NEWS: Age Blogs (All Men Are Liars) - 15/09/08 'Cocaine'

Cocaine
by Sam de Brito
16/09/08

Some weekends ago I went out for a quiet drink and got home at eight the next morning, having spent a thousand dollars on cocaine.

I rarely do drugs nowadays because when I do, I end up getting home at eight in the morning having spent a thousand dollars on cocaine. Call it poor impulse control.

On the Tuesday after my fall from grace, having successfully avoided razor blades, toasters in the bathtub and sunlight, I realised how much I dislike what cocaine does to me.

In 12 hours under its influence I lied to friends so I could have more coke, talked huge amounts of deep and meaningless shit, slunk around nightclub dunnies waiting to inhale, not to mention breaking the law ...

And then there was the creep factor: whatever restraint I usually exercise over my libido is cast aside once the devil's dandruff takes over - I can rationalise almost any perversity on the rack.

Which is not the drug's fault, the perversity has to be there, but when I'm straight it's easier to maintain them as fantasies; I can keep the creep at the back of his cave.

With cocaine, all bets are off; the creep moves to the front of the cave and throws rocks at passersby. I become, in short, the most repulsive of stereotypes - the rack head.

In his cult classic book Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade, Robert Sabbag writes that "cocaine is the caviar of the drug market ... to snort cocaine is to make a statement. It's like flying to Paris for breakfast."

Perhaps that was the case in New York in 1976 when Sabbag's book was published but in Australia, circa 2008, snorting the blanco diablo is like stumbling into O'Porto's for a chicken burger.

It's pedestrian, predictable and more to the point, boooooring, especially if you're at dinner with two rack daddies and their chicks, all who think they're fascinating, don't eat and spend half the night chopping up in the bathroom.

The pathetic thing about this sideshow is that nowhere in the world do you pay so much for so little.

There price of a gram in this country is anywhere between $250 to $400, news of which causes Europeans to shake their heads sympathetically, Americans to laugh mockingly and South Americans to phone home to shady relatives.

Then there is the terrible quality of the local product which makes dealers and nightclub connoisseurs raving about their "Ferrari" gear sound like shoeshine boys discussing the derivatives market.

Coke is everywhere at the moment: suburban pubs, the races, hen's parties, A-list events, Mad Monday celebrations, even weddings, where bride and groom prefer six hours on the rack to experiencing "the greatest day of their life".

The Australian Crime Commission reported a 635 percent increase in detections for 2006-07 (610kgs) compared to 2005-06 (83kgs).

This surge has also proliferated the urban myths perpetuated by coke's glass-eyed devotees; that it's non-addictive, increases men's sexual prowess, it's a clean drug that gives you no hangover, that it somehow attracts a 'better' type of user.

What it attracts is a type of man who uses 'Australia's greatest pick-up line' (white and eight cms long) to lure women into bathrooms for a game known as Happy Trails.

There, girls who 'hover' over toilet seats to avoid germs lick their fingers to swab public toilet cisterns for the last crumbs of booger sugar then loiter around these pseudo-Casanovas in the hope of a free bump that costs less than their cab fare home.

In the late 1800s, Viennese physician Emil Erlenmeyer, in response to his colleague Sigmund Freud's enthusiastic championing of cocaine, deemed the drug the "third scourge of the race" after alcohol and morphine.

Freud, who preferred an oral dose of pharmaceutical Charlie of between 0.05 and 0.10 grams dissolved in water, considered cocaine a wonder drug and wrote six papers on its virtues including the seminal Uber Coca.

However, street cocaine is far from the pure Freud gorged on and is often cut with anything from talcum powder, lactose, dextrose, speed, laxatives, clenbuterol, novocaine, procaine and Borax.

Yet still we pay, the reasoning being, "if it's selling it for $400 a gram, it must be cocaine" which also explains how diet teas and $500 moisturisers like La Mer find a market.

And then there's this chestnut: when you share a banknote to snort, you're also embracing the possibility of Hepatitis. The blood vessels in your nostrils can rupture doing any drug nasally so that curled $50 may also be buying you a lifelong case of liver trouble.

Comedian Robin Williams famously said: "Cocaine is god's way of saying you are making too much money" but I reckon its true character is that of moral disintegrator.

Says one anonymous poet: "It'll make a schoolboy forget his books, a beauty queen her looks, take a renowned speaker and make a bore, a mother and make her a whore."

It's an overpriced sham: If I can think of one benefit of cocaine, it's that it has single-handedly taught America the metric system.

Though you still have to buy gallons and pounds in the USA even the most strung-out coke bunny knows there's 28.3 grams in an ounce.

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js2k6 said:

lsd wins epicly over all other drugs

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Redleader said:

I never understood cocaine. It wasn't euphoric for me, and it made me have the most awkward dreams. I figured it to be the most overrated drug out there. And ya, I tried good quality stuff.

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Verybuffed said:

I enjoyed reading that, it was an entertaining and informative article.

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where bride and groom prefer six hours on the rack to experiencing "the greatest day of their life".

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