This might sound naïve to those in the know, but who the heck is still snorting cocaine?  I remember when I moved to L.A. in 1978.  I was writing for some of the major rock magazines at the time and hanging with lots of people in the music business.  More than half of them were doing cocaine and thing everyone used to say back then was “and the great thing is there’s no bad side effects.” We all soon discovered that was certainly not the case.  First there were the people who just dropped dead after snorting a big line of coke.  Yeah, I would call DEATH a pretty serious side effect.  Of course, back then people said that these overdoses were people who had weak hearts.  But then it turned out that most people who have weak hearts don’t know that they have them until they have some sort of attack.  And finding out that you have a medical by DYING from that issue is not the way you want to go.

But the real casualties of frequent cocaine use in those days we’re your death — was your life.  I knew lots of people that had pretty good lives, a good job, a nice wife, a great place to live who totally destroyed all of it by using cocaine.  Basically, the only problem they had was a wee bit of boredom now and then.  Then they discovered cocaine — it took away the boredom alright, but it took everything else as well.  People like to call cocaine a “recreational” drug.  Well, one of the things about something that is recreational is you don’t HAVE to do it.  It was amazing how someone could go from a little “bump” once in a while on the weekends to a gram a day and then two or three grams a day.  Of course, by then they were spending so much money on cocaine coupled with the strong likelihood that their job (an probably their family) was now gone, that they were full on addicts. A lot of people never recovered from that period of their lives.  But those who did or, like me, those of us who witnessed such self destruction up close swore off the drug for life.

But there are still a lot of people out there still using it.  I thought that, in light of the opioid overdose crisis people would be smarter about what they put in their body.  Apparently not, since DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) seized nearly four tons of coke on a boat between the Madeira and Azores Islands of the coast of Portugal.  The street value was estimated at 269 million dollars.  There were 165 individual packages of cocaine weighing 23 kilograms each.

It is believed that the cocaine originally came from Venezuela and was on its way to Europe or the United Arab Emirates.  Abdelhak Khiam, Morocco’s Chief of Investigations said that South American drug cartels have been using smuggling routes through sub-Saharan countries where he said there was “little control”.

The vessel was stopped about 965km (600 miles) south of the Azores, Portugal News Online reported, and was carrying a large amount of “highly pure” cocaine.  The crew of the boat were mostly from Turkey and Azerbaijan.  They were arrested and the Comoros-flagged vessel was towed into the Spanish port of Cádiz on Friday after Spanish officials received intelligence from the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA).  The operation was jointly conducted by Spanish customs and police and the NCA under the overall co-ordination of the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre-Narcotics (MAOC-N) in Lisbon.

“Seizing this quantity of cocaine represents a major disruption to international crime groups, depriving them of revenue potentially running into the hundreds of millions of pounds,” NCA spokesman Mark Blackwell said.

The Portuguese navy and air force is also reported to have carried out a drugs seizure on Thursday after intercepting a yacht suspected of transporting cocaine to the country from the Caribbean.