WARNING: CONFRONTING CONTENT
THEY never found her body. But her killers would reveal how they had kidnapped her, tortured her, repeatedly raped her, decapitated her, then played soccer with her head.
Middle class Westerners, some of them quite possibly Australian professional footballers, enjoyed the cocaine trafficked by these animals.
For the record, the victim’s name was Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena Lopezs. She was 19 and she was innocent. Her killers, when captured, admitted they had mistaken her for someone else.
So it goes in Mexico, where more than 10 thousand people are killed each year in the drug war.
“If we’re a society that worries about eating free range chicken, drinking fair trade coffee and buying shoes and jeans that were not put together by sweatshop labour, well, we’d better worry about the real cost of cocaine, too.â€
So wrote Melbourne economist Mike Pottenger two years ago. Those words are truer than ever today, with cocaine use still on the rise in Australia.
Most of the world’s cocaine is produced in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. It is then shipped through Mexico and onwards to the western world. Mexican cartels love two things about the Australian market. Firstly, our coastline is so vast the chances of interception are small, whether the drug is transported by small boats or shipping containers.
And secondly, as this graph shows, wholesale prices are insanely high.
According to the United Nations World Drug Report 2014, the Oceania market is among the world’s fastest-growing markets. Our market is so lucrative that Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapoâ€Guzman Loera, a man the US State Department called “the most powerful drug trafficker in the worldâ€, helped set up a cocaine importation business in Sydney five years ago.
But why do Australians love the drug so much? Matt Noffs, CEO of drug rehab and counselling organisation The Noffs Foundation, says it’s all about image.
“I think a lot of it is about social marketing,†Noffs tells news.com.au. “People see these sports stars using cocaine and they think ‘hey, if they can get away with it, I should be able to get away scot free too’.â€
Noffs says cocaine is now the drug of choice among the middle and upper classes in Australia for several reasons. One is the decline of heroin, which occurred because of the “heroin drought†caused by the 2000s war in Afghanistan (where opium poppies are grown). Also, heroin has had what Noffs calls very effective “social marketingâ€. Put simply, we all know what a junkie looks like. And that’s not an image anyone aspires to.
But the image of the cool footballer, the fast-paced Wall Street trader, the creative ad executive, all of them snorting a line or two of cocaine to get them through the day and later, through the night — is socially acceptable.
“A coke addict will look like our friends and family members,†Noffs says. “So many people use it regularly, it’s a very normal thing.â€
But are there side effects of regular cocaine use beyond a perennially runny nose? You’d better believe it.
Noffs foundation clinician Kieran Palmer deals with the pointy end of people’s drug addiction. The first myth he exposes is that cocaine is not addictive. Make no mistake, it’s as addictive as any other drug out there.
“In terms of how it affects the brain, cocaine doesn’t discriminate whether you’re a pro athlete or a kid robbing cars. It’s quite an addictive kind of substance and the drive to get more of it is strong, no matter what,†Palmer explains.
“People who use cocaine regularly often do so because it’s a short-acting drug. Something like ice might last for 10 to 12 hours, depending on the quality, but a cocaine high can be as short as half an hour or an hour. Then comes the severe cravings for more.â€
Palmer says that regular cocaine users become more neurotic, more aggressive and difficult to work with, and can even undergo a drug-induced psychosis. And when you try to shake the addiction, that’s a whole new kind of hell.
“Cocaine withdrawal has in the past been undervalued a bit because it didn’t carry the sort of physical stuff a lot of the other withdrawals would have, like the shakes or vomiting you might get with heroin or alcohol. But cocaine withdrawal tends to play havoc on the moods. People experience down or depressed moods, irritability, fatigue, sleep disturbances and so on.â€
Meanwhile, Matt Noffs fears that this week’s news will only help make cocaine seem cooler.
“To become socially unacceptable I think we have to see more of those people lose their jobs, their money, their families. That’s when people start to take it seriously.â€
NSW police Drug Squad detectives announced proudly today that they had arrested and charged two Colombian nationals with the commercial supply of cocaine after seizing more than $2 million worth of the drug overnight. Despite this, cocaine is unlikely to become hard-to-get or “uncool†anytime soon.
The best way remind the “cool†people who use this “cool†drug of its real downsides? For now, it might be to remind them of life in Mexico as often as possible.
Here’s what US science writer Erik Vance wrote on the subject of the people behind the cocaine trade a year ago. And remember, much of this happens to innocent mums, dads and children, not just drug dealers:
“Decapitations and burning people alive are just the start. Chainsaws, belt sanders, acid — these 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.
“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.â€
Originally published as Cocaine truth will blow you away
