Peter Krupa

Tonight, I have discovered that box wine and the Costa Rican equivalent of Doritos is actually kind of a nice combination. Please don’t judge me. We just put the newspaper to bed.

Oh man, the New York Times e-mail inboxes are screwed. In the graphic accompanying a science article about invisibility, they somehow identified a Klingon warship (clocking device and all) as Romulan.

How did I notice this, you ask? I’m wondering the same thing myself. I think I’ll go back to bed.

The New York Times has a thoroughly boring story today about rampant recreational cocaine use. Methinks they are a little behind the 8-ball (haha!). I didn’t even go to clubs in New York and I knew this was a thing.

Realistically, however, I should probably cut the Times some slack, since this is an important story to get on record regardless of timeliness. I am a little worried, however, that the story sounds like it was written by Nancy Reagan.

Evidence of (increasingly casual cocaine use) is popping up in music, television and even theater. Indeed, for a generation that has not had its John Belushi to drive home the dangers of drug abuse, references and even use are open, casual, even blatant.

OK, raise your hand if you quit doing coke because of John Belushi. Right.

Here’s the question this story should really be asking: If everyone is doing coke, yet crime is going down, employment is staying up, and New York City remains one of the most desirable, most successful, most healthy, and richest cities in the world… what the fuck is the problem?

This is the real question people should be asking: Is it worth the trouble to keep certain drugs illegal?

Because on the other hand, far from the eyes of nanny politicians and church groups that campaign against exotic forms of artificial stimulation, all sorts of people are getting murdered - in Mexico, Central America, and Colombia - precisely because the drug business is illegal, and therefore run by criminal mafias.*

All so some douche bag on Wall Street can get his fix. He’ll get his fix somehow. Wouldn’t it be better if he could just buy it at the bodega?

* FUN FACT: So far this year, Costa Rican police (along with various U.S. drug enforcement efforts) have confiscated 15 tons of cocaine, trafficked by foreign mafias who are probably paying Tico fishermen way more than they would make catching fish. (Imagine how much the authorities have missed.)

When you start a new job at a newspaper, you also get new legends, new myths, new gossip about coworkers who have affairs with each other, or the absurd thing so-and-so did when he was covering such-and-such.

Yesterday, for instance, I learned that one time, one of the page layout guys, while standing in the lobby of the building, got shot in the leg.

It was a glancing blow, as the bullet ricocheted off the floor and dealt him a flesh wound, but a wound nonetheless. Members of the OIJ (the Costa Rican version of the FBI) were called to the scene.

They stood there in the lobby, laconic, shrugging. Who knew where the bullet came from? They suggested that probably someone, somewhere, had just been cleaning a gun.