Cocaine + Browsing: A Sordid Historical past of Browsing’s Biggest Love Affair

From the creator of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go To Hell, a finalist for the PEN Heart USA Award for Nonfiction

It’s no shock that surfers prefer to celebration. The 1960–70s picture, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Large Wednesday, was certainly one of gentle outlaws―tanned boys refusing to develop up, spending their days consuming beer and smoking joints on the seashore in between senseless hours within the water.

However within the Nineteen Eighties, as surf manufacturers morphed into multibillion-dollar firms, the derelict portrait started to hurt enterprise. The exterior surf picture turned Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, beacons of well being, vitality, bravery, and clean-living.

Internally, although, browsing had moved on from booze and weed to its coronary heart’s true house, its soul’s twin flame: cocaine. The rise of cocaine in American well-liked tradition as the selection of wealthy, white elites was matched, then quadrupled, inside surf tradition. The events bought wilder, the nights stretched longer, the tales turned extra ridiculously unbelievable. And there was no stopping, no dip in ardour.

It’s a forbidden love, and few, if any, outdoors the surf world learn about this explicit rhapsody. Drug use is stored very well-hidden, even from insiders, however proof of its psychosis rears its head infrequently within the type of overdoses, bar fights, surf contests, murders, and cover-ups.

Cocaine + Browsing attracts again the curtain on a hopped-up, sometimes-sexy, sometimes-deadly relationship and makes use of cocaine because the car to reveal and clarify the totally absurd surf business to outsiders.