I saw the documentary Cocaine Diaries: Alex James in Colombia a few weeks ago and it got me thinking. So much attention on part of the 'left' is paid to sweat shops, organic food, and reducing carbon emissions, of thinking globally acting locally but how many of these people use illicit drugs and how many of these people know where they came from? And again how many of them care?
I was at a party a week or so ago and I was chatting with this guy who told me he was partial to the occasional line of coke. So I told him about the film. "Yeah I've heard about it but haven't seen it," he told me, "Actually I have a friend who's constantly bugging me about my drug use for all those very same reasons and I feel kinda bad but I think I live a reasonably good life, I buy the right things and give money to charity, you know? It's just a bit of fun."
It's like the blood diamonds, I told him. Westerners with too much money, wanting something bright and shiney on their finger, whose money was used to fund a brutal civil war in Western Africa, where aputations and killings were a part of every day life. The war was sustained by there money, and in the end it was more about controlling the supply of diamonds that it was about ideology or territory or old ethnic tensions.
"What if I offered you a line, right here and now?" he asked me. "What would you do?" So I answered him as honestly as I could: "I guess I would have to think about whether the several hours off buzzing off my nut is worth more than the life of someone on the other side of the world and I hope I would say no."
Sunday, January 25, 2009
cocaine diaries
Alex James, ex-Blur bassist and now cheese farmer, once wrote that he had spent a million pounds on champagne and cocaine. Now cocaine-free James recently visited Colombia, the source of 80 percent of the world's cocaine, on the invitation of President Alvaro Uribe, to see first hand what his personal drug habit and that of the estimated 800,000 Brits has had on his country. Vice President Francisco Santos explained to him, upon arrival that when a "person starts consuming coke, all that money comes here to finance landmines, destruction of the environment, terrorism, kidnapping, displacement." During his visit, James met with drug dealers, farmers and members of an anti-narcotic unit, who according to the BBC website, 10 percent of them have been killed since filming in 2008. In Bogota, the capital of Colombia, James met with a contract killer, disguised as a taxi driver. Driving through the streets of Bogota, the driver told James that business was very good, making allusion to the paid killings. It's all drug related, he explained. The taxi driver was killed himself after filming.
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2 comments:
If it was all legalised these problems would go away.
If consumers have no ethical objection to a product I don't think you can expect them to stop using it unless it's a boycott aimed at opening up other supply chains, and there's no way boycotting would open up 'cleaner' supplies here. It's reasonable to expect people to influence the source where they have the ability to (like fair trade) but if they are denied these options then I don't think they're at fault.
Here the fault lies with the governments of the world for creating artificial scarcity and an unregulated market. Perhaps wider and more accepted usage will convince them to change...
Keep blogging mate!
sorry for the late reply anonymous - although I agree that governments legalising and regulating might reduce the problems of production and trafficking of cocaine however they ain't gonna do that anytime soon. if a person has no ethical objection to cocaine and the destruction to human life it causes in the countries that produce it then I guess there is not point arguing with them but I do not accept any logic that removes responsibility of the individual in the choices they make. there are international consequences to our action and there is a direct link between cocaine the west divides into lines on the coffee table and the decades long civil war that has more to do about the production of charlie than the ideological differences that started it.
look no one's perfect, christ I have a few branded items of clothing here and that were undoubtedly produced in sweat shops but I am trying to work on that.
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