SOLD ON THE HIGH LIFE
BY: G. SAMPATH
Wade Agnew fell in love with drugs, and then started selling them. He talks about how he survived to tell the tale.
It is said that the legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s greatest gift to mankind (here, mankind means just that) was not unlimited cocaine, but unlimited number of blow-jobs in bathroom stalls all across the world. Pretty teenage girls addicted to coke developed a sudden fascination for short, fat men with halitosis whose sex appeal seemed to derive primarily from their access to substances that most of the civilised world was waging a war against, a war that Wade Agnew is intimately familiar with.
Though this 56-year-old Australian, who is in Mumbai for the release of his memoirs, Cheating the Hangman: True Confessions of a Heroin Trafficker is cagey about his bathroom stall experiences, he does admit that his decision to adopt drug-dealing as a career was as much a lifestyle choice as a business one. “Which other career offers you as much in terms of travel, thrills, glamour, and of course, ridiculous amounts of money?” he says. Back in the summer of ‘69, while an unknown singer called Adams was busy enjoying the best days of his life, a 19-year-old Agnew made the startling discovery that grass is actually greener than university, the law and the government. He turned his back on the last three and took to cannabis with the fervent enthusiasm of a born-again hippie. From there it was only a little hop to heroin, and from heroin consumption, an even smaller skip to heroin smuggling.
Agnew to be sure, is no Escobar. His house in Brisbane does not have gold-plated toilet bowls, and the Interpol is not exactly salivating for him. But he is, nevertheless, quite proud of his achievements in his chosen line of work. He speaks of it with the kind of reverence that one would normally reserve for a divine calling. Just as Mother Teresa felt the sacred call of destiny to go and help the lepers in Kolkata, Agnew felt called upon to serve the suffering masses that were addicted to heroin. Their pain, thanks to a hypocritical government that was targeting them, could not be assuaged without the law being broken and lives being risked. “Of course, there were also tonnes of money to be made,” he admits. “But basically I was just delivering a service to those who needed it.” Agnew retired from this “service” in 1985. By then, his addiction was beginning to take its toll, and hampering his ability to manage the risks of trafficking, making it too dangerous for him to continue. It would, however, take him another 13 years to come out of the grip of heroin itself.
|
Today, according to his press agent who just wouldn’t go away, Agnew has a halo around his head, he doesn’t take any drugs (“not even grass”), he doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, and is vegetarian.Sipping coffee (“my drug of choice these days”) at the Shoppers’ Stop in Bandra, this wiry Australian with dark eyes and salt-n-pepper hair is not your typical junkie. Thirty years of sustained heroin abuse seems to have left him in pretty good shape. And 11 years of trafficking heroin into Australia, from the Golden Triangle of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, have earned him not even a minor thrashing from the cops, let alone a prison sentence. Instead he got to travel all over the world, engage in productive activities with beautiful women from different continents, and thumb his nose at what he calls the “biggest sham on earth” — the war against drugs. A heroin run from Bangkok to Sydney would take him to Rome, Amsterdam, and Athens, as he tried to avoid routes and flights that were under the drug scanner. He did music promotion as a cover for his drug-related travel and drug-stained income.
Agnew does not believe that legalisation would get more people addicted. “You’re assuming that once all drugs are made legal, everyone would want to buy them. That’s crap. Only those who want it buy it. Marijuana consumption went down in Holland after it was made legal. “Look at what happened during prohibition in the US in the 1930s. Did people stop drinking? No. They drank more and, on top of that, the mafia came out of it stronger. The more intense the war against drugs, the higher will be the prices, because the risks are more, and therefore the higher will be the profit margins. And the more profitable you make it, more drug trafficking will grow. The war against drugs is a totally counter-productive, utterly nonsensical idea.”
Agnew’s father was a navigator in the Australian Air Force, which meant he moved around a lot as a kid. “If you’re plucked out of school every two years, it’s pretty hard. Travelling and adapting became my way of life as a child.” Indeed, it turned out to be ideal preparation for his future life as a drug trafficker, which demanded continuous personal movement, from country to country, culture to culture, in search of new markets and better deals. It also means that you find stability rather boring. After a while you start craving for some excitement. If heroin cannot supply it, maybe a book can.
Thanks to his book, there is a lot of excitement in store for Agnew once he returns to Australia next month. For one, his 80-year-old mother who he lives in Brisbane, doesn’t have a clue about her son’s illustrious trafficking career. “That’s what I have to go home to face. She’s in poor health. This news might just finish her off – her heart might just stop.” But Agnew is determined to tell the world about his exploits, and extract money and fame from it. What if the cops come after him? “I hope they do,” he says. “The publicity will help my book sales; then I can make a tidy sum from the film rights.”
Published:
D.N.A.
4th April 2006
Mumbai India
|
