Cocaine Nights Quotes

I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake up in the middle of the night and begin to realise, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.

Put a higher value on yourself. Being hyper-realistic about everything is too simple a get-out.

Yes, we gave her drugs - we wanted to free her from those sinister clinics up in the hills, from those men in white coats who know best. Bibi needed to soar over our heads, dreaming her amphetamine dreams, coming off the beach in the evening and leading everyone into the cocaine night.

I’m not going to let go of you. I’m going to hold you all night. So go ahead and feel whatever you feel. If you’re still craving cocaine, go ahead. You’re safe. You can crave it all you want, but I won’t let go, and if you still feel like you can’t trust yourself in the morning, and it’s what you want, I’ll drive you to rehab myself. Okay?" ~ Max

...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.

We're building prisons all over the world and calling them luxury condos.

Booze makes you stupid and like it. It makes you fall around and not care. And eventually, stupid is the only way you know how to be. Cocaine makes you feel important, that life matters, that you matter. That the music is better than it really is. That every conversation is profound and that all pretenses have been stripped away. Ecstasy makes you dance all night and love your friends so much, in a way that you've never been able to tell them about before. Acid makes you see pretty colours and makes things breathe. But Sadness, there is nothing like Sadness.

They're listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light.

She glanced at her watch, reminding herself who she was.

The white façades of the villas and apartment houses were like blocks of time that had crystallised beside the road.

Religions emerged too early in human evolution — they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end. Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We're fascinated by that "other world" where everything is possible.

Once I thought I saw you in a crowded hazy bar, Dancing on the light from star to star. Far across the moonbeam I know that's who you are, I saw your brown eyes turning once to fire. You are like a hurricane There's calm in your eye. And I'm gettin' blown away To somewhere safer where the feeling stays. I want to love you but I'm getting blown away. I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream, You could have been anyone to me. Before that moment you touched my lips That perfect feeling when time just slips Away between us on our foggy trip. You are like a hurricane There's calm in your eye. And I'm gettin' blown away To somewhere safer where the feeling stays. I want to love you but I'm getting blown away. You are just a dreamer, and I am just a dream. You could have been anyone to me. Before that moment you touched my lips That perfect feeling when time just slips Away between us on our foggy trip. You are like a hurricane There's calm in your eye. And I'm gettin' blown away To somewhere safer where the feeling stays. I want to love you but I'm getting blown away. The song was written in July 1975 after Young had just undergone an operation on his vocal chords after a cocaine-fueled night with friend. "We were all really high, fucked up. Been out partying. Wrote it sitting up at Vista Point on Skyline. Supposed to be the highest point in San Mateo County, which was appropriate. I wrote it when I couldn't sing. I was on voice rest. It was nuts - I was whistling it. I wrote a lot of songs when I couldn't talk.

You taste of the sea, of clocks, dark nights, of everything that is soothing and prohibited. Of dawn in the eyes, falling snow and destiny.

Crime and vandalism are everywhere. You have to rise above these mindless thugs and the oafish world they inhabit. Insecurity forces you to cherish whatever moral strengths you have, just as political prisoners memorize Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, the dying play Bach and rediscover their faith, parents mourning a dead child do voluntary work at a hospice.

At home I’m a night owl. When I’m away, I’m more like an insomniac who just mixed a bunch of cocaine into some Red Bull and took a spin on a mechanical bull.

Loving you is kissing the night, exposing the scars, words in flames, for every drop and for every life.

Amy ran on sugar, caffeine, and pain pills, and would sacrifice an entire night of sleep to level up a character in one of her games. The people with health insurance get antidepressants and Adderall, the rich get cocaine, the clean-living Christians settle for mug after mug of coffee and all-you-can-eat buffets. The reality is that society had gotten too fast, noisy, and stressful for the human brain to process and everybody was ingesting something to either keep up or dull the shame of falling behind. For those few who truly live clean, well, it’s the self-righteousness that gets them high.

The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but your rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush.

The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp... 'You'll curse the insects,' he said at least, 'and you'll curse the natives... The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You'll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you'll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine... it's a sort of madness...

Bad luck, bad luck – the idea entertained itself, fattened, came to fruition. They took cocaine in breakneck quantities against the idea of the bad luck. They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. The need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

When it happens and it hits hard, we decide certain things, and realize there's truth in all those dark, lonely days" He had an instantaneous look about him, a glimmer and a glint over those eyes, he knew how the world worked, and took pleasure in its wickedness. He would give a dime or two to those sitting on the street, he would tell them things like: "It won't get any better," and "Might as well use this to buy your next fix," and finally "It's better to die high than to live sober," His suit was pressed nicely, with care and respect, like the kind a corpse wears, he'd say that was his way of honoring the dead, of always being ready for the oncoming train, I liked him, he never wore a fake smile and he was always ready to tell a story about how and when "We all wake up alone," he said once, "Oftentimes even when sleeping next to someone, we wake up before them and they are still asleep and suddenly we are awake, and alone." I didn't see him for a few days, a few days later it felt like it'd been weeks, those weeks drifted apart from one another, like leaves on a pond's surface, and became like months. And then I saw him and I asked him where he'd been, he said, "I woke up alone one day, just like any other, and I decided I didn't like it anymore.

The Doper's Dream Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in To a bubblin' hookah so high, When all of a sudden some Arab jinni Jump up just a-winkin' his eye. 'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me. As for words I was trying to grope. 'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige me By turning me on to some dope!' With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand, And we flew down the sky in a flash, And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me Was a whole solid mountain of hash! All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills, Whur the Romilar River flowed by, To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow, So pretty that I wanted to cry. All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion, Mourning glories woven into their hair, Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine, All their dope they were eager to share. We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin', In the flowering Panama Red, Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea, And those brownies so kind to your head. Now I could've passed that good time forever, And I really was fixing to stay, But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man, And he busted me right whur I lay. And he took me back to a cold, cold world 'N' now m'prison's whurever I be... And I dream of the days back in Doperland And I wonder, will I ever go free?

Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.

being is one day and a million nights. the blood on the glass, blood lust with the sun holding. the universe beats for the lost and found. with you.

Compared with the addiction to perfect forms, cocaine is a pastime for stationmasters. But

When you were strung out and I kissed you I imagined your mouth a mound of cocaine, inhaling your breath like powder as I pushed into you and you pulled me with your bruised thighs. Some nights we fucked so slowly I dissolved like a Quaalude in a glass of vodka, and you drank me down. We kept the room dark, so we could not see each other with our eyes rolled back - or was it because we did not want to see ourselves. It's taken me too long to think of that, the way we never thought the other would go, and then one night I woke up sober and yes, still there.

Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition, a tonic to those for whom doubt and introspection serve no purpose. No accident that it replaced psychedelics in the Woodstock Generation’s stash boxes as flower children turned into young professionals.

He said, Remick, I could say things to you in the night that you would never fucking recover from. They lived together for a while in the district of Gràcia. They drank too much and too late. They fought with venom and skill. They smoked rock cocaine. They fought like drunk gorillas.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!

That first year in L.A., Richard became addicted to cocaine. It was 1978, and coke was the “in” drug, selling for $100 per gram. This was prior to the Colombian cartels applying modern corporate techniques to the importation and distribution of cocaine in the States, which brought the price of a gram down to thirty-five dollars by the mid-eighties.

I never knew cocaine to improve anything. When the white lines came out, it was time to call it a night: the music could only get worse. If I joined in, the next day's playback would provide clear evidence of the deterioration of both the performances and of my critical ability to judge them. I suspect that the surge in cocaine's popularity explains - at least in part - why so many great sixties artists made such bad records in the following decade.

Think, Carter. Use the “little grey cells”, as Agatha Christie’s Poirot says in the stories. All the great detectives spent time reflecting on the case. Remember Sherlock Holmes playing his violin far into the night.’ ‘And injecting himself with cocaine?’ interjected Steph. ‘You won’t be doing that, will you, sir?’ she asked cheekily. ‘No,’ replied Oldroyd. ‘The similarities between myself and Conan Doyle’s creation are few, apart from our brilliantly perceptive minds.

The tattoos around his eyes burned as he scanned the surrounding area. No one but him probably noticed, but the plumes of darkness branching in every direction were writhing and groaning, desperate to avoid the light of the moon and street lamps. Come to me, he beseeched them. They didn’t hesitate. As if they’d merely been waiting for the invitation, they danced toward him, flattening against his car, shielding it—and thereby him—from prying eyes. “Freaks me out every damn time you do that,” Rowan said as he crawled into the front passenger seat. For the first time, Sean’s friend had accompanied him to “keep you from doing something you’ll regret.” Not that Gabby had known. Rowan had lain in the backseat the entire drive. “I can’t see a damn thing.” “I can.” Sean’s gaze could cut through shadows as easily as a knife through butter. Gabby was in the process of settling behind the wheel of her car. Though more than two weeks had passed since their kiss, they hadn’t touched again. Not even a brush of fingers. He was becoming desperate for more. That kiss . . . it was the hottest of his life. He’d forgotten where he was, what—and who—was around him. He’d never, never, risked discovery like that. But that night, having Gabby so close, those lush lips of hers parted and ready, those brown eyes watching him as if he were something delicious, he’d been unable to stop himself. He’d beckoned the shadows around them, meshed their lips together, touched her in places a man should only touch a woman in private, and tasted her. Oh, had he tasted her. Sugar and lemon. Which meant she’d been sipping lemonade during her breaks. Lemonade had never been sexy to him before. Now he was addicted to the stuff. Drank it every chance he got. Hell, he sported a hard-on if he even spotted the yellow fruit. At night he thought about pouring lemon juice over her lean body, sprinkling that liquid with sugar, and then feasting. She’d come, he’d come, and then they could do it all over again. Seriously. Lemonade was like his own personal brand of cocaine now—which he’d once been addicted to, had spent years in rehab combating, and had sworn never to let himself become so obsessed with a substance again. Good luck with that. “I’m getting nowhere with her,” Rowan said. “You, she watches. You, she kissed.” “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” Gabby’s car passed his and he accelerated, staying close enough to her that anyone trying to merge into her lane wouldn’t clip his car because they couldn’t see him. Not that anyone was out and about at this time of night. “She’s mine. I don’t want you touching her.” “Finally. The truth. Which is a good thing, because I already called Bill and told him you were gonna be the one to seduce her.” “Thanks.” This was one of the reasons he and Rowan were such good friends. “But I thought you were here tonight to keep me from her.” “First, you’re welcome. Second, I lied.

It would take me all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned, not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on.... there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties — gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another, there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers.... He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and, wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience....

It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing. I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life. I found a shopping bag in the break room and packed up my coffee mug, the spare change of clothes I kept in my desk drawer along with a few pairs of high heels, panty hose, a push-up bra, some makeup, a stash of cocaine I hadn’t used in a year. I thought about stealing something from the gallery—the Larry Clark photo hanging in Natasha’s office, or the paper cutter. I settled on a bottle of champagne—a lukewarm, and therefore appropriate, consolation.

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last. His mother had been crazy for a while, had believed that the phone was ringing when it wasn’t, had conversations with dead children who weren’t there. Sometimes he felt she had talked more with dead children than she ever had with him. She had burned down their house. She spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, skipped out on a court appearance, and dropped out of Wayne’s life for almost two years. She spent a while on book tour, visiting bookstores in the morning and local bars at night. She hung out in L.A. for six months, working on a cartoon version of Search Engine that never got off the ground and a cocaine habit that did. She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to. Wayne’s father got sick of Vic’s drinking, Vic’s wandering, and Vic’s crazy, and he took up with the lady who had done most of his tattoos, a girl named Carol who had big hair and dressed like it was still the eighties. Only Carol had another boyfriend, and they stole Lou’s identity and ran off to California, where they racked up a ten-thousand-dollar debt in Lou’s name. Lou was still dealing with creditors. Bruce Wayne Carmody wanted to love and enjoy his parents, and occasionally he did. But they made it hard. Which was why the papers in his back pocket felt like nitroglycerin, a bomb that hadn’t exploded yet.

My parents died one after the other my junior year of college—first my dad from cancer, then my mother from pills and alcohol six weeks later. All of this, the tragedy of my past, came reeling back with great force that night I woke up in the supply closet at Ducat for the last time. It was ten at night and everyone had gone home. I trudged up the dark stairway to clean out my desk. There was no sadness or nostalgia, only disgust that I’d wasted so much time on unnecessary labor when I could have been sleeping and feeling nothing. I’d been stupid to believe that employment would add value to my life. I found a shopping bag in the break room and packed up my coffee mug, the spare change of clothes I kept in my desk drawer along with a few pairs of high heels, panty hose, a push-up bra, some makeup, a stash of cocaine I hadn’t used in a year. I thought about stealing something from the gallery—the Larry Clark photo hanging in Natasha’s office, or the paper cutter. I settled on a bottle of champagne—a lukewarm, and therefore appropriate, consolation.

The good intentions of Weekend are exactly what Brody finds frustrating: these are simply people, not stand-ins for some impossibly noble ideal that the corporate gay community longs for and embraces—that upbeat and (yes) bland role model in which everything’s constantly experienced through the lens of identity politics and ideology, and with rules on how people should express themselves within a certain range of propriety. Some in that adamant community took issue with Weekend at initial screenings—according to IFC, who released it—and wished the movie had been more “gay positive,” worrying whether the guys were using condoms and concerned about the amount of weed they smoked, and the beer they drank, and cocaine they shared on Saturday night—on top of which they actually disagreed (blasphemy alert) about the importance of gay marriage. It seemed that some in the smiling corporate gay community blindly refused to understand the movie on its own terms. As A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, “Weekend is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era.” The shock of Weekend is that there is no political cause at the heart of it.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop complaining about Hollywood values. It's Oscar time again, which means two things: (1) I've got to get waxed, and (2) talk-radio hosts and conservative columnists will trot out their annual complaints about Hollywood: We're too liberal; we're out of touch with the Heartland; our facial muscles have been deadened with chicken botulism; and we make them feel fat. To these people, I say: Shut up and eat your popcorn. And stop bitching about one of the few American products--movies---that people all over the world still want to buy. Last year, Hollywood set a new box-office record: $16 billion worldwide. Not bad for a bunch of socialists. You never see Hollywood begging Washington for a handout, like corn farmers, or the auto industry, or the entire state of Alaska. What makes it even more inappropriate for conservatives to slam Hollywood is that they more than anybody lose their shit over any D-lister who leans right to the point that they actually run them for office. Sony Bono? Fred Thompson? And let'snot forget that the modern conservative messiah is a guy who costarred with a chimp. That's right, Dick Cheney. I'm not trying to say that when celebrities are conservative they're almost always lame, but if Stephen Baldwin killed himself and Bo Derrick with a car bomb, the headline the next day would be "Two Die in Car Bombing." The truth is that the vast majority of Hollywood talent is liberal, because most stars adhere to an ideology that jibes with their core principles of taking drugs and getting laid. The liebral stars that the right is always demonizing--Sean Penn and Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins, and all the other members of my biweekly cocaine orgy--they're just people with opinions. None of them hold elective office, and liberals aren't begging them to run. Because we live in the real world, where actors do acting, and politicians do...nothing. We progressives love our stars, but we know better than to elect them. We make the movies here, so we know a well-kept trade secret: The people on that screen are only pretending to be geniuses, astronauts, and cowboys. So please don't hat eon us. And please don't ruin the Oscars. Because honestly, we're just like you: We work hard all year long, and the Oscars are really just our prom night. The tuxedos are scratchy, the limousines are rented, and we go home with eighteen-year-old girls.

In addiction, this means that because being addicted escalates wanting more than liking, the drug experience gets deeply carved into your memory. Anything you can associate with achieving a drug high, you will. As a result, when you try to quit, everything from a spoon (you could use it to prepare drugs) to a street (this is where the dealer lives!) to stress (when I feel like this, I need drugs) can come to drive craving. Desire fuels learning, whether it is normal learning or the pathological “overlearning” that occurs in addiction. You learn what interests you with ease because desire motivates. In contrast, it’s far more difficult to learn something you don’t want to understand or care to comprehend. Berridge and Robinson’s research also helps resolve another paradox: If dopamine signifies pleasure, then the brain should become less and less responsive to it as tolerance to a drug develops. But while tolerance clearly does occur, the opposite result is also seen in the brain. As I took cocaine, paranoia began to set in at lower and lower doses—not higher ones. The summer of 1988, it also took increasingly less drug to achieve the state of heart-pounding anxiety and mortal dread that I experienced so frequently. Neuroscientist Marc Lewis described his experience of this effect in his addiction memoir this way: “I kept pumping [cocaine] into my vein, this non-sterile solution, until my reeling consciousness, nausea, racing heart, and bloated capillaries told me that death was near. Later that night, I begged myself to stop.… But the urge would not relent.

My sisters and I giggled at “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” (“Tits and ass / bought myself a fancy pair / tightened up the derriere”) while our parents sat in the front of the car—my father at the wheel, my mom in the passenger seat—both distracted and nonplussed. We flipped through the Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins hardbacks in my grandmother’s bookshelf and watched The Exorcist on the Z Channel (the country’s first pay-cable network that premiered in LA in the mid-’70s) after our parents sternly told us not to watch it, but of course we did anyway and got properly freaked out. We saw skits about people doing cocaine on Saturday Night Live, and we were drawn to the allure of disco culture and unironic horror movies. We consumed all of this and none of it ever triggered us—we were never wounded because the darkness and the bad mood of the era was everywhere, and when pessimism was the national language, a badge of hipness and cool. Everything was a scam and everybody was corrupt and we were all being raised on a diet of grit. One could argue that this fucked us all up, or maybe, from another angle, it made us stronger. Looking back almost forty years later, it probably made each of us less of a wuss. Yes, we were sixth and seventh graders dealing with a society where no parental filters existed. Tube8.com was not within our reach, fisting videos were not available on our phones, nor were Fifty Shades of Grey or gangster rap or violent video games, and terrorism hadn’t yet reached our shores, but we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults. No one cared what we watched or didn’t, how we felt or what we wanted, and we hadn’t yet become enthralled by the cult of victimization. It was, by comparison to what’s now acceptable when children are coddled into helplessness, an age of innocence.

All the substances that are the main drugs of abuse today originate in natural plant products and have been known to human beings for thousands of years. Opium, the basis of heroin, is an extract of the Asian poppy Papaver somniferum. Four thousand years ago, the Sumerians and Egyptians were already familiar with its usefulness in treating pain and diarrhea and also with its powers to affect a person’s psychological state. Cocaine is an extract of the leaves of Erythroxyolon coca, a small tree that thrives on the eastern slopes of the Andes in western South America. Amazon Indians chewed coca long before the Conquest, as an antidote to fatigue and to reduce the need to eat on long, arduous mountain journeys. Coca was also venerated in spiritual practices: Native people called it the Divine Plant of the Incas. In what was probably the first ideological “War on Drugs” in the New World, the Spanish invaders denounced coca’s effects as a “delusion from the devil.” The hemp plant, from which marijuana is derived, first grew on the Indian subcontinent and was christened Cannabis sativa by the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in 1753. It was also known to ancient Persians, Arabs and Chinese, and its earliest recorded pharmaceutical use appears in a Chinese compendium of medicine written nearly three thousand years ago. Stimulants derived from plants were also used by the ancient Chinese, for example in the treatment of nasal and bronchial congestion. Alcohol, produced by fermentation that depends on microscopic fungi, is such an indelible part of human history and joy making that in many traditions it is honoured as a gift from the gods. Contrary to its present reputation, it has also been viewed as a giver of wisdom. The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a tribe in the Near East whose council of elders would never sustain a decision they made when sober unless they also confirmed it under the influence of strong wine. Or, if they came up with something while intoxicated, they would also have to agree with themselves after sobering up. None of these substances could affect us unless they worked on natural processes in the human brain and made use of the brain’s innate chemical apparatus. Drugs influence and alter how we act and feel because they resemble the brain’s own natural chemicals. This likeness allows them to occupy receptor sites on our cells and interact with the brain’s intrinsic messenger systems. But why is the human brain so receptive to drugs of abuse? Nature couldn’t have taken millions of years to develop the incredibly intricate system of brain circuits, neurotransmitters and receptors that become involved in addiction just so people could get “high” to escape their troubles or have a wild time on a Saturday night. These circuits and systems, writes a leading neuroscientist and addiction researcher, Professor Jaak Panksepp, must “serve some critical purpose other than promoting the vigorous intake of highly purified chemical compounds recently developed by humans.” Addiction may not be a natural state, but the brain regions it subverts are part of our central machinery of survival.

The most prominent feature in the park itself was an inexplicable thirty-foot-tall mountain of white near the center. Some college-age kids were digging into the side. “Beer Mountain,” said Andre. “Twenty tons of chipped ice, ten thousand bottles of beer embedded throughout. Partiers just dig ’em out as the night goes on. Can’t tell from here, but it’s in the shape of Mt. Rushmore, only all four heads are Arthur.” “Thank god, for a second I thought it was cocaine.

I’m off the morphine now,” he said. “Thankfully, I’m on nothing stronger than a little cocaine in the mornings. It helps with the headaches.

alcohol kills 17.6 times more people than cocaine every year.141 If we look at drunk driving, the statistics are horrific. Every night and weekend one out of ten drivers on the road are intoxicated, and alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death among young people.142 Half of all fatal highway accidents are alcohol-related.143 Imagine if a Boeing 747 aircraft carrying five hundred people crashed, killing all its passengers, every eight days. That is how many people die every eight days as a result of drunk driving.

former engineer turned militia leader whom I’d described as a mix of Che Guevara meets Somali pirates. I spent the bulk of my three weeks in eastern Congo at my hotel bar—the preferred meeting ground for aid workers and the militia leaders who were supposedly the source of all the troubles. The drinks at the hotel were as expensive as those at any bar in New York or London; the bartender told me that on most nights, if he wasn’t careful with his pours, he could empty nearly every bottle and would have nothing for the end of the week. “It’s the cocaine,” he said, which was cheap and all but worthless in the domestic market. Before leaving, I managed to spend several nights

Oh, you need to get paid. I understand.” By this time I had walked around and jumped back into my truck. Luther had followed me outside and was looking at me through the window. He stuck his arm in and placed something in the front pocket of my T-shirt with a smile. He saw the box of cigars on the dashboard and grabbed them. ”Let me get one of these.” He said it like a little kid tearing into a crackerjack box, smiling from ear to ear as he took both the remaining cigars I had and handed me back an empty box. I tossed it onto the passenger seat. I had tried one the night they were given to me, but I wasn’t much of a tobacco smoker, so half of that one sat in my ashtray. Turned out they were Cubans, illegal to buy or even possess here in the States. Hand rolled on the thigh of a Latin Queen in the heat of the Caribbean sun, a man could still taste her sweat. Not meant to smoke as much as to savor, it's said a man is suppose to fellatio a fine cigar like horny prom queen on a silk bed. For me trying to smoke one was like trying to go-down on a hooker in the bathroom of speak-easy. So the sheriff was welcome to mine.

Opium? No! Cocaine? No! The Great American Brain Killer Is Dance Music!’ – Portland Oregonian, 1932 T

It might make me seem more human at this point, which is to say more sympathetic, if I were to declare that I itched and blinked and nearly swooned with a feeling of unreality. Sorry. Not so. I confess to a ghastly lack in myself. Anything I see or hear or feel or taste or smell is real to me. I am so much a credulous plaything of my senses that nothing is unreal to me. This armor-plated credulity has been continent even in times when I was struck on the head or drunk or, in one freakish adventure that need not concern this accounting, even under the influence of cocaine.

For the rest of the night, the Amazon and I talked. Every now and then, she’d drag me to the bathroom, where I’d watch her inhale cocaine like a human Dustbuster. “Do

Nothing could have prepared him for this night, and if he survived, nothing would ever live up to it again. Not ten tours of Iraq. Not a hundred lines of cocaine. Death was watching him from every angle and yet he did not care. Jackie knew he was staring into the abyss, and yet he did not flinch.

A key member of the show’s production staff found that she had to stop smoking pot when she worked on Saturday Night—ironically, since it was the first job she’d ever had where she could smoke pot—because it made her too sensitive, too soft in dealing with all the people calling in who wanted something. With cocaine she found she could tell them no very efficiently, very fast, with no emotion whatsoever. “Coke,” she said, “takes the heart out of people. It’s irrelevant if you’re hurting somebody. It’s all what you want to get across at the moment and who you want to listen to you.

To support his cocaine habit, Richard committed scores of burglaries. Without difficulty, he was earning the money he needed for the cocaine—which was now between $1,200 and $1,500 a week. The fences at the bus terminal gladly bought whatever he had of worth, though they preferred televisions, stereos, jewelry, stamp collections, watches, any kind of gold, and diamonds.

Richard became obsessed with the rush and the feeling of power cocaine gave him. When he was on it, he felt strong, cunning, and invincible. Richard had seen Ruben using a needle since he was twelve, and it was an easy transformation from snorting cocaine to injecting it intravenously.

Mainlining cocaine is far different from snorting it. The drug goes right into the bloodstream all at once, causing an immediate, thunderous rush with the intensity of a speeding train. Cocaine stimulates the right side of the brain, where much that is dark and abstract about human nature resides, and with the drug saturating Richard’s brain, he was drawn further and further toward Satan and sadism. The drug became a key that unlocked a door behind which lurked nightmares in living color.

There were parties and long hot nights. There were trucks loaded with cocaine crossing the desert. There were Cessna planes flying low over the desert like the spirits of Catholic Indians ready to slit everyone’s throats. There were whispered conversations and laughter and narcocorridos as background music.

And you do choose these things. You choose to make yourself feel like an absolute fucking spineless, easily led pile of shit with a steaming hangover tomorrow morning. Maybe even tomorrow evening. The night is young, and I have so much cocaine in my bra.

The seventies were crazy everywhere, but crazier in Los Angeles. It was the era of freewheeling drugs and sex, the rag end of the sixties. I refer to sprees, to strange couplings and triplings, to nights that started with beer and wine and ended with cocaine and capsules, to debaucheries too various to chronicle. In a sense, we were all Robert Mitchum, smoking rope in bed with two girls while the sun was still noon high. We thought it was normal. You would walk into a house for a pool party, and there, on the cocktail table in the center of the living room, as if it were nuts or cooked shrimp, would be a platter of cocaine. We did it because we were stupid, because we did not know the danger. When I talk about my drug years, I am talking about twenty-four months in the middle of the seventies. I was in the rock and roll world, which meant I was around the stuff all the time. Of course, it was more than mere proximity. I was fun when I was high, talkative and all-encompassing. I could go forever, never be done talking. To some extent, I was really self-medicating, using the drugs to skate over issues in my own life. The fact is, money and success had come so fast, while I was away doing something else, not paying attention, that, when I finally realized where I was and just what I had, I could not understand it. There was this voice in my head, saying, Who do you think you are? What do you think you did? You are a fraud! You don’t deserve any of this! I tortured myself, and let the anxiety well up, then beat back the anxiety with the drugs, on and on, until one day, I stood up and said, “Screw it. That’s over. I’m done.” No rehab, no counseling, nothing like that. Just a moment of clarity, in which I saw myself from the outside, the mess I was making, the waste. I was slipping, not working as hard as I used to. I started leaving the office early on Fridays, then skipping Fridays altogether. Then I started leaving early on Thursdays, then arriving late on Mondays. I was letting myself go. Then one day, I just decided, It has to stop. I threw away the pills and bottles, took a cold shower, had a barbershop shave, and stepped into the cool of Sunset Boulevard, and began fresh. Maybe it had to do with my family situation. I was a father again.

- So what do you want me to do, Adam? I cannot be everywhere at the same time. I already have to be in three places at once, not just two. My Spanish is much better than it was half a year ago, but I am not native, Adam - I am not Catalan, I am not Spanish. - Alright, alright, alright. Jesus. - What do you mean, Boss Jesus? I am Tomas, the king of the Goys, not the Jews. - HAHAHA. Get serious now. This costs me money. - You’re kidding. You don’t even pay me a salary and my girlfriend is crazy about it. How do you want me to make over 10,000 Euros in net traffic a month if you are sending me to the same Estanco stores that never order and barely have any traffic, just wasting my time, Adam? - Mario made a lot of business with Estancos. - Bullshit, Boss. Mario, Mister Jerk Twister made monkey-business with a handful of Estancos. He sold a set of twelve crumble-cards with a free display in 2012 Spring and he never showed up again, they said. Was he even in Spain, Adam? - That’s not the point. - OK. So what is the point? - Mario made a lot of business. - Would you like to show me the total sum of wholesale figures Mario allegedly made in 2012, Boss? - No. - Because Mario didn’t make 10 000 Euros traffic in an entire year, Boss. Monkey-business. - You are spending 140 Euros on these two kids for the two catalogs and wasting time here with Rachel. - So do you want Rachel to stay here all night to laminate all this by herself, or may I help her so that we can give the catalogs to the two kids and we at least triple our potential tomorrow, so they can do sales, Adam, so they could go and visit all the Estancos as you wish? - Yeah, sure. - Thank you. Adam the tiny Estancos are seasonal and some of them don’t even keep our kinds of products they rely soley on tobacco sales, elder Catalan people. Clubs are opening at every corner, Adam and they need us to supply them with products. They won’t be so seasonal, they cannot rely on the tourism by law they cannot register walk-ins. - Cccc. They register anyone, what are you talking about? - No. Which club? - Club Alfalfa. The custom card client, Mario and Tom made in 2012. - Yeah, the marijuana club where there were two Police razzias both found cocaine twice behind the booth, so far. - But they are open again. Selling weed. - For how long Adam? How many times can they re-open after the Police had shut the club down twice already because of cocaine? How many members or employees they arrested, Adam? Would you bail me out if I go inside the wrong door one day, representing you?

At one particular moment, with my eyes closed, I was crying and asking the question over and over aloud, „Does true love exist? Does true love exist in girls? Does true love exist? Does Sabrina love me? Does true love exist? Does true love exist?” - I had suddenly seen a flash. As if I was poking the Devil in the dark, staring too long into the darkness until it looked back at me as they say. I have never told anyone about this before. I try to describe what I had seen that night in that windowless, dark, and cold place deep inside under that big, old building, with my eyes closed. It made a half turn, flashing one of its eyes at me for a moment before disappearing again into the dark. As if it was nodding to me, I still get goosebumps years later when I try to describe it. As if it had been standing there all along, and just tried to reassure me that it had heard my question and would answer. Quite close. Just to make me be quiet finally. His eyes were yellow and red. I'm not actually sure if it had two eyes; I only saw one of them. One Evil Eye. Perhaps he had lost an eye, that's why I had seen the light of only one of them. His eye was malicious, but not particularly. It was more tired and angry yet understanding, as if he had heard this question over a billion times before from fools like me and I did not amuse him with my question and demand. As if he was about to show me a trick he had known for a long time. As if Satan had seen it all already. He knows all the tricks, he invented them, he inspired them all. As if he was bored of humanity already. (There is only One Evil Eye. The planet Saturn.) I was cuddling with Adam's cat, crying a lot, asking the darkness, about Love, and reflecting on Sabrina. Perhaps it was merely an optical illusion. I leave it up to the reader to decide what they believe about what I was facing and how I miraculously survived, as an atheist goy, as well as who truly supported me throughout the ordeal. If anyone or anything supported me in Spain at all. I had seen an advertisement somewhere saying that Miss Kittin would be playing on Saturday night, November 16th, 2013 in Barcelona at The Marhes. Satan. Saturn. Saturday. Coincidence? Maybe. So far. Perhaps. I knew I had to see her again after such a long time; she had been playing drum and bass in the early 2000s across the globe, and also in Budapest. I checked the map; The Marhes was next to Camp Nou, the FC Barcelona stadium. I thought of buying a bottle of champagne, which I didn't like, unless it’s Italian, but I wanted to celebrate, and I would walk along Avenida Roma to get there straight. I knew I'd get drunk; I didn't want to drive, I wanted to arrive intoxicated. I re-posted the Miss Kittin party’s flyer, on Instagram, writing underneath it : ‘All roads lead to Rome.

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

The history of modern doping began with the cycling craze of the 1890s and the six-day races that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night. Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders’ black coffee. Brandy was added to tea. Cyclists were given nitroglycerine to ease breathing after sprints. This was a dangerous business, since these substances were doled out without medical supervision.

They pretended to be suspicious of certain individuals, detaining them so that others who did have cocaine hidden on them could go through. It was profitable to turn a blind eye to the packages, to play for time with the rest of us. Drugs pay more than intimidation. And inspiring fear has its pleasures.

purse. As she opened it, she saw a small edge of plastic poking out of the inner pocket. Pulling it out, she saw it was a small bag of cocaine from a party a few weeks ago, the night she had signed the contract for Socialites in the City. Looking at it for a moment, she rushed into the kitchen and, after tapping out a small amount, pulled out her credit card and cut it up, quickly and expertly. Making a thin line, she opened a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a packet of drinking straws. Cutting one in half and then half again, she bent over and snorted the line up her nose. She then turned on the tap, sniffing hard, and then ran her fingers under the water. Taking a few drops of water onto the back of her hand, she snorted the water into her nostril and massaged either side of her nose, stretching the skin and letting the drug absorb into her system. Violetta shook her head and felt the buzz begin. She checked her nose in the mirror and then smiled at herself. ‘Showtime,’ she said, plastering a smile on her face as she left for the party. *

He led the USFL with 28 sacks for 199 yards lost (both professional football records), but also led in manic mayhem. Early on during training camp, Corker—nicknamed Sack Man—gathered the team in a circle and guided the Panthers in prayer. “He started praying like a Baptist black preacher,” said Dave Tipton, a defensive tackle, “and I thought, Wow, Corker must walk with the Lord.” Not quite. Blessed with the world’s largest penis, Corker never shied away from showing it off to fellow Panthers. “The biggest johnson in the USFL,” said Matt Braswell, the team’s center. “We had women reporters come into the locker room, and Corker would position himself so he was in full view of any females. He had this vat of Nivea skin cream, and he would just make sure to completely rub it and moisturize it.” Corker operated on a clock that required only two to three hours of sleep per night, and was powered by the dual fuels of alcohol and cocaine. He kept a gun in his car’s glove compartment, missed as many meetings as he attended, and proudly pasted his pay stubs to his locker, so that teammates could marvel at the money he was being docked. Once, Hebert drove with Corker from Pontiac to Detroit for a promotional appearance. It was snowing outside, the roads were slippery—“and Corker was driving, smoking one joint after another,” said Hebert. “We both walked in reeking of pot.” In a USFL urban legend that actually checks out, Corker was once found naked on the ice at Joe Louis Arena in the early-morning hours. He had passed out, and spent so much time on the cold surface that some of his skin had to be ripped off. “That,” said Bentley, “surprised none of us.

Andrew C. Thornton II was a lawyer turned drug lord whose body was found with night vision goggles, a bulletproof vest, Gucci loafers, and a duffel bag containing approximately $15 million of cocaine, $4,500 in cash, six 1/10 oz. gold Krugerrands, knives, and two pistols.