Cocaine Jungle

What's behind the increasing cocaine usage in post-pandemic New York?

If you’re ever at a party and you want to score coke just look for the guy beautiful women approach and are actually excited to talk to.

I’ve been doing some shoe leather reporting these last few months. Most Fridays and Saturdays I go out and I piss away my money, my health, and my free time at bars and house parties. As a result of this hard scrabble investigative journalism I can confirm cocaine is having a renaissance in New York City. I don’t have statistics or hard data to prove this, only the fact that a lot of people have been offering me free bumps. When female tourists from Sweden are being offered lines in the bar that’s just a Tuesday in the big apple. When heterosexual men are offering it to the spindly mick you’re having a notable glut.

This uptick in cocaine use is more remarkable as news of fentanyl in the coke supply appears to not have done much to discourage anyone. Of the 2,668 fatal overdoses in New York in 2021 just over 1,000 involved fentanyl and cocaine. That’s up from 17 in 2017. Bars here have signs in their bathrooms fruitlessly attempting to discourage people from using nose drugs in the stalls but also asking them to see the bartender for a fentanyl test strip if they must. I suppose because a dead body is more of a liability than a long bathroom line. 

While cocaine never went out of fashion in New York the end of the Covid lockdowns has brought renewed hedonistic fervor. The legalization of marijuana has also rendered many of the weed delivery services superfluous. You used to text a guy then in two to seven hours somebody on a bicycle who hates you would show up at your apartment unzip their backpack and make up some lies about the differences between the strains they had for sale. Now the pot heads have the convenience of licensed corner stores, meaning the black market delivery businesses have been refocusing on those drugs that are still black market. At a party I met a guy who told me about the high quality cocaine courier service he patronizes. The owner and operator of a less high quality one is currently serving 25 to life for causing the overdose deaths of 3 people in 2021.

This isn’t entirely new to me. I snorted a bit of coke in college. When I moved here I very briefly dated a girl who always kept some in a pendant she wore around her neck. We’d take lines in the club bathroom then go dancing until one day it ended as most New York relationships do (she stopped answering my texts and now I just stalk her Instagram stories). I’ve never been a heavy user but post-pandemic I have partaken in a few of those lines and bumps people have offered me, mainly because it seemed impolite not to. 

I don’t have much delusion about coke though. 

Drug war researcher El Parece put it better than I can: 

There's a trail of death and misery that you can't even comprehend behind every gram of cocaine produced and smuggled north so 24-year-old behavioral therapists named Bri can get their mind's dick wet 3 times a week

Americans are 4% of the global population but we snort and smoke about a third of all the cocaine produced. This habit causes significant deforestation. The most pristine remote wildernesses tend to be away from the prying eyes of authorities, making them ideal places to clear cut for coca cultivation. It’s difficult to count all the violent deaths caused by the trade, at least 300,000 in Mexico since 2006 to limit yourself to one country. When you buy cocaine you fund child slavery, human trafficking, and some of the most violent and evil criminal organizations in the world such as the CIA. 

And yet here we all are at a bar in Bushwick on a Friday night. A dues paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America is digging around in a small bag of white powder with their mailbox key. Being a leftist in the first world mostly just means you want somebody to pat you on the head and tell you you’re still a good person as you indulge in whatever your preferred world destroying vice is. When confronted you tell people there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. It’s hard not to look at us, and I include myself in the us, and conclude that the Maoists might be right. We really are parasites.

One explanation for all the nose candy could be that young people, and I include myself in the young people though I’m on far shakier ground here, are confronting the gnawing feeling that we might have failed. Did the window get slammed shut and now we’re foreclosed on a better future? Hope and change was just bank bailouts and drones. Bernie got crushed. Odds are Biden is gonna get re-elected. The system is gonna keep chugging along. That all American system of ‘fuck you I’ve got mine.’ Sorry that your cancer bankrupted you buddy but I guess I’m just built different. 

What better expression of nihilistic dilettantism than the white powder. Every president since Ronald Reagan has been Ronald Reagan so now we’re bringing back the drug that defined his era. Sure we gave a good go at getting healthcare for all and dismantling the empire but in the back of our minds we knew if we failed it wouldn’t be us who paid the worst consequences. We’re safe and secure in fortress America. Now we’ve got a Great Gatsby theme party tomorrow so clear cut some more Peruvian forests for our yak before your sea level gets too high.

But you know maybe I’m just rambling with this political shit and the real explanation is a more obvious one. Cocaine is back because the women here like it. Weed is for the boys, cocaine is for the girls. Women like to take a sniff in the bathroom, giggle a bit and tell their best friend how much they love her. Men like to take an edible put on noise canceling headphones and pretend they really are a shipmate under the command of Captain Aubrey from Master and Commander. 

This isn’t to blame the women, though of course doing so is in the nature of men. It’s easy enough to see an attractive woman snorting up and say “look at Carmela Soprano over there, oblivious to all the pain that provides her with her lifestyle.” But it’s usually men who get cocaine for women and we do it because we want women. And not just to fuck! I am so sick of listening to this vulgar oversimplification. Yeah fine the lizard brain makes a man want to fuck most every woman he meets, but our prefrontal cortex is what makes us a man! There are universes in there! 

We want women to be near us. To smile when they see us. To flirt with us, to joke with us. To touch our shoulder, to share a knowing glance. To help us feel that essence of life that we can only feel when they’re around. Not to get too gay about it but to show up somewhere and have a beautiful woman earnestly ask how you’ve been and to see in her face that she actually cares about your answer, that’s like 70% as good as having sex with her.

Want a shortcut to all that? Offer her a bump of cocaine. There should be a government program to teach incels how to bring cocaine to parties. 

I’m being a little facetious but don’t underestimate the number of conversations with women you can have when you’re the one with the bag. Some months ago I bought a drink for a girl and we chatted for a bit. I lost her attention when the man with the blow came through our group. She was an environmental scientist! When they’re doing coke you know the planet is fucked. 

I’ve never been the guy at the party with coke but plenty of times I’ve stood next to the guy at the party with coke. I’ve seen women talk to him how men talk to women when we want something from them. They’re very sweet! I suppose if you want to get cynical about it their kindness is purely transactional, but how much more pure are your motives? Besides, they have the right attitude. It’s America, everything is a transaction.

Back in high school when I was a libertarian, like many people were before their brain fully developed, I believed very strongly in the legalization of all drugs including cocaine. I still think legalization and strict regulation is the least bad solution but I’m not nearly as gung ho about it as I once was.  

To put my tedious political bore hat back on drugs are weapons the ruling class uses to keep us complacent. It’s not a coincidence the English used opium to cripple and exploit the Chinese or that the CIA dumped crack in the black neighborhoods that were once hotbeds for the black panthers. Addiction is a scourge that destroys communities and I don’t have hesitation in saying the government should compel addicts into rehab by force. I see increasing drinking and drug use as a profound spiritual cataclysm that all of us feel but none of us can quite untangle. 

But hey I could be wrong. Perhaps people are just doing more coke because they’re celebrating how great it is to live in Joe Biden’s America. Things are good here now. Unemployment is low, wages are going up. Lots of people are making bank off that war in Ukraine. There’s more drug addicts on the streets than I’ve ever seen in my life. More Americans die of overdoses every year than ever before in our history. We’re here, it’s the weekend. We worked a job that makes us want to kill ourselves and we’re going to drink snort and smoke until we can’t remember it. Isn’t that what this free country is all about?

Maybe this is why women aren’t excited to talk to me at parties.