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Great Writing - Home > Not News > Former Colombian Drug Lord Admits Cocaine ‘Just a Well-Marketed Placebo’
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Not News
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| Former Colombian Drug Lord Admits Cocaine ‘Just a Well-Marketed Placebo’ | |
| By robokent | ||||||||
| 16 March 2007 | ||||||||
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Just came to me this morning, and wanted to know what you all thought of it... excuse the baseball references... remember, I'm a Yank.
Alejandro Peña sits in a porch swing on the veranda of his six thousand square foot home in an unnamed suburb of Medellin, Colombia, a cool mojito in his right hand. Surveying the vast coca fields which blanket most of his 1,000 acres, he laughs. “None of it is real,” he says. “It’s just sugar!” Peña, 61, retired from the cocaine business three years ago when his top lieutenant was gunned down in a brutal battle between his Bandito Cocaine Syndicate (BCS) and the rival Perros Sucios. He says after seeing his friend shot for a few kilos of high-grade sugarcane, he realized it just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore, despite the estimated 140 billion dollars he accrued over his career. “It’s silly, really. I mean, it’s just sugar, you know? Real top-quality sugar, not like that Domino shit you put in your coffee, but still, it’s sugar.” The startling revelation that cocaine is just really a highly prized form of sugar has spread through the drug and drug prevention communities like a bag of heroin shot directly into a vein. “We’re awaiting further tests,” said Oliver Van Buren, Deputy Director of the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. “To be perfectly frank, we never bothered testing the stuff. We just assumed it was a highly addictive, deadly drug because of all those rock stars who died from it. Isn’t that how Janice Joplin died?” Cocaine became a widely popular drug for ‘recreational use’ in the 1970s, when it went from a fringe drug used by hippies who had grown immune to the effects of marijuana to the preferred form of pharmaceutical for upwardly mobile members of society. The white powder, resembling sugar in appearance, is sucked up through the nasal passages, or ‘snorted’ with the use of a small straw or tightly rolled-up hundred dollar bill. “But besides giving you a funny feeling of having a teaspoonful of powder up your nose, cocaine doesn’t do anything for you!” Peña avers. “Seriously, the only reason people start flipping out and doing all that crazy shit when they’re ‘high,’” he says, raising his hands and stretching and retracting his index and middle fingers in the international sign indicating use of quotes, “is because they see their friends doing it. They think, well, my friend is ‘high’, so I must be too. It’s bullshit, man! It’s marketing is what it is.” Asked to explain what exactly he means by marketing, Peña continues, “Look, Colombia was a poor country. We had nothing after being raped by the Spanish for a few hundred years. All we had was sugar. And that was something. But a bunch of us figured out that if we just marketed sugar a little differently, we could expand the market and all get filthy rich.” Peña takes a long sip of his mojito and orders his maid Tammie, a strung-out junkie from St. Clair Shores, Michigan, to bring him another. “So, we blended together the finest sugarcanes and changed the name to cocaine. I forget who said it, but basically, we were capitalizing on Coca-Cola’s name. Get it? Coke-cane? Everybody likes Coke, right?” Peña explains that the popular myth that Coke once contained cocaine was actually thought up during an early meeting of the BCS. As the popularity of cocaine grew, so did the myth. “I think it’s proven mutually beneficial, actually,” he contends. Frieda Nubenkopf of Substance Abusers Anonymous scoffs at Peña’s claims. “Ridiculous. Of course cocaine is a drug. A deliciously mind-altering narcotic that can make you feel like Superman, Catwoman and the Green Lantern all rolled into one.” Nubenkopf, a former addict who made cocaine her drug of choice during a 1971 Led Zeppelin concert, expresses outrage at the notion that the drug which she sold her two children for during a particularly rough time in the mid-80s could be nothing but a placebo that allows its users the psychological freedom to let go of all sexual inhibitions while providing them with a manufactured sense of life on a higher plain of existence. “I’ll do a line for you right now,” she offers. “Judge for yourself if I’m just ‘manufacturing’ a high.” Nubenkopf also indicates the use of quotes around the word ‘manufacturing’ by moving her fingers in much the same way as Peña. Former Major League pitcher and out-of-his-mind coke addict Steve Howe agrees with Nubenkopf, who he is nearly certain he did not sleep with during a particular binge after the 1981 postseason. “I can’t believe that it’s just sugar. I mean, then why was I suspended from baseball seven times? It wasn’t Gatorade they found in my system! And a couple other things: you know I died in 2006, right? Well, if I’m supposed to be dead, what do you think it is that’s keeping me upright right now? That’s right! It’s the coke. Also, you know that Alejandro Peña guy you keep talking about? I think he was one of my teammates on the Dodgers.” Peña, who denies playing baseball past Little League, doesn’t care about the controversy he has started. “I’m out of the game, anyway,” he says, clarifying that he is not referring to Major League Baseball, but is using the expression ‘out of the game’ to mean he is no longer involved in selling drugs. “I just want to live out my days in peace here, a mojito in my hand, with my American crack whore / maid Tammie at my side.” As the sun sets over the horizon, Peña gazes out over his coca fields, which he continues to cultivate, but “only for the good memories”, he says. This is one former drug lord who is content to relegate his ‘tripping’ these days to nowhere but down memory lane.
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