Chapter 3: Pickled Slug
The University of California - Santa Cruz is a sister school to UCLA and UC Berkeley, but it’s more like an adopted sister with a learning disability than an actual blood relative. It’s a strange place partly because of its position within the state, and I’d come to learn that it was a major stop on the drug trafficking route from Mexico up to Northern California. Despite being littered with insufferable aging hippies and Arc’teryx-wearing tech millionaires, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. The campus may be unrivaled in its redwood-studded splendor.
I hated it, but then again, I would have hated anything. It just wasn’t my kind of place I convinced myself, as I struggled the whole time that I was there trying to artificially adjust who I was to make more sense of it. I have no desire to ever return, out of fear of replayed tragedies and beach-themed meth flashbacks, but nevertheless, Santa Cruz is charming to those that have not experienced its gruesome underbelly.
Nineteen kids from my high school went to UC Santa Cruz, which was a school of about 17,000 undergrads. I didn’t like my roommates - or to put it honestly - I was too socially inept to accept people I refused to get to know before I judged them. Within the first month I purchased an air mattress and moved into a dorm room occupied by a couple of high school friends, Kevin and Peter. Being too anxious to handle any amount of social discomfort, I embedded myself within the lives of people I already knew. My other friends Alex and Mark were in the dorm building next door, making my non-sanctioned move even more justified. I knew it would be easier to hang out with people who were already accustomed to my transgressions then to figure out how to not be an asshole.
UC Santa Cruz was known as a stoner school in a stoner town, and it was, but within a few months of my freshman year, kids in my dorm were smoking black tar heroin. Sure, weed was a big part of the local culture, but we’d come to find out that the whole town was saturated with any drug you could name, and that beneath the pasture of hippies and beach-bums was a bedrock composed of heroin and crystal meth. The town was flooded with high quality tar directly from the cartel, causing an epidemic that preceded other parts of the country by a few years. While places like Florida and the Midwest were still plagued by Oxycontin, Santa Cruz, and the West Coast in general, spearheaded the transition from prescription opiates to heroin in the late aughts.
Unlike a substantial amount of my social circle, I didn’t touch heroin my freshman year. After all, as a child I saw firsthand its capacity for destruction. I knew heroin was something to stay away from, but I had no fucking clue what Oxycontin was. Like I stated earlier, Oxycontin was already losing popularity in California at this time, but access to the overly prescribed painkiller was still plentiful in those days. Upon seeing other kids taking it at college parties, I grew very curious. It was a pill - it was medicine, like an aspirin or Tylenol or a blood thinner. That might be a stretch, but we can all agree that Oxycontin looks more like aspirin than a needle full of dope. Using this thought process, I concluded that oxy was one of the safest drugs I could possibly take, given that it was approved by the FDA. If you research the purpose of Oxycontin’s creation, you’ll find out that it was marketed as a non-habit-forming replacement for traditional opiate-based painkillers. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect recreational drug? All the high that an opiate can offer without the horrific physical addiction. A literal miracle. Unfortunately, like millions of other Americans over the past few decades, I would come to find out that this wasn’t exactly accurate.
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