Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

Cocaine can be altered — cut, or stepped — with various substances, which get added to the drug either during production or, more simply, mixed with the final product, with the white powder. There are three kinds of cut: active cuts, done with substances that produce the same psychoactive effects as cocaine; cosmetic cuts, with substances that reproduce some of cocaine’s collateral effects; and inert cuts, with products that increase volume without creating damaging effects. People may think they’re snorting good quality stuff, but they’re really paving their nostrils with concrete. Active cuts are made with amphetamines or other stimulants, such as caffeine, that enhance and prolong the effect of the drug, as in the case of Chalk — low quality cocaine that’s dressed up with amphetamines. Cosmetic cuts use pharmaceuticals and local anesthetics, such as lidocaine and ephedrine, that reproduce some of the same collateral effects as coke. When you just want to increase the volume to get more doses and make more money, you use innocuous substances, such as flour and lactose. The most commonly used substance for inert cuts is mannitol, a laxative gentle enough for children and the elderly that, other than in appearance, has nothing in common with cocaine.

“One of my most loyal customers just got back from the United States. He says blow there’s 30 percent.”

“Thirty percent?”

“Yeah, the active ingredient is 30 percent. But I say it’s a load of crock. I know places in Paris where it’s 5 percent. And in Italy some pushers sell balls of coke where the active ingredient’s practically nonexistent. But they’re real cheats.”

Over the years I’ve seen just about everything there is to see in drug distribution. In Europe the average ranges from 25 percent to 43 percent; some countries come in lower, Denmark at 18 percent and England and Wales at 20. But these figures could change at any time.

The cut is where the real money is made, because it’s the cut that makes a line of coke precious, and it’s the cut that ruins nostrils. In London some bourgeois pushers hide quality coke in garages to put on the market when drug seizures make for a shortage of goods and as a consequence everybody starts cutting it, lowering the quality. At that point you can sell the really good stuff for four times as much. In an economy in which supply and demand fluctuate so rapidly, the cut becomes the discriminating factor. The distributor can cut it, with the approval of the Mafia family. The base is allowed to cut only in extreme cases, and only with the authorization of the distributer. The pusher who cuts is a dead pusher.

• • •

“I took some courses; I crashed one of those clinics where people who want to quit are bullied with statistics, like 25 percent of heart attacks in people between the ages of eighteen and forty-five are caused by my product. If you ask me, these courses spew a lot of bullshit. But I did learn something. It acts on your neurons, makes your nervous system go haywire, and over time it damages it. In other words, it pisses your brain away. And that’s not all: It’s dangerous for your heart too; all it needs is an extra chaser to make it collapse, and if the product’s washed down with a Long Island or a Negroni or a Jack Daniel’s, or accompanied by little blue pills, well, then it’s like stepping on the gas on a curve. You also have to consider that cocaine is a vasoconstrictor; it constricts your blood vessels, anesthetizes you. All these effects happen pretty much right away, depending on how you do it: If you shoot up, it starts taking effect before you even realize it; if you smoke crack or freebase, it’s a little slower but still really fast; and if you snort, it hits you a second later.”

I ask him about the good moments.

“The good moments? It wakes you up right away, raises your attention level, gives you energy, you’re less tired, you don’t even feel the need to sleep, eat, or drink. But that’s not all: It improves your sense of self, you feel happy, you want to do things, you’re euphoric, and any pain you might have disappears. And you lose your inhibitions, so it ups your sex drive, makes you more daring. And what’s more, coke doesn’t make you feel like a drug addict. A cocaine addict’s nothing like a heroin addict. People who snort cocaine are users, not junkies. They satisfy a need and then get on with life.”

But then he starts right in on the bad moments.

“If you do it a lot, you heart goes crazy, you have panic attacks, it’s easy to get depressed, you become irascible for no reason, even paranoid at times. Since you don’t sleep or eat much, you tend to lose weight. If you snort a lot for several years, you risk fucking up your nostrils. I know people who had to get their nasal septum redone because they snorted so much. I also know people who died: One dose too many and you have a heart attack. It’s common knowledge, after all; it’s not like I discovered hot water or something, but when I heard them say that if you use my product you can’t get it up anymore, I was, I mean, it’s not like I have that sort of problem, but a good chunk of my customers come to me precisely for this reason, and they all keep coming back; they’re really charged up, they tell me they fuck for hours, they have orgasms that electrify them from their heads to their toes, they do things they’d only ever seen in porn movies, things they’d never even dreamed of doing — a whole tribe of horny customers who, before they met me, would come after two minutes, and now they’re really having a grand time. I had to understand, but it’s not like I could ask them flat out, guys don’t talk willingly about certain things, and so I asked a woman friend of mine, she’s real tough and asks me for a bit of blow every now and then, but only because she’s finishing up med school and has to study all night, because she works as a cashier during the day to pay the tuition. With me she calls herself Butterfly, because she has a butterfly tattoo on one cheek; I asked her to show it to me, because I didn’t believe her, but she always refused. The fact remains that we agree to meet at the usual place, and as usual, she’s all elusive because she has a million things to do, but I stop her, ask her how things are going with her boyfriend, and then I wink, I feel like an idiot, but I don’t know how else to broach the subject, and luckily she understands and asks me how come I want to know, what’s it to me? I tell her I’m just curious, that she’s important to me, her pleasure’s important, and I wink again when I say pleasure, but this time I feel less idiotic, like I’ve gotten her attention. What’s on your mind? she says, and at that point I tell her the situation, that I heard it said that my product isn’t so good for those kinds of things, and so I’m conducting a sort of market survey, that’s all. And she does something real strange: She takes my hand and drags me to a bar, orders a couple of beers, and lights a cigarette. The bartender sees her and tries to tell her she can’t smoke, but she tells him not to bust her balls, so he retreats behind the counter and goes back to serving cappuccino. And she tells me about her boyfriend: At first it was really fabulous, so good it was almost scary, he’d have these amazing erections, Guinness world book of records, sex that would make the Italian Stallion jealous — but then it was all over. His dick, she says, is as flaccid as a sausage left to boil too long; it takes hours for him to get hard, and if she tries to touch him, it’s like he doesn’t even feel it; it’s like the heat’s gone and his blood vessels are pumping ice water. He’s superdepressed about it; all he does is apologize; he can’t even masturbate when he’s alone. So now he’s taking Viagra, a small dose at first, just twenty-five milligrams, then he upped it to a hundred, but it’s no good; he still only gets half hard, and he can’t come. There’s just no way to make him come, and it’s painful, all that built-up energy that can’t explode, it hurts like hell, and fucking for hours, waiting for him to finally blow, isn’t exactly fun for her either. He’s being treated by an andrologist, he confessed to using my product, and the doctor didn’t bat an eye; he said lots of people come to him with the same problem, and the only solution is to ditch my product, but it’s not easy. Butterfly talks freely, and I start putting the pieces together, and I realize I’m raising an army of sexually depressed men who just keep upping their doses on the remote chance they’ll get hard. Fuck, I wanted to shout, if it weren’t such an inappropriate thing to say right then. And then Butterfly tells me that women use it too, for the same reason, because it gets you aroused, really revved up, but from the point of view of sex it’s a disaster, because one of the product’s side effects is that it’s also an excellent anesthetic; it’s one thing if you rub a bit on your wisdom tooth that’s coming in, but if you stop reaching orgasm, which is already difficult enough under normal circumstances, well, that’s a whole different story. Not to mention, Butterfly continues, the things you do and then regret, like that time her boyfriend confessed to her that he was a bit too high one evening and ended up with a trans, that he’d always fantasized about it but never had the courage to do it. The courage? I say, and Butterfly nods, then after a minute of silence I ask her if she’ll let me see her tattoo this time, and she smiles and stands between the tables, unbuttons her pants, and lowers her underwear. What can I say? She wasn’t lying.