Comment: Intoxication - what's your poison?

My friends don’t do drugs. That much I know.

I’ve always wondered who does all the coke on toilet seats and sinks that makes investigations reveal that coke is sprinkled all over my beloved Copenhagen nightlife. No one ever offers me any drugs. And I’m not even sure who to go to, if I wanted to snort, swallow or inject something to spice up my night.

So you can imagine how surprised I was when I hosted a party a couple of months ago which turned out to be a coke-fiends paradise.

My roomies and I threw a big party, and yeah some people crashed — they always do right? — But we thought we had the situation under control. Next morning, when we were cleaning up, we heard a knock on our door. Our upstairs neighbour, a friendly looking middle-aged woman greeted us with a smile. In a calm voice, she assured us, that she didn’t mind our parties, and she didn’t mind the loud music — but that they were a bit annoyed by having to hear people snorting coke in the staircase all night. Also, the space in front of their door was covered in little bloodstains and empty coke bags.

It’s there. It’s definitely there. And after that party, I’ve become oddly aware of it.

We cleaned up the blood, threw out the bags, and sat down to talk about the whole mess.

Yeah, maybe it was actually a little weird that everyone disappeared all the time. And as a matter of fact, I did notice that some of the guys kept going to the bathroom together. And wait – didn’t that guy have a bit of a nosebleed at one point?

It’s there. It’s definitely there. And after that party, I’ve become oddly aware of it. Girls with huge pupils, claiming to be extra drunk, dancing less self-consciously than usual. Guys rubbing their lips and grinding their teeth a little. And it turns out that these days, you can even buy the drugs online, and have them sent to your door. The Global Drug Survey 2014 shows an increase in people who buy drugs online. It also showed that the most common purchases are Cannabis and MDMA [methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or ecstasy, ed].

My mom raised me to be afraid of drugs.

Quite frankly they terrify me. So I try to stick to alcohol. I happily take a swimming pool full of liquor and then dive in it – as Kendrick Lamar would say.

But maybe I’m being uptight. It seems that drugs are here to stay. Should I change my perception of drugs and the people who use them, or does the world around me have to change? It’s hard to find a young Dane today who doesn’t support the proposals to legalize marijuana in Denmark. But then I think of my high-school sweetheart who is a schizophrenic today because of a cannabis-induced psychosis.

Or how it took my brother an extra year to finish high-school because he smoked weed instead of doing algebra.

See the original article on Pandeia here.

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