The Lens

Cocaine.

Without thinking, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

I bet I can tell you where you are from.

If you think of Studio 54, scantily clad women, Tony Montana, parties, Wall Street, and rock and roll, I bet you are American. Or European.

If you think of an uncle you never met, killed when he was at the wrong club when a sicario sprayed it with bullets, or a cousin killed by a car bomb as she walked down a street. I bet you are Colombian.

It all depends on the lens you look through, the consumer or the provider.

I have long been fascinated by illegal substances, especially cocaine. Not because I do them. I have known for a long time to equate one gram of powder with one pint of blood. Even with my straight-edged white privilege, running with the usually higher educated, I have been offered my fair share and even unbeknownst to me at the time, most probably transported it. Twice. I am still haunted by what would have happened if I were swept up in an arrest. Yet, I am fascinated by it due to the logistics, the business models, and the business people that surround them. Even with penalties ranging from life in prison to immediate death, paraphrasing Thyisodes, some men are still attracted to danger. 

Whether it is Medellin, Miami, Marseille, or Moscow, people without prospects for a better life will do what they have to do to try to secure one. Even the cocaine traffickers themselves in the early days said this was a rich man’s drug; sold to the Hollywood elite and self-styled Wall Street Masters of the Universe. Having moved in a few Hollywood circles myself, I learned that pink cocaine was a party favorite of two very prominent celebrities at the time as my roommate knew their supplier. What the supplier did not mention was that it was pink because it was stored within dead fish being smuggled in from Mexico; blood was mixing with the powder. Quite an apt metaphor.

This all changed with crack, however. The rich man’s drug became the scourge of the poor. With little more than a coffee pot and some items from a grocery store, one kilo of pure Colombian white could be made into countless rocks to be sold cheaply and smoked quickly. This creates a faster and more intense high also causing it to dissipate more quickly, necessitating another boost in the very near future.

In my own life, I have seen what the drug game can do to people. I was shadowing my father during my freshman year of high school as he worked as a trauma surgeon in what I call a crack suburb of Philadelphia. He got a call that someone was coming that had been shot multiple times. I was in the Emergency Room watching him work, standing in the corner. There was some blood but not as much as I was expecting from someone with multiple gunshot wounds. This guy was shot through the belly and the back. My dad was able to stop the bleeding and then took him up to the Operating Room to remove the bullets and repair what he could. And I was right there every step of the way. He opened this gentleman’s belly, got what he could, stopped all the bleeding, and sewed up everything. However, when we looked at the x-rays together, we could see that there was a bullet lodged in one of the lower vertebrae of this man’s spine. He would never walk again. The cops said it was a drug deal gone sideways.

While the sea of blood that once tried to drown Medellin has washed up in places like Ciudad Juarez with the reins of the drug trade switching hands from the Colombians to the Mexicans, many people have said, if there was no market, there would be no violence. But what if the very supply of the product creates its own market? What if simply providing a product could make you and your family so rich, you could not spend all the money in a single lifetime? What would you do to protect this way of life, knowing that droves of people are coming for you and your family?

On the other side, is it because the government does not control the trade that makes it illegal? Look at the Opium Wars. Look at what occurred in Afghanistan. One of my tour guides, a local Paisa to Medellin said this: Americans are not evil, they are just ignorant. Perhaps, it goes beyond that. Some may be ignorant, but others know all too well.