"Supply and Demand"

Nights in Berlin developed at their own pace. One might begin with dinner, or drinks at a friend's house. We would hang out at one setting until it exhausted itself and only then did we contemplate what the next setting might be… When the bar closed, we moved on to a friend's house, a massive, high-ceilinged Altbau apartment that was tidy and bare. A fluorescent tube light in one corner lit up a solitary fern. The dominant piece of furniture in the dining room was a table around which a group of adults sat as if at a formal dinner, except the only thing on offer was a single plate onto which lines of cocaine had been cut and a rolled-up euro note had been placed. We sat there for hours, talking, joking, evaluating dating profiles. The plate went around the table, and then a little amber medicine bottle, with an eyedropper, of GHB. "I erased my dealer's number," one guest lamented when the call went out for more cocaine, which eventually arrived after a pooling of money.

* * *

The current [cartel] infighting began when Joaquín Guzmán López, a Chapito, betrayed his father's longtime partner, Mr. Zambada. The younger Mr. Guzmán kidnapped Mr. Zambada and flew him over the border into the custody of U.S. federal agents last summer.

The power struggle that ensued has left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 1,500 missing in Sinaloa State, according to official data and local search groups, and the violence has not relented.

Three people were brutally killed this month in a single afternoon in separate events in Culiacán, the state capital. One man was found dumped on the outskirts of the city, blindfolded, hands bound behind his back, bearing signs of torture.

* * *

Newcomers passed through all night long, drunk from office Christmas parties. The sun came up. The cocaine ran out. Anna and her boyfriend had gone home hours ago. The seats around the dining table began to empty. A few of us walked out under a cold, gray morning sky and hailed a cab to the next setting.

* * *

The following day, a father and son were ambushed while driving through a busy thoroughfare. The father died at the scene and the son was critically wounded, their car struck by at least 50 high-caliber rounds.

A fruit vendor eagerly set up at the crime scene, with soldiers lining up to order lemonade and other drinks under the baking sun.

As a forensics team pried the victim's body from the driver's seat and zipped it into a body bag, guttural cries rose from his nearby family, sobbing and holding each other.

The vendor told a reporter that this was his first good bout of business in months. So many people had fled Culiacán because of the violence that the streets were empty of customers.

"But my hands are trembling," he said, asking to remain nameless because of the violence. "I don't want to sell like this."

* * *

Everything about [Berlin's club] Berghain has been pored over: the phallic light fixtures in Panorama Bar, the louvered blinds that snapped open spontaneously during the day to let in sudden bursts of light, the row of sex cubicles on the edge of the P-Bar, the Eisbar that served ice cream during the day, the dark room.

Then the bathrooms. The bathrooms at Berghain were designed for maximum utility. The toilets were stainless steel and had no seats. The doors of the stalls were saloon style, two panels that met in the middle with a latch and a rubber flap that had holes ripped into it by people trying to peek inside. …It was code of conduct in Berghain that you did not snort your drugs in the open, which meant that the toilet stalls were like clown cars, friends all going in at the same time to take drugs, take turns peeing, complete sex acts. As the hours passed, the toilets would get more and more intense. At peak times the lines were long, the floors littered with bottles, cigarette butts, mini Ziploc bags. …The bathrooms were places to buy, sell, trade, and share drugs, but also where you tended to make friends.

* * *

We drove on to the next [Sierra Madre] village, passing a rock formation known locally as the Devil's Ass and a spire called Cerro de Verga, Hard Dick Peak. Beneath it were the ruins of Jesús Miranda, a village that had wiped itself out completely in feuds. A few low adobe walls were all that remained of that experiment in civilization. We drove on…

"We had a nice crop growing in the hills and we were getting ready to pick it when the army came with planes and helicopters and a captain that could not be fixed."

"It is these new college-educated army officers," said Gustavo. "There are a couple of them near Álamos who can't be fixed."

"They are not reasonable men," said Espinoza. "We used to grow a lot of opium here and the army stopped that, too. It makes no sense. The army and the federales were getting their share, the politicians were getting their share from the mafia, the gringos were getting their drugs, and the people here were able to make a living. It was a good system for everybody and now it is broken."

* * *

The Klubnacht begins on Saturday night at 11:59 and ends sometime on Monday morning, thirtysomething hours of party. The longest I've ever stayed there was fifteen hours.

…It had taught people like us the possibility of a certain twenty-four-hour style of partying, an approach to drug-taking, and an unwritten code of queer social and sexual ethics that had since become the basis of a shared understanding for a global scene.

* * *

[Presidente] Fox needed the migrants left alone because the money they sent back to their relatives [in Mexico] was now the second largest component of Mexico's economy, estimated at ten billion dollars a year.

But the largest component of Mexico's economy was still drug trafficking, estimated at fifty billion dollars a year, and here was Fox's dilemma. He needed to do something for [President] Bush and he wanted to assert his authority against the cartels, but the unfortunate fact was that his country was hooked on drug money. Without it there would be economic collapse. According to a leaked study conducted in 2001 by Mexico's internal security agency CISEN, and quoted in Charles Bowden's Down by the River, if the drug business was somehow wiped out, Mexico's economy would shrink by 63 percent. That was never going to happen, of course.

* * *

I went to the bathroom. In line I stood next to an Italian from Milan who introduced himself as Mario. He offered me some powdered MDMA in a baggie and I went into the stall with him. I licked my pinkie, dipped it in, licked it again. "I can't stand the taste of it," said the guy from Milan, so I held his black leather wallet while he rolled a twenty-euro note, dumped out some of the powder in the baggie onto the wallet, and snorted. Snorting MDMA was not common, but of course it also worked. I found it repellent. I was grateful to Mario but I didn't really like him and when we walked back to Panorama Bar and he put his hand on the small of my back I moved away. "What?" he asked. I smiled and on the dance floor the crowd slowly parted for us. We didn't see each other again.

* * *

"It's a good thing to dismantle these groups but it's almost impossible to achieve a sustained disruption in drug flows," said John Creamer, a retired American diplomat who served in U.S. embassies across Latin America, most recently in Mexico.

"You can never truly put a stake through the heart of an entire cartel," he said. "You can disrupt and create chaos for them, but the drug trade always bounces back. That's what makes the drug war so frustrating."

* * *

"Officers inspected a police truck abandoned in northern Mexico with the initials of a local cartel written in blood on the windshield. Two men were found decapitated inside, including the body of the police chief of Agualeguas." (National Post)

* * *

They ruined the only way for a man to make a living in these unforgiving mountains and now he was thinking about going north and walking across the desert into the United States. "I am a proud Mexican and I love my country but everything in Mexico always turns to shit," he said.

Men were going north from these mountains every day, he said. If you factored in the killings and the arrests, there were hardly any men left, one for every six or seven women in Guirocoba. This, we realized, was why the villages all looked deserted.

"Fuck the army, fuck the federales, fuck the mochomos and the mafia and fuck President Fox with a great big donkey verga," he said. "I have a cousin in Los Angeles and friends in Phoenix. I am strong and hardworking and I will make a new life up there with the fucking gringos."

* * *

There must have been thirty of us out there, and twenty of us died.
By Monday we were all dead.
I was hiding under that tree.
Out there, I saw people in despair.
I saw them without water.
I don't know why I survived.
Maybe it's a miracle.
Some of them just died of desperation.
Some of them went insane.
Some of them lost their minds.
You could hear them screaming.
Some fell all alone.
I heard one guy screaming, daring the Border Patrol to come find him.
Stupid things like that.
He was desperate.
He started singing.
We were drinking urine.
We were ripping open cactus.
Some of the boys were saying you could cut the thirst with a cactus.
The majority of them died that day.
I was going to die this morning.

* * *

There are few circumstances that fill me with more elation than going from the deserted streets of a city on a weekend morning into a portal where the fun had never stopped and the desolation of a Sunday can be put off for another few hours, or twenty.

* * *

The sign of the dead could be ghastly and haunting. One of the men tore off his shirt and tried to bury himself. The hither tither he left all around him showed violent kicking and arm flailing, as if he were swimming. He managed to get the top half of his torso buried in the ground, where he either smothered or passed out. The relentless heat baked him, literally cooking him in the ground. His face bloated and came loose from the bones, tender as barbecued pork.

* * *

We passed a long time dancing together, our love triangle, which as the night continued became more like a platonic family. Norman Nodge was playing, or Boris, or at one point AnD, a duo from Manchester who played the hardest set I've ever heard, music that sounded like cannons firing….

I found Otto dancing in a corner of Panorama Bar then lost him then found him again in the bar next to the main dance floor, sitting on a padded platform suspended from chains. I was staring at him without seeing him until he stood up and waved. It was now, I remember, two in the morning, because his friend Julia said she needed to go home, she had to work the next day. We went to the bar for a drink and I suddenly felt faint, cold sweat pouring out of me. I hadn't eaten for more than twelve hours. I sat down and drank an orange juice and felt better.

* * *

Isidro and Mario were in luck: they found some prickly pears—tuna in Spanish. "We ate the tunas to stay alive," Mario says.

The liquid in the cactus fruits spared him.

* * *

At one point I had sat there with Felix, who drank a cherry-banana juice. I sipped an espresso and let my eyes go slowly out of focus while I rested my feet. The windows of the café rattled with the throb of bass. Refreshed, we returned again to the main floor. Sometimes you fall in love with someone at the club. They become your modal tree, your search image. You look at them. Mine was not Felix but a man in a plaid shirt and jeans I kept seeing on the floor of the main room, ordinary, bearded, very handsome. He moved with a slowness that hinted he was on acid. He looked like he had stepped through a portal from the forests of the Pacific Northwest of the United States onto the dance floor. I kept seeing him. I loved him.

* * *

They said cholla cactus looked like trees covered in spiked balls.

The group started to break apart as the demons and angels started to sing. They could smell their own stench. It was embarrassing. It was frightening.

Nahum Landa Ortiz: "We kept walking. We were walking all day in that fucking desert, going under trees. That's when they started dying…"

A voice was heard in the light-shatter, saying, "He's going to die. Lay him down here and let him die. Keep walking."

* * *

Different personality types were drawn to different drugs. Some people just took Adderall to stay awake and smoked weed to add a layer of interest to their surroundings. There were cokeheads and ketamine queens and people who microdosed mushrooms. Others took a carefully weighed-out dose of MDMA or dipped into their little Ziploc bags of it all night. …Most of us specialized in polyintoxication. We learned how each drug interacted with another drug, and when was the best time along the journey of one chemical to add another."

* * *

The desert, out of focus and suddenly terribly sharp, burst white and yellow in their eyes. It tilted. Elongated. It was at an impossible angle! It tipped up toward the sun, and if they didn't crawl, they would slide right off it and fall forever. It made noise: THERE WERE ENGINES BENEATH THE DESERT. It made evil grinding noises, mechanical humming. No, it was insectile, the screech of hunger and derision. The devils were under the rocks, spitting insults. THE BLACK HEAD LAUGHED. I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth. No, it did not fucking laugh—it was as silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps.

* * *

"Authorities in one of Mexico's largest cities said Friday they have found seven bodies with five of them decapitated and another completely dismembered—with a message on each corpse—in a car left in the middle of traffic on a main expressway." (CBS News)

"The decapitated bodies in plastic bags were found just a week after a Mexican mayor was beheaded." (Al Jazeera)

"Sinaloa state prosecutors said four decapitated bodies were found hanging from a bridge over a highway near the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan. Authorities found 16 bodies riddled with gunshot wounds in a van on the same highway, one of which was also decapitated, local media reported." (USA Today)

"Before he was found naked and decapitated days after his 33rd birthday, Palacios—"Franky" to his friends—worked at Veteran's Tire Shop in Edinburg, one county over." (Reveal News)

* * *

But it wasn't only hedonism; we were all there for the music, too, and if the music didn't meet the drugs, none of it would have held up. These were mind states that desired complexity—the drugs did not make us stupid, they made us more demanding—and many of us were there because we found we couldn't eat what everyone kept trying to feed us. The parties made us feel as if we were participating in an art form rooted in self-expression and freedom, one that was a little bit secret but in no way walled off. It defined itself by a shared commitment to fun and artistry.

* * *

Lorenzo Ortiz Hernandez lay as if asleep beside an ancient saguaro. The cactus was easily three hundred years old, and it had seen walkers die before. GPS N. 32.23.18/W. 113.19.59. Lorenzo was on his back, his eyes open to his enemy, the sun. His brown slacks were empty looking: his abdomen had fallen in, his pelvis held up the material of the slacks as if his slacks were a circus tent coming loose from its poles.

It was 110 degrees before noon.  

* * *

When the party finally ended and we walked outside into the freezing midday glare, the construction workers took out their phones and took pictures of the bedraggled and limping ravers beginning their long treks back to Bushwick and Ridgewood and Bed-Stuy. From the scaffolding the workers asked us what was going on in there. "Nothing!" someone shouted back.

* * *

When I got back to San Bernardino with my truck, Manuel had some bad news. A war had broken out between the San Bernardino mafia and the Chinipas mafia. He thought it would be unwise for anyone from San Bernardino to show up in Chinipas at the moment and that I would be safer going alone without him.

…And what about the bandits? The week before they had held up a Coca-Cola delivery truck right outside San Bernardino and killed the driver. But Manuel said not to worry. The bandits operated only occasionally and were strictly amateurs. "They just block the road with their trucks or a big log and when you stop they jump out of the bushes with their guns," he said dismissively. "They are just marijuana growers who have lost their crops to the army, not like the bandits we used to have."

* * *

Cocaine, the most profitable drug of all, was holding steady in price and during Fox's administration, Mexican traffickers had increased their share of the American market from 75 percent to 90 percent.

* * *

Most of us specialized in polyintoxication.

* * *

The man's name we didn't speak was Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who was born into a mafia clan in the Sierra Madre of Sinaloa and turned himself into the biggest, wealthiest, most powerful drug lord in Mexico. He is estimated to have earned $25 billion from his years in the drug trade and paid out $500 million a year in bribes to various police chiefs, army generals, state governors, and politicians at the highest levels of government. He was nicknamed El Señor de Los Cielos, "The Lord of the Skies," because he had a fleet of full-sized passenger airplanes that he used to fly cocaine from Columbia into Mexico and is thought to have ordered the executions of at least four hundred people. In 1997, at the age of forty-one, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died during a plastic surgery operation in a private hospital in Mexico City, although many Mexicans believe that he staged his own death.

* * *

At some point transference happens. You become one with the place. The world outside stops existing. The effects of the individual drugs you put in your body are no longer subtly discernable. You drop in; the hemispheres of your brain meld and start levitating. Time passes. The music is so loud it vibrates your organs. The times I have gone to Berghain compress into a single experience, I can't sort out the different images. When you first arrive it fits in the order of the outside word but then the changes subtly begin, and the bartender is naked; the tall woman stumbling is wearing a T-shirt that reads "Late Checkout" on it; I look for a place to sit down and avoid the mysterious pile of banana peels on a couch. The faces at the club become familiar, then they become your friends. By the time I finally left I had been at Berghain for fourteen hours. I biked home across the Spree. The sun was pink on the TV tower. I went home to my window and the tree outside, pulled the heavy velvet curtains closed across it, and went to sleep.

* * *

"There must be so many widows with children. What do the widows do?"

"Many, many widows. They go and live with their own families."

We talked about the old days in the Sierra, before the drugs and pickups and machine guns. Che Che felt nostalgic for those simpler times but allowed there was a lot of killing back then too. At El Trigo, for example, a man killed his wife and decapitated his children with a machete because he found out that his wife had been with another man. "There were many killings for jealousy and many feuds. Also we had lunáticos who wandered around the mountains killing people. But life was better then. People were happier and more content. Before the drugs came in, the only thing people needed money for was to buy soap and clothes. Everything else you grew or made."

* * *

The claim that American prosperity comes from suffering elsewhere is a complex issue with various perspectives and arguments:

Arguments supporting this claim:

• Dependency Theory: This theory suggests that the global economic system is structured in a way where wealthy nations (like the US) exploit poorer nations, states Simply Psychology. Resources, cheap labor, and markets flow from "periphery" countries to "core" countries, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. This theory suggests that the wealth of rich nations comes directly from the exploitation of poorer nations.
  
  
• Historical Examples: Dependency theory points to colonialism as a historical example of this exploitation, where European powers extracted resources and wealth from colonized territories, leaving them with underdeveloped economies even after independence. Some argue that the US, while not a colonial power in the same way, has benefited from systems that perpetuate global inequalities, such as the exploitation of resources or cheap labor in other countries.
  
  
• Neocolonialism: This concept describes how, even after formal colonialism ended, developed nations can continue to exert control and influence over developing countries through economic means like debt and trade, says Social Sci LibreTexts.

* * *

Like most people I knew, I wanted to participate in some form of opposition but found it hard to find. I think all the moral posturing online in those years had something to do with this sense of utter helplessness. In the absence of tangible change, we settled for soothing bromides about sustainability and ethical consumer packaging and advertising. It was another symptom of our troubled consciousness. It did not feel good to live this way, and the routines of our ordinary politics would not address it. …The Democratic Party had sold out decades ago to billionaires, bankers, and warmongers. America and its myths of freedom were canards betrayed by the country's origins in slavery and genocide, and liberalism was just a comforting lie we told ourselves as we massacred abroad. In short, we had no leg to stand on.

* * *

Mendez took the money from his pockets, what money Lauro had. Then he tried to get up. Was astounded to find that he couldn't stand. He pushed on the ground, but his legs gave out on him.

How about that?

Those damned legs.

* * *

"Smoking mota is a bad habit," said Angel. "It is a vice and I have never done it. But the money from it is wonderful. I think of the money often."

"The money is why people get killed over it."

"Yes, but think of the money we could make if we bought twenty kilos. I can get it at a very good price and growing up in San Bernardino I have all the connections to get it to the border. If you can find a way to get it across, we make nearly ten thousand dollars each. So why not fifty kilos? That way we make more than twenty thousand each."

He was about half joking and half serious, as near as I could tell, and I felt the temptation too.

* * *

There is very little that can be done when a society decides that the only rule of life is to get yours, and that empathy, concern, and worry are for losers and chumps.

* * *

Empathy: "The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another."

Sympathy: "The act or capacity of entering into or sharing the feelings or interests of another."

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?

Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful. Empathy involves actively sharing in the person's emotional experience. Sympathy has been in use since the 16th century. It comes ultimately from the Greek sympathēs, meaning "having common feelings, sympathetic," which was formed from syn- ("with, together with") and páthos, "experience, misfortune, emotion, condition." Empathy was modeled on sympathy;

Nihilism: a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.

* * *

Andrew and I had our own expression of nihilism, which was partying, and our own form of retreat, which was setting up our little life together.

* * *

When Reymundo died and slid from his father's arms, his father lurched away into the desert, away from the trees, crying out in despair. Some of the men said he took the American money he had saved for their trip and tore it into small bits.

* * *

Only later could I see that Andrew and I had been doing drugs for different reasons. He took them to turn off parts of himself that threatened to destroy him. I took them to psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive that I sought a chemical window to see outside of it (also for pleasure, for fun).

* * *

The 58-year-old man, a mechanic by day and drug packer by night, had been working for the Sinaloa Cartel for over 20 years, fixing and loading cars with cocaine, meth and now fentanyl.

In all of that time, he said, his job has never been as dangerous as now. "Hopefully this is my last gig," he said.

* * *

I didn't have to be under the influence of mushrooms to know that our individual futures and those of all humanity were inextricably linked, and that the pace of change seemed to be accelerating.

* * *

Even if [the Mexican President] Fox had the will to stamp out the narcotics industry in Mexico, he didn't have the power. The institutions of government were too weak and corrupt and the market forces too strong. There was a demand just across the border that created fifty billion dollars in profit every year. Illegal narcotics was the third-biggest industry in the world (after arms and oil) and the only conceivable obstacle to its profits—America legalizing drugs—was a political impossibility.

* * *

What I liked about reporting was that, like drugs, it caused a temporary defamiliarization that could reveal my own insularity and myopia, if I were sensitive enough to recognize them.

* * *

SOURCES

All material comes from Emily Witt's Health and Safety: A Breakdown, Luis Alberto Urrea's The Devil's Highway: A True Story, Richard Grant's God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Urban Dictionary, an AI-powered Google search, and the article "Cartel Fighters Make a Desperate Alliance That Could Transform Underworld," by Maria Abi-Habib, Paulina Villegas, and Alan Feuer from The New York Times.

__

This piece emerged from reading a number of books in close proximity, including books about Latin America, the US-Mexico border, and Emily Witt's Health and Safety, and from spending years conscious of the social, ethical, and ecological ramifications of our consumer and recreational habits, and finally wanting to point out the truly horrific human, social, and ecological costs of Americans' recreational drug use, which seems especially hypocritical when my fellow liberals support progressive causes and care for justice and human rights on one hand, while ignorning the human cost of their chemicals on the other hand. Elevating human suffering is one of the many reasons I live a sober life. Why opt into that?