Four hundred words on Cocaine

Dam square in Amsterdam looks like a carnival tonight. A mechanical circus of spinning lights, screaming clowns and dizzying-stupid attractions. The blue-red neon billboards road leading to Central Station looks like a golden bricks path for hungry and lascivious backpackers from all over the OECD Country Club. My German bike is on automatic pilot. I’m on my way to a Halloween party. Red lights make me stop at the phallic monument’s corner. I hear the happy-meal-tourist words whispered to my ear: “Coca-Cola, Ecstasy!” A big black man looks at me. I’m sure the one that gets the real money of this supply chain is a fat white dude smelling like Hugo Boss. Fuck! “Coca!” once again. No thanks! I have a speedball of Dutch ecstasy in my head. Green light! R&B, cool nice girls, dark masks, red wine, suspicious numb couples making-out in the restroom, white lines crossing their livid faces on a mirror like a knife, legal joints, illegal parties, a white wild river up their noses.

Beverly Hills, Paris, London, Tokyo. Like a Prada ad of self-confident postmodern boys and girls clubbing in VIP lounge rooms, feeling nice and hip and yip before having sex on cocaine. The war on drugs keeps going on, financed by European and North American money, led by ignorant policymakers and their own dumb policies, waged for the sake of greedy arms manufacturers fucks from all over the civilized world. Afghan poppy fields across the horizon of hunger and war and B52’s. “Unnoticed” money laundering in Zurich, Amsterdam and New York. Coked-up investment bankers watching interest rates on flat laptops and premium-service-lap-dance-escort-girls stripping for them on white wall mirrors. Naked breasts full of coke in Manhattan skyscrapers and dead civilians on Colombian land.

Weed from California, amphetamines from Texas, nicotine from Phillip Morris, Prozac from Merck, Spanish MDMA, German acid trips, absolut alcohol, and British opium from centuries ago. Three hundred billion dollars on agricultural subsidies for the north, snorting out insincere economic policies for the farmers of the south. Starving coca growers, small time cocaine traffickers, big time white powder distributors in east and west, comfortably ignorant G-8 consumers playing Dionysian games, immense bank accounts in offshore hidden branches of puritan financial corporations and weapons dealers triggering-on another money machine gun. Cocaine clouds drifting like dark angels on the blue skies of yesterday. The world is fucked and I’m grabbing my ass. 400.

Carlos Peralta (Colombia!)