“See I’ve been thinking, the thing is. Ah fuck, man, it’s like this. If cocaine was free everything would be fucking great, wouldn’t it? I mean, imagine it; everywhere you go there’s free coke. You go to bars and there’s just a table full of the stuff. Fuck. Imagine it, whole mounds sitting with everyone’s name on it, like it’s public domain.”
“What, you mean like Happy Birthday?”
“Happy what?”
“Public domain like Happy Birthday… The song…”
“Na mate, The Warner Brothers own it.”
“Fucking Disney.”
Or so the conversation often goes whilst one half of your numbed face dries out. You sit on the edge of your seat actively clasping your hands wondering whether anyone really gets you, thinking that probably they don’t and that’s just fine;
‘Cos I’m alright. Just look at all these people around me, listening to me talk about Happy Fucking Birthday. Shit. I bet none of them knew Warner Brothers owned it.
Fuck I’m smart. Maybe too smart… These fuckers don’t know me. Fuck ‘em.
Is my heart alright? It’s beating fast.
Man, I’ve got a cool name.
Yeah, it’s fucking fine. I’m gonna have another line. I’ve got a strong heart. I ain’t gonna have a heart attack. They might, but I won’t. Fucking losers.
And with that you inhale whatever concoction of white chemicals has been cut up before you, the snot stained wet end of a rolled tenner tickling your nose hairs. You tilt your head back, open your eyes dramatically slowly and purse your lips. Your mouth’s dry and the beer is falling through your insides. You’re drunk-not-drunk and desperately unfulfilled, but then what else can you do but carry on now?
Welcome to any given night on Europe’s best selling Class A. The drug of choice for the rich and famous, ballet dancers, football fans and the down and out much alike. Though the poor like it boiled with bicarbonate of soda so they can smoke or inject it. The poor – what a bunch of losers.
Manufactured from the simple coca plant indigenous to South America, cocaine is a tropane alkaloid, a voltage gated sodium channel blocker, a blood-brain barrier breaker-downer, and your best mate until the morning after.
Weaving it’s magical powers to conversate, cocaine stimulates the ventral tegmental area of your brain causing it to create more dopamine, and to feel more happy. Normally ‘transporter’ molecules come around and clear away the dopamine after a while, which is why we’re not over the moon all the time, but cocaine also prevents these ‘transporters’ from doing their job. Excess dopamine in your synapses sends an amplified signal to your receiving neurones which process your feelings of pleasure and joy, and so you feel high.
Cocaine is so smart.
But this is also why it’s addictive. This amplification of what neuroscientists call ‘The Reward System’, creates a differential in happiness levels meaning that in order to feel that good again you need more and more frequently.
Effectively cocaine manufactures a sense of pleasure and happiness in your brain, making you feel really excessively great about everything you do, whilst teaching your brain to recalibrate the way that you understand what happiness actually is on a chemical level.
Cocaine is so a dick.
But whatever, food does the same thing. So does sex. All things stimulate your dopamine levels causing a spike, resulting in you feeling depressed about all things thereafter. Just had excellent, depraved sex that ripped through your body in a visceral combination of desperation and desire? Good. Now feel shit about yourself for the next ten minutes.
Enjoying all that ice-cream you’re eating? Great, now feel like a fat turd for a while and consider making yourself throw up.
Everything does this and really there’s no way to hide from the fact that we’re constantly fighting a battle between cheerfulness and depression, whether it be through two-inch long white granular lines, or a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra.
But it isn’t this fight that really ought to be bothering us. It’s the far more thrilling, society destroying fight that keeps packets of powder reaching the shores of Britain every day from Latin and South America that we really ought to spend a minute considering.
Farmed by the poor (AKA losers), 95% of global cocaine production comes from Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where the climate surrounding the Andes provides a perfect environment for a good crop. This constitutes an estimated 1,250 tonnes of the stuff a year. Though how trustworthy this estimation is, is for you to decide as it’s data extrapolated from American seizures which supposedly sees around half of the coke produced not going to market. The real amount is probably considerably higher.
It’s also interesting to consider that in the mid-60′s cocaine seizures were measured in the tens of kilograms annually. This was the case until the 80′s when a huge surge in a jacket’s shoulder height also saw an annual increase in cocaine seizure of 40%, quickly becoming tonnes, and then hundreds of tonnes. The estimated worth of the cocaine industry is now around $70-$90 billion, or $500 billion depending on who you trust and how they come to these conclusions. Either way it’s billions of dollars and far more money than you can actually consider.
Now, due to the fertility of the land, and the fact that production is worth so much money, there have been arguments over who controls which bit of land and who they report to for decades. Big arguments. Big arguments with guns and knives and bombs and torture and rape. But we’ll come back to that.
Let’s, for a moment, take a look at Colombia. A country twice the size of France, it has a population of around 47.5 million and a capital called Bogota. It also has an extremely troubled history marred by the government’s inability to police rural farmland or control the two warring factions of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (“Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia”) or FARC and M-19 (the 19th of April Movement so named because of a fraudulent election held on the 19th of April 1970).
Spiralling out of control, hundreds and thousands were killed by and between these two factions creating drastic economic instability and a faithless populous, and giving rise to a wealth of narco-paramilitary groups who found that they could make a lot of money out of desperately bored Westerners by manufacturing cocaine. In the 1980′s the government sought to step up interdiction of the cocaine trade and restore faith in their people. So the drug wars began.
Looking to increase their influence over lands and the trade, as well as fighting off the police forces that were trying to stop them manufacturing cocaine, narcotics producers sought to take control of Colombia and in 1989 declared total and absolute war against the Colombian government.
Earning around $60 million dollars a day at their peak, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel began assassinating politicians including presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, and blowing up cars all over the place, murdering and injuring hundreds and thousands of civilians so that they could continue exploiting the farmers who produced their coca leaves.
What the Medellin Cartel and others like them achieved was to create a climate of fear that pervaded Colombia for decades, and which has only in recent years seen a decline due to advances in the detection of laboratories and unyielding police force. Though this slackening in cocaine production has been taken up by neighbouring countries The Republic of Peru and the Plurinational State of Bolivia, which is nice.
Talking figures, between the years of 1990 and 2010 there were 450,000 murders associated with the cocaine industry. That’s an average of 61 people a day. In Colombia alone. In Mexico the same figure is around 30 people a day.
This isn’t to mention the amount of people whose bodies are never found; the gang violence between dealers in Europe and North America; the traffickers who never make their destination. Bolivia. Peru. Brazil. The emerging “narco-state” Guinea Bissau. Miguel Arroyave. Those injured, kidnapped. The children whose mothers and fathers are killed, whose lives are completely destroyed by the need for us to fabricate a fleeting sense of joy that all our comforts; our internet porn and freezers stocked with ice-cream, don’t give us.
“Oh yeah. That’s what I was saying. Yeah. Fuck, man. If coke was free I’d just do so much of it. I’d be all like …uhhhhh [Spanish Accent] Cocaine? Yes please.”
“Yuuuuh.”
“And there wouldn’t be all that baking powder and lactose and talcom powder, or benzocaine or Boric acid, or dimethylterephthalate in it. Just puuuure coke man.”
“Die what?”
“Oh, it’s used to produce polyester and stuff. But just imagine, fucking coke fucking everywhere. That would be so sick.”
“Yeah man, that would be sick.”
You bounce your knee up and down and fiddle with an unlit cigarette.
“Then there would be no dramas. No drug wars man. Fuck, no one would die because everyone would be like fuck that. You know. Fuck that shit. I don’t want to kill anyone. Fuck are you crazy?… It would be cool. But I mean, I would if I had to.”
“…What did you say?…”
You sit back and chew your lip for a while, thinking about something else to say with fervour. Thinking about something you think, or have thought. You think about your life and the things you want to do. Think about funny things. Think about yourself.
You don’t want to consider any of these facts or figures. You don’t want to think about the dead hands that have touched your drugs. You don’t want to think about the nations crippled by decades of civil war and unrest that have allowed you to fork over the fifty or so quid to your dealer for a neatly folded scrap of paper. And why not?
Because cocaine is all about you.
All about you in that it creates a sense of purpose in all the fleeting thoughts that flood your mind daily. Instead of letting them pass by unnoticed your brain picks them up and places them on a pedestal, because you feel so goddamn great. It’s about convincing yourself that what you think is right and the best thing to think and that people need to hear about it.
But it’s more than that.
It’s about you reading this right now. You, the market. You the idolatrous self serving citizen of the world. It’s your hopeless whimper, your boastful self-aggrandisment. Your money. Your life. Your dreams and aspirations forged in the white lie of one white line. It’s your fictitious faith in yourself that chimes in with petty pardons for your self fulfilling prophecy.
It’s that feeling of not feeling your face. It’s the poor dead losers who sit at the bottom of ditches so you can sit at the top of your high castle.
It’s death. It’s a lie, and it’s miserably selfish.
But fuck it, who cares? At the end of the day, you’re fucking great.
“Want another line?…”