I was once on a three-day coke binge in Quito, Ecuador, when I was hit with a dilemma about how to use the next eight hours of my life.
It was late 2021 and my rampage was scheduled to end sometime on Sunday afternoon. I had been working as a researcher for the United Nations for around a year and the next day had a 9AM meeting scheduled with the Ecuadorian Ministry of Environment, who wanted to discuss the finer points of an Amazonian conservation project in their office. I would need my wits about me. Some sleep would have been useful. Both of these things were beyond doubt.
However, even though I had taken a boatload of benzos, the cravings were so strong that at 1AM I took a quick glance at my watch and then a doomed taxi into Quito city center.
I jumped out at a place where I knew the “basuqueros,” or dealers, operated and started asking around. Some guys said they could get coke for me a couple of blocks away. We formed a little convoy of five—me, with my polished shoes and a fancy leather jacket, looking like anyone but a basuquero, and four people who very clearly were, in fact, basuqueros. Sadly, we walked right into a police ambush, and were ordered up against the wall at gunpoint. We were cuffed and taken to a nearby station, whereupon the police gleefully began beating the dealers senseless, striking their stomachs, backs, and thighs with a big stick.
My turn duly arrived—yet rather than leaving me splayed on the ground in a pool of my own blood, the commander struck me very gently on the shoulder then asked what I was doing with the other guys. I said I was from Brazil and that I worked for the UN. He said it didn’t matter if I was a Brazilian diplomat, what the fuck was I doing with those guys? They hadn’t found anything on me, so I said that I had just broken up with my fiancée, and I was very drunk, and had randomly decided I was going to buy those other guys some booze.
“At 8.50AM I was at the Ministry of Environment, high as a kite. Masked-up due to Covid, it seemed to me that nobody had noticed. The meeting began, I took the notes, then went back home—since it was still not mandatory to work from the office—in order to finish the rest of my drugs”
Bizarrely, the officer found this to be credible, and asked me to sit down at a table in the room. I felt really bad for the basuqueros as I sat and watched him beat the shit out of them. They were crying, vomiting, and yelling in pain.
By the time we got out my regular dealer, Jesús, was around. So I took another taxi, got a couple of grams, went back home, and snorted a line. By then it was 5AM. I took a shower, ironed my shirt, suit, and tie, polished my shoes, and at 8.50AM I was at the Ministry of Environment, high as a kite. Masked-up due to Covid, it seemed to me that nobody had noticed. The meeting began, I took the notes, then went back home—since it was still not mandatory to work from the office—in order to finish the rest of my drugs.
I had first taken cocaine five years earlier, in 2016, when I was doing my bachelor’s degree in Europe. I was buying different things off the dark web and when I first snorted cocaine I was like, “God, now I know why Pablo Escobar used to be one of the top 10 billionaires in the world.” It made me see the world with love everywhere, at first.
But gradually I got hooked. After graduating in 2017, I started working for a think tank in Brasília, the purpose-built capital of Brazil designed from the ground up by Oscar Niemeyer. I was making quite a lot of money, which was good because good cocaine was expensive, and not always easy to get hold of. When I moved to Rio I knew no one at all. So, I’d go into the favelas to buy coke from teenagers who were equipped with grenades and rifles. The favelas near to my home were like an open drug market and customers were treated nicely. I’d often go there at 7AM looking to re-up during a days-long binge and giggle to myself as I passed the colorful spot where Michael Jackson once shot a music video.
“When I moved to Ecuador in 2020, having become a UN officer, things took a turn for the worse. The coke supply on the streets was unbelievable”
By then I was working for the UN Development Project. To my knowledge, maybe a few of my colleagues were also taking coke. I was an outlier, for sure. But when I moved to Ecuador in 2020, having become a UN officer, things took a turn for the worse. The coke supply on the streets was unbelievable. It was around the time when the prison killings began and gangs were gaining power, driving supply up and prices down. A gram of pure coke, or perico, was just $10, and I was snorting a lot of it since we were working from home. In fairness, it did often help me stay focused during long shifts.
At this point, I was spending a lot of time with girls I’d met on Tinder, sometimes dating three at once. The chicks in Ecuador were really cool and easygoing, and I fell in love with one amazing girl after we were together just a few months, even spending Christmas and New Year with her family. But she broke up with me after I snorted a line in front of her, a heartbreak that triggered a two-week coke binge.
With my honeymoon period with the drug well and truly behind me, I found it increasingly difficult to balance my cocaine life with putting on a suit to go to morning meetings, such as the one at the education ministry. With all I was snorting—five grams per day at the peak—a small hole between my septum was growing until it became about 1.5cm wide, like a coin. It was also very inflamed. I needed to find another route of administration. At the very end of 2021, I tried smoking basuco, which is like the shitty residue that’s leftover after making cocaine, and also crack, but I found that neither were as good as injecting cocaine. The whole ritual of taking a syringe and finding a vein was very exciting. Cocaine, at those doses, gives you such a psychedelic experience. It feels like you’re talking with spirits or hearing people from another dimension.
My addiction was at such a critical stage that I had to ask for help from my parents. I went back to Brazil and got myself admitted into rehab with the condition they would allow me to have full-time access to my computer and cellphone so I could continue working. I even coined the term “rehab office.”
“During my training in Bogotá, I went to a nightclub with a few colleagues who I knew took cocaine”
Then I was offered a position as a UN officer in rural Colombia. During my training in Bogotá, I went to a nightclub with a few colleagues who I knew took cocaine so I offered them some, but they refused as we were with other colleagues. But most of the time I would take cocaine at home by myself. Real drug addicts do not like to share. I was friends with two Venezuelan refugees, though, who sold coke but didn’t snort themselves. They would hang out at my house and we’d cook together and watch movies and shit. Occasionally I would go skydiving, racking up around 35 jumps over a few years. I’ve always been an adrenaline junkie and the high you get from the jump is almost the same as snorting a line, but I was definitely bored and lonely at points.
In the rural town I was deployed to, the coca trade was the main economic activity. The community relied entirely on the coca plantation and coca paste trade to buy food, medicine, and basic supplies. At one point during 2023, there was a shortage of coca paste buyers, causing a local humanitarian crisis. With the shortage of Colombian peso bills, coca paste actually became the local currency in markets and pharmacies. I also once witnessed a Sicario-like execution, and separately met the Colombian minister of defense when he came for a meeting.
Things got really out of control again there. I was doing mountains of tusi, the pink cocaine, since finding good coke in Colombia is rather tricky outside of the big cities, and I was doing it everywhere. I snorted coke in a former FARC combatant camp, once inside a Colombian Army base, and in the bathroom of the police headquarters before a meeting about drug trafficking in a government building. I’m still surprised I got away with that, but I suppose no one would suspect a UN officer, wearing a UN jacket, would be doing lines in a police station toilet.
After another cocaine-induced psychotic break I was incapable of going back to work and I had a panic attack. I got help from a UN psychologist, who managed to get me to a hospital in Medellín, and I was immediately repatriated back to Brazil with a paramedic at my side. I spent 30 days in rehab before the UN doctors decided not to grant me the security clearance to go back to work. My contract had to be terminated.
“I suppose no one would suspect a UN officer, wearing a UN jacket, would be doing lines in a police station toilet”
The last two years have been a constant struggle to find a new job in my field while coping with the loss of the “UN guy” identity I built for myself. I’m now four months clean after spending the last two years in and out of rehab.
I’m speaking out because nobody actually talks about cocaine legalization. Decades of interventions attempting to curb the supply have had no actual positive outcome. Now we’ve just got teenagers armed to the teeth selling it and killing each other for market dominance. I’m still haunted by the times I copped from them.
In Brazil, the rise of armed criminal groups with absolute power over suburban areas—while simultaneously laundering money in the heart of São Paulo’s financial district—is driven entirely by cocaine.
Legalization would most likely move the ‘white gold’ out of the hands of armed criminal groups. Hopefully, then, Latin America would stop experiencing such extreme levels of cocaine-related violence. Maybe a man with a laundry list of errors and a hole in his nose isn’t the best advocate for deregulation, but clearly we need to try something different.
If you’re struggling with addiction, you can visit the official website of SAMHSA’s National Helpline for treatment information.
As told to Mattha Busby. Follow him on Instagram @matthabusby
The post ‘I Was Snorting 5 Grams a Day’: The Wild Life of a Cocaine-Addicted UN Worker appeared first on VICE.
