Pubdate: Sun, 27 Mar 2005
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: David Aaronovitch
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

COCAINE: THE TRUTH

Those Who Deny The Human Cost Of The Drugs Trade Should See Maria Full
Of Grace

If I had been a cocaine user, then perhaps I wouldn't have got things
so wrong. But it was precisely because I hadn't touched any illicit
substance for two decades that my imagination failed me.

We are all drugs generations now. With my lot, it was Red Leb and
Kabul, rumours that someone had spiked the wine with Dexedrine, girls
freaking out after dropping Mandrax and tales from the countryside of
magic mushrooms. Some drank, some smoked, some dealt, some had a bad
trip, and most got over it. One bloke was supposed to have lost his
septum through over-snorting, but I never saw it.

The attitude was best summed up by that scene in Woody Allen's Annie
Hall, where the gauche hero sneezes $10,000-worth of cocaine up the
walls of a New York party.

When it was announced late last year that Britain and Spain have the
highest proportion of cocaine users in the European Union, it didn't
seem unduly worrying. If 2 per cent of all adults in the UK had used
cocaine recently, then this was something to do with the spread within
the middle classes of a party habit that had previously been the
prerogative of the top stratum of professionals. The professionals had
survived and so would everyone else. What, me worry?

Meanwhile, the malign effects of the drug trade could be blamed not on
the users, but on the law. It has been prohibition that has created
the link between the trade and the criminals, and that has forced
addicts into theft, violence and burglary. Somehow reorder the world
so that drugs would be treated in the same way as fags - legal but
educated against - and the drugs lords and narcotics barons would lose
their power. So the argument goes.

Last month, when the Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell and Sir Ian
Blair, the new Metropolitan Police commissioner, launched a campaign
against middle-class cocaine use, I saw it as a rather pointless
guilt-trip. Sure, I said to myself, there's blood in that powder, but
whose fault is that? The reason that peoples' pleasures are obtained
at the expense of a vicious illegal industry is precisely because
there can be no 'fair-trade cocaine', with happy Colombian coca
collectives handing over the best pods to be processed for Starbucks'
own-brand ethical happy powder. And I forgot about it.

Then, last week, I went to see a movie that changed my mind. Maria
Full of Grace, now released in Britain, was made by young American
director Joshua Marston. It is a completely straightforward depiction
of the recruitment and first journey of Maria, a young cocaine 'mule',
who transports 62 large pellets of cocaine from Colombia to New York
inside her stomach.

Seventeen-year-old Maria does not live in abject poverty, but is
restless with the grind of her life and is quickly seduced by the
fabulous sums on offer to those who will make the journey. She trains
herself to swallow the pellets and then has to negotiate the dangers
of one of the packages breaking open during the flight, of excreting
or vomiting the packages en route, of being stopped at US customs and
of retrieving the drugs after the journey.

To emphasise that all this is true, one of the characters in the film
effectively plays himself. Orlando Tobon is a well-known character in
New York's Little Colombia. Fifteen years ago, he came across three
unclaimed corpses in a city morgue. They were drugs mules who had
suffered fatal overdoses through the bursting of drugs packages. Since
then, Tobon has organised the return to Colombia of more than 400 such
victims.

Why do I need a film to tell me this? I can read. I knew, for example,
that a couple of years back, a 12-year-old Nigerian boy was caught at
JFK airport with 87 packages of heroin in his stomach. He had been
offered just over ?1,000 for this assignment.

Somehow, stupidly, I didn't make the ethical connection between the
decision to use cocaine and these particular people. This spare,
unsentimental, unsanctimonious film makes such evasion impossible.
Here, it says, is the journey that delivers your coke to your nose.

Or, since you, in all probability, don't indulge either, to Kate's
nose. Kate is the pseudonym of a 36-year-old marketing executive and
mother of two, featured in the BBC's Online magazine. She takes coke
two or three times a week, usually with her friends. Lines of cocaine
are left 'racked up' in the bedroom at parties for those who wish to
indulge. 'It is just part of my life,' says Kate, 'and my checklist
when I leave the house to meet friends is, more often than not, money,
phone, keys and cocaine.'

Her dealer lives in Soho. But where does his stuff originate? 'I don't
really think about where the cocaine comes from,' admits Kate, 'or the
cost to other people down the supply chain. The drug industry is much
bigger than just us "middle-class" users. The problems would not go
away if we all stopped using. I think it's a waste of police time
tackling us.'

I don't think Kate could watch Maria Full of Grace and then carry on
as before. How could she, as the minister and the police chief put it,
buy Body Shop jojoba oil because the money goes to needy Zambians, but
happily score Colombian coke that has been carried inside the body of
a terrified 17-year-old mule? If her use is as elective as she says it
is (she can take it or leave it, apparently), she has no need
whatsoever to run the moral hazard of benefiting from someone else's
misery.

How stupid of me to miss the point, though, even though I have an
excuse that Kate doesn't. Not buying or using cocaine, I have never
really had an occasion to question my actions. There was no choice to
be made, so I saw only the policy, not the people. And it is obvious
to me now that in this, as in everything else, an individual cannot
shrug off the moral responsibility for their individual actions.

What can be done? Forget, for a moment, the issue of prohibition. At
the purely individual level, we should tell those of our friends who
decamp from the bar or living-room, only to return a few moments later
bright-eyed and spouting rubbish, to give it up. Not because it's bad
for them (they already know all about that), or because it makes them
very boring, or because it's against the law, but because people with
names and families really do die getting their supplies to them.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin