Cocaine White Quotes

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa.

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.

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

The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?" "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine-bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

Until you've got your mouth full of cocaine, you don't know what kissing is. One kiss goes on from phase to phase like one of those novels by Balzac and Zola and Romain Rolland and D. H. Lawrence and those chaps. And you never get tire. You're on fourth speed all the time, and the engine purrs like a kitten, a big white kitten with the stars in its whiskers.

You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?" "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine-bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

Off To The Races" My old man is a bad man but I can't deny the way he holds my hand And he grabs me, he has me by my heart He doesn't mind I have a Las Vegas past He doesn't mind I have an LA crass way about me He loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart Swimming pool glimmering darling White bikini off with my red nail polish Watch me in the swimming pool bright blue ripples you Sitting sipping on your black Cristal Oh yeah Light of my life, fire of my loins Be a good baby, do what I want Light of my life, fire of my loins Give me them gold coins, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Ready for you My old man is a tough man but He's got a soul as sweet as blood red jam And he shows me, he knows me Every inch of my tar black soul He doesn't mind I have a flat broke down life In fact he says he thinks it's why he might like about me Admires me, the way I roll like a Rolling Stone Likes to watch me in the glass room bathroom, Chateau Marmont Slippin' on my red dress, puttin' on my makeup Glass film, perfume, cognac, lilac Fumes, says it feels like heaven to him Light of his life, fire of his loins Keep me forever, tell me you own me Light of your life, fire of your loins Tell me you own me, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Now I'm off to the races, laces Leather on my waist is tight and I am fallin' down I can see your face is shameless, Cipriani's basement Love you but I'm going down God I'm so crazy, baby, I'm sorry that I'm misbehaving I'm your little harlot, starlet, Queen of Coney Island Raising hell all over town Sorry 'bout it My old man is a thief and I'm gonna stay and pray with him 'til the end But I trust in the decision of the Lord to watch over us Take him when he may, if he may I'm not afraid to say that I'd die without him Who else is gonna put up with me this way? I need you, I breathe you, I never leave you They would rue the day I was alone without you You're lying with your gold chain on, cigar hanging from your lips I said "Hon' you never looked so beautiful as you do now, my man." And we're off to the races, places Ready, set the gate is down and now we're goin' in To Las Vegas chaos, Casino Oasis, honey it is time to spin Boy you're so crazy, baby, I love you forever not maybe You are my one true love, you are my one true love You are my one true love

Endorphins were my cocaine and Lululemon pants were my rolled-up hundred-dollar bills.

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.

I still don’t think—“ Philip begins, but Bea seizes the pot of tea from the center of the table and dumps it in his lap. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Pip!” she says, grabbing him by the shoulders and shoving him, sputtering and yelping, toward the door. “So dreadfully clumsy. You know, i think all that cocaine I did must have really done a job on my reflexes! Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we?

There’s something else,” he said. “What?” “I wasn’t going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do this.” “Jesus, Jolu, what?” “I hate to say it, but you’re white. I’m not. White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they’re about to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always been like that for us.

The 1968 bugging issue revolved around a Republican initiative to undermine Johnson's Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War and brought home 500,000 American soldiers then fighting in Indochina. The Nixon-Agnew campaign, however, feared that this 'October Surprise' would catapult Vice President Hubert Humphrey to victory and again deny Nixon the White House.

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.

Dave, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie, was a felon because he was black, scared, desperate, and guilty. My student Cole, a heroin user and dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, is a college student because he's white, wealthy, scared, desperate, and guilty.

In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly. Once, after my fourteenth birthday, crouched between the seats of an abandoned school bus in the woods, I filled my life with a line of cocaine. A white letter “I” glowed on the seat’s peeling leather. Inside me the “I” became a switchblade— and something tore. My stomach forced up but it was too late. In minutes, I became more of myself. Which is to say the monstrous part of me got so large, so familiar, I could want it. I could kiss it.

I snatched up the papers and reminded him that it had been his idea. “But yes, thank God you didn’t manage to get me pregnant, Jonathan. A baby I didn’t want in the first place turning out to have a genetic predilection for cocaine and white jeans.” I left before he could say anything else.

If there are significant differences in the surveys to be found, they frequently suggest that whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color.11 One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.12 That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12–17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.13 Thus

Grant pressed his back against the outside wall of the turquoise and white two-story home he and a team of Miami PD officers were about to storm. On the surface the place fit in perfectly into the upper middle class neighborhood. On the inside, however, it was a fully functioning cocaine lab.

I checked my reflection. Not bad - Ralph Lauren in banker blue, professional, with a crisp white shirt. It probably wouldn't get me a date, but it said that I care, that I am serious about my work, and that I'm not interested in competing with my clients. The shoes, however, probably said more to me than about me. Right now they were saying, Hey, you up there. You're going to have to skip some things this month. Okay, so I spend a little too extravagantly on shoes now and then, but I know people who spend thousands each month on cocaine, so comparatively speaking, it really isn't that big a deal.

And so, at a December 1981 meeting, Contra leaders, whom Reagan referred to as the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” floated the idea that trafficking cocaine into California would provide enough profits to arm and train the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.108 With most of the network already established, the plan was rather straightforward: There were the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia; the airports and money laundering in Panama run by President Manuel Noriega; the well-known lack of radar detection that made landing strips in Costa Rica prime transport depots; and weapons and drug warehouses at Ilopango air base outside San Salvador. The problem had been U.S. law enforcement guarding key entry points into a lucrative market. But with the CIA and the National Security Council now ready to run interference and keep the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service,

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.

In racially mixed open-air drug markets, black dealers were far more likely to be arrested than whites, even though white dealers were present and visible. And the department focused overwhelmingly on crack—the one drug in Seattle more likely to be sold by African Americans—despite the fact that local hospital records indicated that overdose deaths involving heroin were more numerous than all overdose deaths for crack and powder cocaine combined. Local

after my first sinus cold last week, I have become acquainted at one fell swoop with the byways of socialized medecine. the hard way. they persuaded me to try our college “hospital” here, and I went obediently, thinking with relief of the smith college routine of penicillin and cocaine. here it was aspirin therapy, total neglect, and pasty white meals (potato, fish, bread, custard and dough). when I asked for kleenex, the nurse offered to tear up an old sheet; probably a winding sheet.

least.” “I don’t remember you complaining.” “Yes, well, I’d only been fantasizing about it for ages.” “See, there’s a thing,” Alex points out. “You just told me that. You can tell me other stuff.” “It’s hardly the same.” He rolls over onto his stomach, considers, and very deliberately says, “Baby.” It’s become a thing: baby. He knows it’s become a thing. He’s slipped up and accidentally said it a few times, and each time, Henry positively melts and Alex pretends not to notice, but he’s not above playing dirty here. There’s a slow hiss of an exhale across the line, like air escaping through a crack in a window. “It’s, ah. It’s not the best time,” he says. “How did you put it? Nutso family stuff.” Alex purses his lips, bites down on his cheek. There it is. He’s wondered when Henry would finally start talking about the royal family. He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more to it than that. He couldn’t tell you when he started noticing, though, just like he doesn’t know when he started ticking off the days of Henry’s moods. “Ah,” he says. “I see.” “I don’t suppose you keep up with any British tabloids, do you?” “Not if I can help it.” Henry offers the bitterest of laughs. “Well, the Daily Mail has always had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry. They, er, they gave my sister this nickname years ago. ‘The Powder Princess.’” A ding of recognition. “Because of the…” “Yes, the cocaine, Alex.” “Okay, that does sound familiar.” Henry sighs. “Well, someone’s managed to bypass security to spray paint ‘Powder Princess’ on the side of her car.” “Shit,” Alex says. “And she’s not taking it well?” “Bea?” Henry laughs, a little more genuinely this time. “No, she doesn’t usually care about those things. She’s fine. More shaken up that someone got past security than anything.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn't mean he could live by them, abide by them, or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good. You would get nowhere telling him that weeds too have tubers, or that the first sign of loose teeth is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums. Roots were what saved, the ropes one throws out to rescue drowning men, to Save Their Souls.

All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Agayev, Colossus by Finn Alnæs, Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer and Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life's Great Passion or writing the Great Novel. Everything they wanted I wanted too.

So just take a look at the different prosecution rates and sentencing rules for ghetto drugs like crack and suburban drugs like cocaine, or for drunk drivers and drug users, or just between blacks and whites in general―the statistics are clear: this is a war on the poor and minorities. Or ask yourself a simple question: how come marijuana is illegal but tobacco legal? It can't be because of the health impact, because that's exactly the other way around―there has never been a fatality from marijuana use among million reported users in the United States, whereas tobacco kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. My strong suspicion, though I don't know how to prove it, is that the reason is that marijuana's a weed, you can grow it in your backyard, so there's nobody who would make any money off it if it were legal. Tobacco requires extensive capital inputs and technology, and it can be monopolized, so there are people who can make a ton of money off it. I don't really see any other difference between the two of them, frankly―except that tobacco's far more lethal and far more addictive.

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; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; 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 never saw the White Russian countess again. He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at café 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 English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. 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.

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.

The first drug laws, the anti-opium laws of the 1870s, were directed at Chinese immigrants, never mind that the country was full of white middle-class laudanum addicts, tippling from their dropper bottles all day long. Early in the next century, support for the laws criminalizing cocaine was ginned up by claims that “drug-crazed Negroes” were destroying white society and murdering white women. Southern senators, unperturbed by their wives’ opioid addictions, believed that cocaine made black men superhuman, even that it made them immune to bullets. When the first drug czar, a man named Harry Anslinger, wanted to criminalize marijuana, he appealed to people’s biases against immigrants from Mexico, claiming that the drug made Mexicans sexually violent. William Randolph Hearst jumped on this bandwagon, warning again and again in the pages of his newspapers about the dangers of the Mexican “Marihuana-Crazed Madman.” This demonization continues today.*1 White people are five times as likely to use drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites.*2 The racism of the drug war has been the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of color in the United States.

I thought about the aftermath of the 1862 war, when thirty-eight hastily condemned warriors had been hung in Mankato, in the country's largest-ever mass execution. Their bodies were buried in shallow graves and then dug up for study by local doctors, including Dr. Mayo, who kept the body of Cut Nose for his personal examination. I thought about my father losing his teaching job, about his struggle with depression and drinking. About how angry he was that our history was not taught in schools. Instead, we had to battle sports mascots and stereotypes. Movie actors in brownface. Tourists with cameras. Welfare lines. Alcoholism. 'After stealing everything,' he would rage, 'now they want to blame us for it, too.' Social services broke up Native families, sending children like me to white foster parents. Every week, the newspapers ran stories about Indians who rolled their cars while drunk or the rise of crack cocaine on the reservations or somebody's arrest for gang-related crimes. No wonder so many Native kids were committing suicide. But there was so much more to the story of the run. What people didn't see because they chose never to look. Unlike the stone monument in New Ulm, built to memorialize the settlers' loss with angry pride, the Dakhota had created a living, breathing memorial that found healing in prayer and ceremony. What the two monuments shared, however, was remembering. We were all trying to find a way through grief.

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.

White dope would be meth, cocaine, heroine.

From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone’s dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription “uppers.” All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not.

Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.

I folded into the mere sound of Tess’s voice, dizzying, liquid, and lethal like freebase cocaine shimmering in its heated spoon. It was an electric sensation, not like the safe, smooth feeling of Mom’s love, and I chose it outright.

It took me a minute to catch on, but I realized that most of the people who showed up, 50 percent of whom I didn't know, were going straight to the bathroom to do coke. Cocaine?! In my pseudo-Christian, but mainly agnostic home?! I hadn't even done coke! If anything, I should've been the one to christen the bathroom with white!

In 1973, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller signed into law the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandated harsh minimum sentences of fifteen years for the sale or possession of even small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, or heroin. Years later, statistics would show that almost 90 percent of those convicted under these laws were either Black or Latino. And throughout the 1970s, Black folks were twice as likely as white people to be arrested on drug-related offenses. By the eighties, when the young Christopher Wallace was sitting on the stoop, that number ballooned to five times as likely.

In 1986, shortly after Chris’s fourteenth birthday, came a moment that would permanently alter drug enforcement polices moving forward. On June 19, just two days after being selected second overall by the defending champion Boston Celtics, Len Bias died from an overdose, and the world stopped. Bias was a basketball superhero. He had dominated college basketball at the University of Maryland with a combination of force, beauty, grace, and destruction that made him a true one-of-one. In joining the Celtics, he was pinned to become Michael Jordan’s greatest rival (the two had phenomenal duels in college) and prolong the dynasty in Boston, where Larry Bird had led the team to three titles in the last six years. Rumors spread in the press that Bias died after smoking crack. Cocaine, usually associated with lavish white communities and those living in the lap of luxury, was seen as an addiction. But crack was a crime. The drug, far cheaper than powder cocaine, was largely associated with Black communities and was being held significantly responsible for the erosion of society’s moral fabric.

Sleet had changed to snow, which fell steadily as I drove. White powder filled the hollows in the land, erased the gutters, piled on the fir trees like lines of cocaine. Everything—buildings, sidewalks, lights—turned blurry as snow enshrouded the city. Denver went silent under the soft, murderous weight.

A primary factor in this shift is, as The New York Times wrote, “Mostly white and politically conservative counties have continued to send more drug offenders to prison, reflecting the changing geography of addiction. While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities” in largely white locales. The “pathology” long ascribed to urban communities as integral and immutable characteristics of Black life (drug addiction, property crimes to support a habit, broken families) has now moved, with deindustrialization, into the suburbs and the countryside. By 2018, an estimated 130 people were dying every day from opioid overdoses, and over 10 million people were abusing prescription opioids.

Whitehouse Road" Early in the morning when the sun does rise Layin' in the bed with bloodshot eyes Late in the evenin' when the sun sinks low Well that's about time my rooster crows I got women up and down this creek And they keep me going and my engine clean Run me ragged but I don't fret Cause there ain't been one slow me down none yet Get me drinking' that moonshine Get me higher than the grocery bill Take my troubles to the highwall Throw 'em in the river and get your fill We been sniffing that cocaine Ain't nothin' better when the wind cuts cold Lord it's a mighty hard livin' But a damn good feelin' to run these roads I got people try to tell me, Red Keep this livin' and you'll wind up dead Cast your troubles on the Lord of Lord's Or wind up laying on a coolin' board But I got buddies up White House Road And they keep me strutting when my feet hang low Rotgut whiskey gonna ease my pain 'N all this runnin's gonna keep me sane Get me drinking' that moonshine Get me higher than the grocery bill Take my troubles to the highwall Throw 'em in the river and get your fill We been sniffing that cocaine Ain't nothin' better when the wind cuts cold Lord it's a mighty hard livin' But a damn good feelin' to run these roads It's a damn good feelin' to run these roads When they lay me in the cold hard clay Won't ya sing them hymns while the banjo plays You can tell them ladies that they ought not frown Cause there ain't been nothing ever held me down Lawmen, women or a shallow grave Same ol' blues just a different day Get me drinking' that moonshine Get me higher than the grocery bill Take my troubles to the highwall Throw 'em in the river and get your fill We been sniffing that cocaine Ain't nothin' better when the wind cuts cold Lord it's a mighty hard livin' But a damn good feelin' to run these roads It's a damn good feelin' to run these roads It's a damn good feelin' to run these roads Tyler Childers, Purgatory (2017)

Similarly, use of cocaine by black day laborers and other blue-collar workers was initially encouraged, as long as the use was in the service of accomplishing work tasks for whites. But then the situation changed as whites discovered that blacks, too, enjoyed cocaine recreationally for its euphoria- and confidence-inducing effects. Use by blacks was increasingly reported in a manner designed to evoke fear among the white majority. Countless articles exaggerated both the extent to which cocaine was used by blacks and the connection between their use of the drug and heinous crimes. Popular myths held that the drug made black men homicidal as well as exceptional marksmen. Perhaps the most outrageous claim was that the drug rendered this group unaffected by .32-caliber bullets. Incredibly, these ridiculous assertions were actually believed. They prompted some southern police forces to switch to a larger .38-caliber weapon in order to deal with the mythical black, cocainized superhuman.

People often consider social relationships only as negative forces in drug use. However, what they fail to understand is the complexity of group behavior. Human beings have always devised means of determining who is “us” and who is “them,” and the consumption of specific foods or drugs is typically one way of doing so. Teens are especially sensitive to these cues of belongingness, and so if drug use is the price of group membership, it’s one that many are willing to pay. Some groups, however, mark their boundaries by avoiding certain types of drug use—for example, athletes rejecting smoking, 1960s hippies rejecting hard liquor in favor of marijuana and LSD, and blacks avoiding methamphetamine because it is seen as a white drug. From the level of the clique to the level of the national culture, behavior related to drugs isn’t only about getting high; it’s often used to delineate group membership and social standing. The social aspects of drug use also change with age. For example, having children and getting married are both associated with reductions in drug use; one of many studies with similar findings in this literature found that people who are married are three times more likely to quit using cocaine and those who have children are more than twice as likely to stop.1 Similar data shows that people with close family and romantic relationships tend to have better outcomes in treatment2—and students’ feelings of social warmth and connectedness to school and parents are linked with reductions in drug problems.

Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighborhood where they “don’t belong,” will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.19

They also argued that the law discriminates against African Americans, because the majority of those charged with crimes involving crack at that time were black (approximately 93 percent of those convicted of crack offenses were black; 5 percent were white), whereas those convicted of powder cocaine offenses were predominantly white.

Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine—associated with whites.

One study, for example, published in 2000 by the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.12 That same survey revealed that nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors use marijuana. The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported in 2000 that white youth aged 12–17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.13 Thus the very same year Human Rights Watch was reporting that African Americans were being arrested and imprisoned at unprecedented rates, government data revealed that blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites and that white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.14

Like the Rolling Thunder Revue, The Last Waltz was fueled by cocaine. 'It was ankle deep,' says Michael McClure, who read poetry as part of the concert. 'When I look at that film, I get a coke high.' Backstage there was a cocaine room, painted white and decorated with noses cut out of Groucho Marx masks. A tape played sniffing noises. Neil Young came out to sing 'Helpless' with a white lump hanging from his nose. The producers had to hire a Hollywood optical company to have the lump removed from the film.

Who were these people who were Nico's friends at that club? It seemed like an Italian-Spanish coffeeshop. I'm not sure, it was quite far from downtown in a pretty hidden location. I don't remember the name of the club or the street, but if I drive from Urgell I can find it. I took a few pictures outside the reception area while we were waiting outside with Adam to be allowed to enter after being registered as club members. They took our entry into the almost empty private club very seriously, unlike my girlfriend selling weed in their dispensary at age 20, when I just gave her a job elsewhere. The pictures I took were of two skateboards hanging on the wall next to each other. They were spray-painted with smiling devilish faces, the comedy and tragedy masks. („Sock and buskin: The sock and buskin are two ancient symbols of comedy and tragedy. In ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin (Latin cothurnus). The actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock (Latin soccus).” – Source: Wikipedia) There was another skateboard hanging on the wall, showing the devil smiling with his eyes and teeth and horns only visible in the darkness of the artwork. I doubt they were Italians – they were rather Spaniards – but I never really met anyone else from there besides Nico and Carulo. But I trusted Carulo; he was different. Carulo was a known person in Catalonia. He was known to be the person who was sitting in the Catalan Parliament and rolled a joint and lit it up, smoking during a session as a protest against the law prohibiting marijuana growing and smoking in Spain. Nico told me when he introduced me to Carulo in the summer of 2013, almost a year earlier: “This is the guy you can thank for being able to smoke freely in Catalonia without the police bothering you. Tomas, meet Carulo.” He never really ordered from me if I had met him before. He had no traffic; his growshop was always closed. He was only smoking inside with his younger brother, who was always walking his bull terrier. Their white Bull Terrier was female, half the size of Chico, but she was kind of crazy; you could see in her eyes that she was not normal; she had mental issues. At least, looking into Carulo's eyes and his brother's eyes, I recognized the similar illness in their dog's eyes. In 2014, it had been over four years since I had been working with dogs in my secondary job interpreting Italian and travelling every fifth weekend. Additionally, Huns came to Europe with their animals, including their dogs. There are at least nine unique Hungarian dog breeds.

Right as the Mexican Drug War rages, the debate is reaching the second great flux in its history. The first came in the seventies, with the Jimmy Carter White House. Legalization advocates, including various doctors, got into key government positions, their papers got play, their ideas gained currency. States began to decriminalize marijuana and cocaine was viewed in the media as a happy-go-lucky party drug. Reformers thought they had won the debate. They were wrong. In the eighties, America lashed back against narcotics with a vengeance, and in the nineties the drug war went on steroids. The crack epidemic broke out, celebrities died of overdoses, and lots of middle-class parents got concerned about lots of middle-class kids on smack, speed, and sensimilla. In the early 1990s, surveys found large numbers of Americans thought drugs were the number one problem the country faced. The media was packed with stories of crack babies, cracked-up gangbangers, and nice white kids turning into demons on drugs. But that was two decades ago. The pendulum has swung back again. For now. Most people don’t even list drugs in their top ten of America’s problems. The economy is most people’s priority, and terrorism, immigration, crime, religion, abortion, gay marriage, and the environment all spark more concern than narcotics. Meanwhile, drug-policy reformers have emerged strengthened with propositions to decriminalize, spread medical use, and finally fully legalize marijuana. Proposition 19 to legalize cannabis in California narrowly missed passing, getting 46.5 percent in the 2010 vote. Activists are determined it will pass in 2012. And if not, in 2014. Or 2016. They can just keep on going.

Cocaine changed the world. The heroin trade was limited to the hardcore, but the arrival of cheap, plentiful cocaine in the early and mid-1980s broke down all the barriers and let everyone play. Both are white powder, but each has a distinct, pharmacological flavor: Dope is the downer, the heavy; a couple of trips to the corner, a $20 investment and a fiend has enough in him to suffer the day. Coke is the rush to the wire, all of it gone in a flash and never enough to slake that thirst. With heroin, even the hungriest fiend can look to a limit; coke demands that every bill that can be begged or borrowed or stolen goes up to the corner.

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.

From the outset, the drug war could have been waged primarily in overwhelmingly white suburbs or on college campuses. SWAT teams could have rappelled from helicopters in gated suburban communities and raided the homes of high school lacrosse players known for hosting coke and ecstasy parties after their games. The police could have seized televisions, furniture, and cash from fraternity houses based on an anonymous tip that a few joints or a stash of cocaine could be found hidden in someone's dresser drawer. Suburban homemakers could have been placed under surveillance and subjected to undercover operations designed to catch them violating laws regulating the use and sale of prescription 'uppers.' All of this could have happened as a matter of routine in white communities, but it did not.

U.S. Public Health Service statistics show that eight out of ten drug users are white, but of those in jail for drugs only one in ten is white. Several uprisings in federal prisons labeled “racial riots” by the media have been protests against unjust sentencing policies. Crack addicts are punished a hundred times more severely than cocaine users. Literally one hundred times: according to federal law, a gram of crack is equivalent to one hundred grams of cocaine. Practically everyone imprisoned for crack is black.

Later that month, the Senate proposed even tougher antidrug legislation, and shortly thereafter, the president signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 into law. Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.

Among other harsh penalties, the legislation included mandatory minimum sentences for the distribution of cocaine, including far more severe punishment for distribution of crack—associated with blacks—than powder cocaine, associated with whites.

I flutter my eyes ladylike. "I know the green fairy is absinthe, but what's the white angel?" "Cocaine. Wilde, by the way frequents this café. He claims he once saw an angel fluttering over the square. I image what he saw flying was one of the stone angels from atop the Opera across the street. No doubt he saw the image after partaking of cocaine and absinthe.

Overtown remained the center of black life in Miami until the arrival of I-95, the vast stretch of American highway that ran from Maine down the East Coast all the way to Miami. It stomped right through the middle of Miami’s most prominent black neighborhood in 1965, a ravenous millipede with a thousand concrete legs. Had the 3,000-kilometer highway been halted just 5 kilometers to the north, black Miami might have had a different history. Instead the highway, touted as “slum clearance,” bulldozed through black Miami’s main drags. Gone was much of Overtown’s commercial heart, with its three movie theaters, its public pool, grocery store, and businesses. Goodbye to clubs that had hosted Ella Fitzgerald, to the Sir John Hotel, which had offered their finest suites to black entertainers banned from staying in whites-only Miami Beach. But more important, goodbye to a neighborhood where parents knew which house every child belonged to.

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

It may have been morning in America again in certain rich and White neighborhoods, which had awakened to prosperity repeatedly over the years. But it was not morning in America again in the communities where the CIA-backed Contra rebels of Nicaragua started smuggling cocaine in 1985. Nor was it morning in America for Black youths in 1985. Their unemployment rate was four times the rate it had been in 1954, though the White youth employment rate had marginally increased. Nor was it morning in America when some of these unemployed youths started remaking the expensive cocaine into cheaper crack to sell so they could earn a living. And the Reagan administration wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was not morning in America in Black urban neighborhoods, and that drugs—specifically, crack—and the drug dealers and users were to blame.

...paradise is expensive, the gate is narrow. Whoever visits discovers that life is beautiful, that the sun can in fact be divided into individual rays, it's no longer that boring, round ball you can't even look at. The next day, you go back to work on a train full of people with empty looks, emptier than the looks of the people here. Everybody thinking about getting home, making dinner, turning on the television, escaping reality- man, reality is this white powder, not the television!

Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard, they are still having the same cocaine parties that they were having twenty years ago and they still have not ever been searched by the police once, let alone had their parties raided or been choke-slammed to death. They have just bought a flat in Brixton; they go to one of the new white bars there. They pop up to the new reggae club in Ladbroke Grove, the one that serves Caribbean food but also gets nervous when more than two black guys turn up. They have no idea that the building used to be a multi-storey crack house. By twenty-five, even if you don’t read Stuart Hall, if you grew up both black and poor in the UK you will have come to know more about the inner workings of British society, about the dynamics of race, class and empire than a slew of PhDs ever will. In fact, PhDs and scriptwriters will come to the hood to drain your wisdom for their ethnographic research, as will journalists next time there is a riot. They will have careers, you will get a job. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The anonymous Com-12 briefing refers to the Black Rose Organization, which runs a “Black World Order” using drug monies from the Golden Triangle and the Golden Crescent. According to this anonymous but intriguing report, the current chairman and co-founder of the Black Rose is alleged to be George Bush (known in underworld circles as the White Rose). Bush is alleged to have developed a heroin shipment ring while Ambassador in China, and to run cocaine from Panama through his offshore oil rigs.

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.

Someone—Tony or Warner Bros.?—had decided that the grueling schedule and the added tension in the band might be alleviated somewhat by the relative comfort of bus touring versus Old Blue. It was a nice idea. It might have even been a gambit to see if the camaraderie of sharing a luxurious living situation might heal the band’s broken bonds. So we loaded all of our gear into the parking lot behind our apartment and waited for our new accommodations to arrive. Everyone, I think even Jay, was excited about the prospect of spending at least some small part of our lives seeing what it was like to tour in style. That was until he laid eyes on the Ghost Rider. What we were picturing was sleek and non-ostentatious like the buses we had seen parked in front of theaters at sold-out shows by the likes of R.E.M. or the Replacements. Instead, what we got was one of Kiss’s old touring coaches—a seventies-era Silver Eagle decked out with an airbrushed mural in a style I can only describe as “black-light poster–esque,” depicting a pirate ship buffeted by a stormy sea with a screaming skeleton standing in the crow’s nest holding a Gibson Les Paul aloft and being struck by lightning. The look on Jay’s face was tragic. I felt bad for him. This was not a serious vehicle. I’m not sure how we talked him into climbing aboard, and once we did, I have no idea how we got him to stay, because the interior was even worse. White leather, mirrored ceilings, and a purple neon sign in the back lounge informing everyone, in cursive, that they were aboard the “Ghost Rider” lest they forget. So we embarked upon Uncle Tupelo’s last tour learning how to sleep while being shot at eighty miles per hour down the highway inside a metal box that looked like the VIP room at a strip club and made us all feel like we were living inside a cocaine straw. Ghost Rider indeed.

It’s important, Lemuel.” He took another look and shook his head. “What’d this guy do?” he asked. “Helped plant cocaine on some Cambodians so their vehicle and cash could be confiscated.” “I ain’t following you.” “He’s a cop. You see him again, you let me know.” Lemuel leaned back in his chair and looked out at the road, suddenly disconnected from me and a conversation involving a corrupt white police officer. “Lemuel?” I said. “Got to clean my li’l house now. Dust keep blowing out of the yard t’rew the screen, dirtying up my whole house. Just cain’t keep it clean, no matter what I do. See you another time, Dave.” WE LIVE IN the New South. Legal segregation has slipped into history; the Klan has moved west, into white supremacist compounds, where they feel safe from the people whom they fear; and in Mississippi black state troopers ticket white motorists. But memories can be long, fear is fear, and race is at the heart of virtually every political issue in the states of the Old Confederacy, particularly in the realignment of the two national political parties. As I drove back to New Iberia, the fields of early sugar cane rippling in the breeze, the buttercups blooming along the rain ditches, I wondered about the memories of violence and injustice that my friend Lemuel Melancon would probably never share with me. But they obviously lived inside him, and I knew that as a white man it was presumptuous of me to ask that he set aside the cautionary instincts that had allowed him to be a survivor.

Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.

High-GI carbs like those in white potatoes and fruit juice act a bit like cocaine on your brain: a spike, followed by a crash.

The division seems rather unfair," I remarked. "You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?" "For me," said Sherlock Holmes, "there still remains the cocaine-bottle." And he stretched his long white hand up for it.