“We’re Going to Get Fucked Up, Daddy, Are You Coming?” A Night of Pink Cocaine With the Rich and Famous.

The first time I got to know pink cocaine I knew why they call it “the cocaine of the rich”, as if “normal” cocaine was not already an elitist drug.

One of my friends had invested in a luxury hotel in San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato, and I accompanied him to the inauguration. He had put up all his savings in exchange for a modest percentage of the business, while the senior partner was a junior who seemed to have handed over the coins he found in his luxury car to buy 60% of that five-star hotel.

My friend and I watched the senior partner’s guests with fascination: they were all a mix of Luis Miguel, Emmanuel and Elon Musk. They were a mix of Anahi, Barbara Regil and Kim Kardashian. First, delicate and distinguished. Then, with the opening of Bacardi and Möet shampoo, wild and arbitrary. Around midnight, after six hours of drinking and dancing, they decided to inaugurate the penultimate stage of the party: the “upper” to dive back into alcohol.

“Are you coming to the levantón ?” a guest asked me, and I, a journalist who covers organized crime, immediately thought of a kidnapping. The doubt quickly dissipated when she took a Ziploc bag containing a suspiciously pink, almost radioactive powder out of her Hermes bag. “Come on, Juanpa set up his room. It’s 102.”

My friend and I walked to the second floor out of curiosity. When we opened the room, there were five more of them gathered around a silver tray with several lines of pink powder. More than a circle of consumers, it looked like a group of drug acolytes. The worshippers of a pulverized deity. Each time someone snorted, he stood up and shuddered as if he had received the Holy Spirit.

“Ufff, Juanpa, how incredible!” one shouted. “It’s so good!” howled another. Then, another avid for total bliss broke the unwritten rule: while he thought no one was watching, he snorted four lines, instead of the two that each of us was supposed to do.

“Ray, don’t be selfish, you just fucking snorted a thousand pesos!”. My friend and I turned to look at each other immediately. That figure. Our surprise was obvious to everyone. But I did the math: a line of cocaine usually weighs about 50 milligrams; that gives us about 20 “stripes” to add up to a gram. If four lines were a thousand pesos, the ziploc bag of pink cocaine cost about 5 thousand pesos. A price I had never heard on the street.

Suddenly, the guest dumped her purse on the king size bed and four more ziploc bags came out: 25 thousand pesos in drugs, just her, not counting what the others were carrying. Surely there were more all over the hotel, it was obvious just by watching them dance with their jaws locked and their eyes bugged out. The question that excited us the most was: how many thousands of pesos were among us transformed into pink powder?

At first glance, it seemed that this purchase had been worth every peso: the inauguration of the hotel had turned into a rave. Euphoria, laughter, selfies everywhere. But time is relentless with that artificial happiness and everything that goes up, eventually, has to come down. So my friend and I sat and watched the party collapse.

We waited for dawn, when all the pink cocaine had vanished.

Pink cocaine is the drug of the rich and famous.

The first thing to say about the new pink cocaine is that it isn’t so new, nor is it cocaine. It appeared in rave parties in Europe at the beginning of this century, became popular in South America around 2010 and in Mexico emerged around 2016, but because of the very high price it was kept as a secret among the upper classes. To differentiate it from “normal” cocaine, its creators came up with the idea of adding a pink dye to it.

Some have given it other names, tusi or tusibí, after the way it is pronounced in English 2C-B (‘two-ci-bi’), a psychedelic compound first synthesized in 1974 by chemist Alexander Shulgin, an important promoter of the use of psychoactive drugs to treat depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

For years, 2-CB was used in small doses to treat psychiatric patients, couples with communication problems and was even sold in European pharmacies as a sexual stimulant. But its addictive properties sent the compound into the category of illicit narcotics, ready for organized crime to grab the recipe and put it on their party drug menu.

But “pink cocaine” almost never includes 2-CB, because of the difficulty in obtaining the substance. Instead, it is replaced with an explosive and dangerous combination: ecstasy, methamphetamines and ketamine. Always in capricious quantities. Rarely is it mixed with cocaine. “It’s like taking a plane and going to the clouds,” Ray says.

“You’re not going to find a better feeling: if with cocaine you feel like a king, this makes you feel like God. The problem is when the trip ends and you have to land. And that landing is always forced, you crash, the plane catches fire and you go to hell with it,” says Ray, two weeks after the party in Saint Mike, the gringo city of Guanajuato.

It is the drug of the rich and powerful, but also of celebrities who meet a tragic end. For example, in the trial against the tycoon Sean Diddy Combs, the music producer Rodney Jones assured that the rapper’s parties never lacked tusi, because it fueled the sexual desires of men; the encounters in those celebrations have the musician arrested in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. It also appeared in the autopsy on Liam Payne, of One Direction, who died in 2024 at age 31 after falling from a third floor in a hotel in Argentina, traces of pink cocaine were detected.

Model Maecee Marie Lathers confessed that before she crashed and killed two people in Miami, Florida, she had used pink cocaine. And when a video went viral of NFL star Stefon Diggs handing pink powder to a woman on a yacht, the New England Patriots wide receiver was left out of the starting lineup.

The association of the new drug with the elites caused the expected effects on the black market: when the secret of the jetset drug was exposed, everyone wanted to try it and feel like influencers and millionaires. Narcotics are also aspirational. So, criminal companies adapted to the demand of the middle class and changed the formulation to lower prices and offer it to mortals who can only afford to feel like God for a day.

Pink cocaine laced with opiates and even diluted with chalk

“The growing popularity of pink cocaine is a stark reminder of the ever-changing drug landscape, where aesthetics, social media trends and risky behaviors can combine to create new threats,” wrote Joseph Janes, a criminologist at Swansea University in the United Kingdom.

Thus pink cocaine was born, laced with opiates and spiked even with chalk; even sometimes with fentanyl to confuse the user into thinking they are snorting a potent cocktail, although in reality it is pigmented junk that sells for up to 800 pesos a gram, but looks cool at parties or in an Instagram story.

“The bummer is that you never know what you’re buying,” says Pam, 34, another guest at the hotel opening whom I sought out weeks later. “My dealer is trustworthy, I’ve been with him for more years than I’ve been with my boyfriend, and I always tell him that he’s not going to think of selling me crap, because I’ll turn him in to the police. And for the amount I pay him, ufff, I hope he never gave me fentanyl, because if not…”.

“There are two ways to know if your tusi has fentanyl in it,” Ray interrupts. “Either you buy paper strips on Amazon that you put in your bag and that change color if the drug has fentanyl in it… Or you die of an overdose at the party. The problem is that the detection strips take up to a month to arrive at your house, and the party is next Friday.”

Last year, the US anti-drug agency, the DEA, published the National Drug Threat Assessment and identified who might be behind this narcotic trend in Mexico and north of the Rio Grande.

“The Sinaloa Cartel is always looking to profit from current trends in the illegal drug market. One example is tusi, a pink drug cocktail consumed primarily in nightclubs in major metropolitan cities […]. The Mexican government hasn’t reported the seizure of tusi labs in Mexico, but the Sinaloa Cartel has the capacity to import large quantities of ketamine from China to facilitate tusi production in the country,” the report reads.

And they are right: there is no reference in the files of the Defense, Navy, National Guard, or state police to the seizure or destruction of a tusi lab. Perhaps because it’s reported simply as a synthetic or clandestine drug lab, but it is striking that there is not a single reference to pink cocaine. Nor are there any consumption figures or data on overdose deaths. Seen from the government’s perspective, it could well be called transparent or invisible cocaine.

“The problem is the downer. In the early dawn you feel like the most powerful person in the world and in the morning you feel like shit. The pink cocaine knocks your endorphins to the ground and you even want to kill yourself. So, in order not to feel like that, you chase it and chase it. And by the time you realize it, you’ve become addicted, you don’t know how to function without snorting it,” Ray says.

“Did you see what happened the morning after the hotel opened?” asks Pam, a successful screenwriter. “The hearse went bananas on us.”

Tusi, a ketamine, ecstasy and methamphetamine bomb.

At 6 o’clock the next morning, with the first rays of the sun, the first signs of the absence of pink cocaine appeared. Near the pool there was a guy in an obviously expensive suit, unconscious and shoeless. And where a distilled spirits bar was improvised, two girls were sobbing over some drug-fueled fight. Further away, in the parking lot, someone was struggling to get the smell of alcohol out of the car.

The worst was in the rooms: those who made it to a bed were still so stoned they couldn’t close their eyes but instead vomited or mumbled as they writhed on the bed. Others wandered the streets of San Miguel de Allende in search of some dealer who could satisfy an emergency purchase or a 24-hour pharmacy to acquire monumental amounts of ibuprofen, celecoxib and hydrating serums. 

Only a few, the most experienced tusi consumers, looked hungover, but ready for breakfast. Their trick to reduce the harmful effects: use small doses—at most twice during the party—and hydrate only with water, no alcohol or cigarettes.

“I shouldn’t have kept going after the upper” was the phrase most said that morning, when the waiters arrived to serve chilaquiles. The food service was for 100 people, but less than 20 were able to make it to the restaurant. The rest struggled in the distance with their bodies empty of happy hormones and stuffed with anxiety and post-party depression.

And the “levantón” with pink cocaine, I understood later, is that midnight ritual that friends of the senior partner do to chase away drunkenness. An artificial energy boost to keep the party going. Drink, get drunk, snort and repeat until you drop. Driving at full speed with the hand brake on and no seat belt.

What started as an elegant party turned into a disfigurement without category. Fights, crying, stumbling and a staff disgusted by having to wash the toilets. I confess: it was a spectacle. With all the pink cocaine consumed, as Pam said, Cinderella’s carriage turned into a horse-crushed pumpkin.

By 11 a.m., normalcy began to return to the hotel. The first guests emerged from their rooms with packed suitcases and huge sunglasses. Others, unable to drive back to Mexico City, preferred to pay for an extra night and rotate between the cold shower and the bed to give their bodies peace. “I’m not lying to you, it took me about a week to recover,” says Pam: “There’s no hangover worse than cocaine, now imagine what it’s like with the pink stuff.”

“I flat out missed three days of work. I took them out of my vacation and went to my parents’ house. I spent those days drinking green juice, I felt horrible, at some point the day after the party I really thought about calling an ambulance. That’s how terrible I felt,” Ray adds.

All his friends were equally devastated. One paid to be injected with a supposed anti-hangover serum that only cost him 3,000 pesos; another, in an attempt to reduce his anxiety, knocked himself out with clonazepam and slept for two days straight only to discover more than 100 missed calls from his bosses.

According to Energy Control, a Spanish organization specializing in drug harm reduction, ketamine with alcohol enhances the depressant effects, resulting in a loss of gross motor skills or blackouts, which can lead to life-threatening circumstances. And if a methamphetamine is mixed with alcohol, the risks of heart attack, bodily dehydration and heat stroke are increased.

“Would you do it again?” he asked them both, and they looked at each other knowingly. They laughed with that roar I heard them make in San Miguel. I think the mere thought of reuniting around some pink lines excites them and injects them with a sudden energy.

“Next week we’re going to Acapulco again…,” says Pam.

“But to the Diamante nightclub, huh?” interrupts Ray. “We’re going to get fucked up, Daddy, are you coming?”.

Source: Milenio