While backpacking in South America, Jade*, 27, found out how easy it is to get caught up in the cocaine scene.
BEFORE I WENT TO COLOMBIA, I’d tried cocaine a handful of times at house parties or music festivals. But when I got to Colombia at the start of a planned year of backpacking around South America, cocaine was everywhere. So much so, it was normal for a traveller to sit on their bed in the hostel dorm, using a credit card to cut up lines of powder on an iPad, and snort it with a rolled-up bank note. On one of my first nights in Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, I came back to the dorm to get changed before going out when a few travellers crowded around a bed offered me a line. I had a buzz on from happy hour and thought, What the hell, why not?
Someone handed me the note and I snorted a line off an iPad screen. Just seconds later I felt full of energy, like I never wanted to go to sleep. Cocaine made me feel more confident and like it was easier to talk to people, and I quickly got close to a group who did it every day, starting in the evening and not finishing up until sunrise.
We got most of our cocaine from Tom*, a former backpacker who was now living in Bogotá. He would come by the hostel every afternoon and we’d get a few one-gram bags from him. Doing coke was cheaper than drinking alcohol in Colombia – one bag cost about AUD$10 and would last the whole night.
This story is from the August 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan Australia.
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This story is from the August 2017 edition of Cosmopolitan Australia.
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