailing how drug use has been moved from nightclubs and into the backseats of Sydney cabs. Dun-dun-dun!

The news story comes from this past weekend’s Sun-Herald, with reporters Eamonn Duff and Mia Burns launching an investigation into the rise of clubbers pre-gaming with substances on the way to nightspots in Sydney. The pair of journos managed to canvas the experiences of 75 Sydney taxi drivers with ‘two-thirds’ of the cabbies quizzed revealing that they’ve been witness to drug use by passengers in their own cabs.

“I saw a guy in the back seat taking ecstasy tablets, and another time a girl in the front seat was taking pink tablets. She got all hot, started taking her clothes off and jumping around,’’ cab driver Abdul Quyum Khan told the paper. ‘’Another time a guy was using needles and injecting himself but it was too late for me to kick him out as we were already on the freeway.”

As well as ecstasy, cocaine use is apparently high amongst en-route partiers, with many drivers sharing their horror stories with the Herald.

“My street directory has been used by passengers several times for drugs. I had one group request a tissue to clean the front cover. Then they took it in turns to snort lines of cocaine off it,” one cabbie said. “They offer you lines of coke as though it’s the norm, like they’re mints,” explained another.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a media frenzy without a poorly-informed commentator adding their two cents to the discussion, a role filled in this case by taxi blogger (?), Adrian Neylan. “Sometimes it seems that Sydney after dark runs on ecstasy…And these days cocaine is quickly catching up as the drug of choice. The … club scene with its pounding beats and trance-like music is basically catering to pill poppers, GHB sippers and coke snorters.”

Full marks for that one! So what’s caused taxi cabs to become so-called “mobile havens for drug use”? Well, the report points the fingers at state police efforts to curb in-venue usage, with one cabbie saying, “It’s become too risky for people to carry drugs into nightclubs so they’re downing them in cabs before they reach the door.”