Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories (16 page)

Nazi Narcotics
, 2001

W
HILE THE PRICE
of cocaine is high for consumers, it is considerably higher for producers. Here in South America the dangers of the drug are a lot more scary than the occasional perforated nasal septum. The unfeasible amounts of hard currency generated by the drug ricochet around this continent, creating casualties wherever they go. In the last twenty-five years alone, cocaine-generated cash has been responsible for
coups d’état
in Bolivia and Honduras; has infiltrated the governments of the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Haiti, Cuba, and every single Latin American country without exception; has helped to fund a guerrilla war in Nicaragua (creating one of the most embarrassing scandals in the CIA’s history); and has prompted the US invasion of Panama. In the late 1980s, traffickers in Peru and Bolivia were so wealthy that they offered to pay off their countries’ national debts; meanwhile, Colombia’s traffickers were so powerful that they declared war on their own country – and brought it to its knees. At the time of writing, the cocaine industry is creating riots in Peru, policemen are being kidnapped and tortured to death because of it in Bolivia and, if I was a betting man, I would put money on the cocaine industry cranking Colombia’s ongoing civil war to its highest levels for the last thirty-six years within the next six months. At this very moment the governments of Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela are stationing troops on their Colombian borders to handle the expected influx of refugees.

All this trouble, just because of cocaine? The drug you take on special occasions, in the lavatory with your mates, when out clubbing? The drug you take because it’s a laugh? Crazy, isn’t it?

Cocaine
, 2001

N
OT TOO LONG
ago, my friend Olivia brought her cat to the veterinarian because she was chewing clumps of fur off her back and vomiting all the time. The doctor looked at Isabella and immediately diagnosed the animal with something called excessive grooming disorder, which meant that the cat had grown depressed and self-absorbed, perhaps because Olivia’s boyfriend had moved out of the apartment, perhaps because Olivia was traveling so much. At any rate, the vet explained, this was an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Isabella couldn’t stop cleaning herself just as certain people can’t stop vacuuming their apartments, or washing their hands all the time like Lady Macbeth. The vet recommended treating the cat with Prozac, which had proved extremely effective in curing this condition in humans. A feline-size prescription was administered.

Now, you have to understand that Olivia had been on and off Prozac and its chemical variants for a couple of years herself, hoping to find a way to cope with her constant bouts of depression. Olivia had also recently insisted that her boyfriend either go on Prozac or take a hike because his sluggishness and foul moods were destroying their relationship. And I had, of course, been on Prozac for more than six years at that point. So when she called to tell me that now Isabella was on it too, we laughed. ‘Maybe that’s what my cat needs,’ I joked. ‘I mean, he’s been under the weather lately.’

There was a nervous edge to our giggling.

‘I think this Prozac thing has gone too far,’ Olivia said.

‘Yes.’ I sighed. ‘Yes, I think it has.’

I never thought that depression could seem funny, never thought there’d be a time when I could be amused thinking that of the $1.3 billion spent on prescriptions for Prozac last year (up about 30 percent since 1992), some of them might even be for our household pets, who are apparently as susceptible to mental trauma as the rest of us. I never thought I would amazedly read about Wenatchee, Washington, a town known as ‘the Apple Capital of the World,’ a place where 600 out of its 21,000 residents are all on Prozac, and where one psychologist has come to be known as ‘the Pied Piper of Prozac.’ I never thought that the
New York Times
, reporting on the eleven million people who have taken Prozac – six million in the United States alone – would declare on its front page that this constituted a ‘legal drug culture.’ I never thought there would be so many cartoons with Prozac themes in the
New Yorker
, illustrating, among other things, a serotonin-happy Karl Marx declaring, ‘Sure! Capitalism can work out its kinks!’ I never thought that in the same week I would stare down at both a
Newsweek
cover with a large, missile-like capsule beneath the caption ‘Beyond Prozac’ and a
New Republic
cover of some shiny, happy people enjoying their sunny lives above the headline ‘That Prozac Moment!’

I never thought that this antidote to a disease as serious as depression – a malady that easily could have ended my life – would become a national joke.

Prozac Nation
, 1996

OUT OF IT

M
ARKETED AS
M
ANDRAX
in the United Kingdom and easily obtained on prescription, methaqualone became the 1960s London substance of sexual preference. A fair percentage of thirty-year-old readers were probably conceived as a direct result of Britain’s nocturnal drug of choice shifting from Horlicks to Mandrax. Being stoned qualified as a British domestic comfort: safe and exciting. Notting Hill Gate stoners heard tales of globe-trotting hippies sleeping into corpses as they drove off Greek island roads keeping their eyes on the dawn. Foreign hospitals weren’t too much fun. Neither were foreign jails, even before
Midnight Express
. The music was better at home. European rock was absolute shite. There was no need to travel.

However, during 1967, Mick Jagger was busted and jailed in England for being in possession of legally obtained Italian speed. Although the appeal-court judges eventually cut him loose, the incident convinced pursuers of altered mind states that being a bombed-out tourist abroad was considerably safer than staying at home minding one’s business. Even worse, the authorities made the worrying discovery that Mandrax took the fun out of television ratings. They stopped doctors prescribing it. Gee’s Linctus is not much of an aphrodisiac, and the hallucinations on Feminax are well overrated. So, the heads took to travel.

Nowadays, travellers to foreign lands tend to indulge themselves with New Age worries such as catching a strong dose of clap or the cost of mobile-phone diversions from one’s unattended office. I remember so well the days when foreign travel fulfilled with remarkable efficiency my desires to get off my face. It was so easy in the sixties and seventies: catch a cheap flight to Ibiza, walk from the Farmacia airport to a beach full of sex, lie on the tidemark, drop a Dormidina, let my wet dreams ooze into reality, have a happy night, and be woken at dawn by Guardia Civil attacking me with pointed sticks. It was what going abroad was all about. Spain for downers, Italy for uppers, South America for cactus and coca preparations, Morocco for marijuana tea, and up the Khyber for edible, drinkable and smokable hash suppositories.

Foreign chemists always seemed to do a good job catering for sufferers of diarrhoea and hypochondria. Furthermore, the happy Mediterranean pharmacist did not seem troubled that the customer might experience effects over and above mere cure and soon beg for more. British high-street chemists, on the other hand, were nothing more than drug-squad officers dressed in white. One had to be ill to get high. But many medicines continued to be purchased for reasons other than the usual ones of rectifying the irregularity of the discharge of bodily fluids and easing pain. Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Panadol, Anacin-3, Datril and Tylenol, all of which were manufactured initially for headache relief but are now often acquired for use as sedatives and, more puzzingly, for neutralising the quite pleasant comedown effects known as jet lag. Mix acetaminophen with codeine, and one might be lucky enough to get a small rush of euphoric bliss. Ready mixes of these two narcotics could be found in Tylenol #3 and Phenephen #3. Ibuprofen, found in Advil, Midol, Motrin, Panprin, Rufen and other mild painkillers, was discovered to have the additional qualities of relaxing muscles and producing mild visual distractions. Some fortunates even hallucinate when taking the decongestant pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, found in everything from Vick to Children’s Sudafed.

Need a lift? Catch a flight to Malta, go straight to Valetta’s Freedom Square, which has long housed the inviting shelves of Chemimart. Buy some Stilnox, the crème de la crème of sleeping draughts, very similar to Mandrax. Then go to Paris. At the Champs Élysées and avenue Matignon are real drugstores called ‘Drugstores’, where one can by very sexy sleepers (Dornomyl). From Paris go to Milan, where the Farmacia Bracco will sell you Novalhina, which will kill any pain as it smoothly knocks you out. Then go to Spain where you can still neck a Dormidina for siesta and pop Prozac for pleasure.

But it still requires a visit to the Third World to get serious about chemistry shopping. Sample South-East Asia, where benzodiazepine medications, for example Valium and Librium, are widely used tranquillisers that definitely require prescription in most parts of the world. Not so in Thailand, where the authorities react quizzically to concern about its widely documented potential for use as a recreational drug. A regular Bangkok chemist will happily supplement your Valium supplies with some Rohypnol, ten times stronger and rapidly gaining street cred as a date-rape drug.

Psychedelically, Britain is far behind the Third World, quite a way behind Europe, and wrestling with America for last place. In fact, Britain is even worse than America, where many over-the-counter medications with reputations of inducing euphoria and a good night’s kip as side effects are, unlike here, available without prescription. These include Aleve, Naprosyn and Novonaprox, preparations containing naproxen, an anti-inflammatory non-steroid, which took me quite a long and relieving way from pain. A mate of mine had bought them for me at a Manhattan chain store called S & M Pharmacy. He’d also legally scored far more interesting dope called secbarbital and sold as ‘Big Reds’. These actually produced a slice of long-lasting silent giggles.

The United States even outclasses European countries when it comes to the availability of some particular over-the-counter drugs. Melatonin is the best example. It can be bought in Boise, Idaho, but not in Amsterdam, Paris or Madrid. The presence of adequate melatonin, a hormone secreted by the pineal gland, induces sleep and reverses the ravages of time. Benefits supposedly range from its gentle effective sleeping aid to an extremely powerful free radical. (Free radicals are molecules that are highly corrosive to the cells of the body and are believed to be one of the major contributors to the ageing process. They are formed as a by-product of the body’s normal chemical processes, particularly of the reaction between oxygen and fat.) Melatonin is also claimed to be an immune-system enhancer, as well as a confirmed inhibitor of jet lag.

If not allowed to breeze into Miami, do not despair; hop on a plane to Johannesburg and buy some melatonin at any high-street chemist. While there, stock up on Syndol, a strong soporific spiked with codeine.

So, if you want to keep stoned, keep rolling or keep moving.

F
OR OTHER CHILDREN
it was entering a sweetshop that made them feel like a kid in a sweetshop, but it was a trip to the local chemist that invariably aroused the finer feeling in me . . . It was the pills and powders and preparations, the tinctures and mixtures and linctuses. It was the bank of square, dark wood drawers with exotic abbreviations like ‘sticta. pul.’ or ‘sur. papav.’ that stimulated my nameless longings.

Worryingly, my appreciation was not just an aesthetic one, for, even when I was only label-high to a bottle of codeine linctus, I had come to understand the benefits of a slight chemical shift. At the age of seven I was already faking stomach aches in return for a generous dose of Kaolin & Morphine, a mixture that would spread warmth throughout my body.

At boarding school my quest continued. Throughout the winter I would line up after breakfast in the hope of being doled out a sweet spoonful of Gee’s Linctus for my perpetual cough. It seemed to have pretty much the same effect as the tummy-ache medicine and I was not surprised to discover later that anhydrous morphine was again the active ingredient in this opiate squill mixture. Also, thanks to some advice from my older brother, I experimented with some tablets called Do-Do. Each pill contained 18.31mg of ephedrine, the same variety of speed that precipitated the downfall of the footballer Maradona during the 1994 World Cup finals. I found that the drug worked extremely well with alcohol, enabling you to carry on drinking long after you were too drunk to drink any more. The downside was the strain it placed on the heart muscles and the tendency to produce bizarre hallucinations at inconvenient times. It was hard to get my homework done when, for instance, my housemaster – in bondage outfit, but with the tail of a mermaid – would make unscheduled visits from the electrical socket.

Over-the-counter drugs are cheap, they’re easy to get hold of (provided your pharmacist isn’t some bitter old fuck with a chip on their shoulder because they failed to get into medical school), and there’s a wide range of pleasures available. My staple diet is opiates, which come in a bewildering array of pills and sticky liquids. The king of these pills is Paramol. They come in a sinister black packet with a partially eclipsed blue sun, so similar to a pinned-out eye that you wonder if their real market might actually be the recreational users.

Other opiates are on the market in bottles, each one strong enough to get you into a fairly nice nod, or at least make things comfortably blurred around the edges. They will also soothe your nerves after an E too many or a night on the nose – at least that’s what my friends tell me. I’ve given up all those class-A drugs. They’re illegal; they’re expensive; you have to buy them off dodgy people; the doses are hard to predict and, worst of all, they’ve become socially acceptable. Raving the night away on MDMA or spending hours in the locked toilet cubicle of a fashionable nightspot now makes you feel like a regular pillar of society.