The war on drugs is racist, cruel, expensive, and it doesn’t even work, since people are still getting high—in the past few years, illegal drug use among kids has increased, while legal drug use (in the form of tobacco and alcohol) has declined.
Frank Morris was only 23 when he ended up in rehab. But he was already a full-blown junkie, smoking crack on the streets of San Francisco, and nearly losing his left arm after accidentally pumping a full shot into his artery. He tells me the drug that led him down this path—that helped him accelerate from a teenager smoking pot in his parent’s basement to a young man shooting heroin in a filthy apartment—was a medication called OxyContin.
The Bluff is a part of Atlanta most people know well to avoid. Named as an acronym for “Better Leave You Fucking Fool,” it’s regularly ranked as the #1 most dangerous neighborhood in the city, and as of 2010 it was #5 in the United States. Even a simple Google search will reveal that if you’re looking for heroin, it’s the place to go, as long as you don’t mind ending up with a gun in your face. Half the time you hear a street name-checked in Atlanta rap, it’s a street somewhere in here.
I first heard about Spookhaus (or Bruce Campbell) when I was on tour a few weeks ago. Our driver said he had bought weed off of this guy in Vancouver who was a real vampire. Anytime I hear about someone like this in my beautiful, boring city, I get really excited about befriending them. When I found out that Spookhaus allegedly sleeps in a coffin, I was sold.
By the time Suleyman Ergun was 21 years old, he was the world’s most prolific and powerful seller of smack. Known throughout the junkie and police communities as the North London Turk, Ergun and his gang flooded Britain and Europe with heroin for five years.
For his pains, the former factory worker got mansions filled with cash and unlimited underworld cachet. At the height of his powers he was a multimillionaire and his favorite tipple was a bottle of champagne with eight grams of cocaine dumped into it. Today, he is almost penniless and lives with his mum. He’s 39. What happened?
Christiania is Copenhagen’s infamous, self-governed squat community. It was described to me as a magical town where cannabis is sold freely in the streets and hot, girly-looking boys frolic about giving people blowbacks. So when I was in Denmark I obvs HAD to go. Also, being a squatter myself, I feel a strange affinity with other squatters the world over. I wanted to be close to my people. Read the rest of this entry »
