{"id":143630,"date":"2014-01-03T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2014-01-03T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=143630"},"modified":"2013-12-30T11:15:47","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T16:15:47","slug":"cocaine-is-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/01\/03\/cocaine-is-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Buying Cocaine Is Like Donating To The Nazi Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Coke<\/p>\n

The Article:<\/strong> Cocaine Is Evil<\/a> by Erick Vance in Slate.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> I don\u2019t cover the narco war. I don\u2019t even pretend to. I\u2019m a science writer: I go to labs, talk to scientists and policymakers, and occasionally get on boats that take me out to see cool underwater critters. I live in Mexico City, which is about as safe as living in Washington, D.C. I occasionally walk home a little drunk without worrying about my safety any more than I would have in my old home in Berkeley, Calif. And I gotta be honest, I\u2019m happy in my little bubble.<\/p>\n

But working here, especially on occasional jaunts to northern Mexico, you can\u2019t avoid the drug story. It\u2019s infused in every interview, every stop at a checkpoint, every street corner, like that stink you can\u2019t get out of the carpet.<\/p>\n

Last year I reported a fishing story in Sonora that attempted to put a human face on the seafood industry and the collapse of many populations of key ocean creatures. The idea was that if consumers knew more, they might make more informed choices about what they eat, maybe selecting slightly less destructive options. I was in a relatively quiet part of Mexico in terms of violence but one that is nonetheless a crucial stopover for drugs going north. To states like California, where I\u2019m from. My reporting partner\u2014a photographer named Dominic Bracco who\u2019s spent his share of time amid drug violence\u2014and I always thought it was funny that people in the area seemed incredulous that we were actually reporting about fish. Oh right, sure, \u201cfish.\u201d We have a lot of \u201cfish\u201d here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I remember one interview in particular in which a fisherman told us about his relative who occasionally ran drugs for the cartels in between seasons. In this area, it\u2019s not blood in, blood out. Cartels have porous edges, where people drop in when they need the money and get out as fast as possible. And we are not talking about characters from Breaking Bad here\u2014these are poor fishermen with no other choice. And mostly they hate it.<\/p>\n

Fishermen are great mules because they know the waters and they don\u2019t draw attention. And if you have to chuck your haul overboard to avoid the military, other fishermen can dive to retrieve it. This particular guy had a long run up the coast. In moments of dark humor, I imagine the people I know back home who do coke being on that boat with him. Any of them would have considered it the trip of a lifetime, posted photos all over the Web, and come home to great applause with wonderful stories to tell. I imagine them carrying home a couple trinkets to remember their Steinbeck-like voyage.<\/p>\n

This man did not. Maybe he endured storms and massive waves slamming his little panga while he clung for his life and prayed to get out alive. Maybe it was smooth going for a hundred miles, I don\u2019t know. What I do know is that when he got to the end and he met the men who would take the cargo across the border, they put a bullet in his head and tossed him overboard to feed the fish he should have been catching. It\u2019s cheaper to kill the mule than to pay him.<\/p>\n

When people back home do a line of coke, they call it a \u201cbump.\u201d It\u2019s a marvel of the English language that something so horrible, so corrosive can have such a cute little name. I wonder what that fisherman would have said to that innocuous little word. \u201cGlad I could help brighten the party,\u201d maybe?<\/p>\n

Not that the fisherman here are wholly innocent\u2014many of them do meth and coke to stay awake on the water, and some have become addicted. But we all know who drives the drug trade. It\u2019s us. At our hip little parties, our New Year\u2019s Eve celebrations, our secret back rooms, and on the counters of people from well-off families who are destined for rehab.<\/p>\n

The economics of cocaine trafficking are simple. South Americans make it, people in between move it, rich Americans buy it, and U.S. gun stores sell weapons back down the line to enforce this system. Everyone knows this.<\/p>\n

I submit that the drug trade\u2014and specifically cocaine\u2014is among the worst things that the human mind ever invented (which is saying a lot, since we are especially good at inventing horrible things).<\/p>\n

No one has good numbers on the death toll of a given drug trade. I called and asked a few think tanks how many people cocaine has killed over the past 100 years and got mostly bemused laughs. Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency, has thought about this as much as anyone. When I asked him, all he could guess was a number with nine figures in it.<\/p>\n

Just for fun, let’s try a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Around 60,000 were executed as witches during 150 years at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. Mexico alone has seen perhaps twice that many deaths during its seven-year drug war. From 1990 to 2010, Colombia had some 450,000 homicides, overwhelmingly due to coke. Add all the rest of Latin America (counting all the military actions that were driven by efforts to control trafficking routes as much as by politics), the U.S. share (15,000 per year on the high side, counting all kinds of drugs and overdoses and such). Now add an estimate of all the uncounted murders and overdoses and track that carnage back to the 1960s when the modern drug war began. The number starts to be in the league of the atrocities of Nazi Germany or American slavery.<\/p>\n

Please, you say, not another Nazi comparison. Hitler references in the media are so clich\u00e9 that Jon Stewart uses them as a running gag. But the magnitude and gruesomeness of the atrocities committed to acquire and maintain drug trade routes to the United States actually are comparable. Decapitations and burning people alive are just the start. Chainsaws, belt sanders, acid\u2014these things are used very creatively by cartel torturers. They disembowel bloggers and sew faces to soccer balls. Children are forced to work as assassins, people are forced to rape strangers at gunpoint, and lines of victims are killed one at a time with a single hammer. Many of those people disappear into unmarked graves. If their bodies are ever found, they are described in the media with antiseptic words like \u201cmutilated.\u201d<\/p>\n

So yes, I say that paying for coke is equivalent to donating to the Nazi party. The unspoken thing here is that the reason Americans aren\u2019t more outraged or guilt-ridden is that the people dying are poor brown people\u2014many of them in a tragic irony are classified as narcos so governments can claim it’s just gang-on-gang violence. <\/p>\n

So perhaps you can see why I sometimes feel a little silly covering the ocean fisheries crisis, telling people what\u2019s not sustainable and why. It\u2019s true, consumer choices are behind the ocean crisis. But you can eat sustainably every day of your life and give to charity every year, and it all gets wiped out with one line of coke. Who cares if you were a nice guy if in your spare time you burned witches?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no such thing as cruelty-free cocaine. You can\u2019t buy sustainable crank at the farmers market. And here in Mexico people are tired of footing the bill. They often say, \u201cWhy not just let the Americans shove as much of this crap up their noses as they want?\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s just let it through.\u201d \u201cWhy do we have to be the ones who die?\u201d And they have a point.<\/p>\n

The Americans I know who indulge in cocaine are not bad people. Some of them even give money to charity. They\u2019re just a little too bored, a little too rich, and a little too clueless. But if someone here in Mexico asks me who these people are\u2014these people who support something that\u2019s killing entire towns from Bolivia to Texas\u2014well, I don\u2019t know what to say.<\/p>\n

Hey, I mean, it\u2019s just a little bump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Cocaine Is Evil by Erick Vance in Slate. The Text: I don\u2019t cover the narco war. I don\u2019t even pretend to. I\u2019m a science writer: I go to labs, talk to scientists and policymakers, and occasionally get on boats that take me out to see cool underwater critters. I live in Mexico City, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Buying Cocaine Is Like Donating To The Nazi Party<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The gruesomeness of the drug trade rivals any atrocities in history.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/01\/03\/cocaine-is-evil\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Buying Cocaine Is Like Donating To The Nazi Party\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The gruesomeness of the drug trade rivals any atrocities in history.\" \/>\n<meta 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