Slava Pastuk - Bad Trips: How I Went from VICE Reporter to International Drug Smuggler

BAD TRIPS

SLAVA PASTUK
WITH BRIAN WHITNEY

How I Went from VICE Reporter to International Drug Smuggler

Copyright Slava Pastuk and Brian Whitney, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

The names of some individuals in this work have been changed to respect their privacy.

All royalties from the sale of Bad Trips go to co-author Brian Whitney.

Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Russell Smith | Editor: Mary Ann Blair

Cover designer: Michel Vrana

Cover image: istock.com/PAVEL IARUNICHEV airplane: istock.com/Ace_Create

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Bad trips : how I went from Vice reporter to international drug smuggler / Slava Pastuk with Brian Whitney.

Names: Pastuk, Slava, author. | Whitney, Brian, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210333081 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210333189 | ISBN 9781459749252 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459749269 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459749276 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Pastuk, Slava. | LCSH: Drug couriersCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Drug trafficCanada. | LCSH: Drug trafficAustralia. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC HV5805.P37 A3 2022 | DDC 364.1/3365092dc23

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

Dundurn Press
1382 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9
dundurn.com, @dundurnpress

To the coolest person I know my mom.

WHEELING THE SUITCASE lined with eight kilograms of cocaine past the Australian customs agent was the biggest rush of my life.

What brings you to Australia? she asked me and my companion, Pope, a five-foot-nothing, springy twenty-one-year-old black kid dressed head to toe in Supreme.

Were celebrating, I said.

I wasnt exactly lying.

We just finished filming a new show for VICELAND. You should be seeing my friend here on TV pretty soon, I continued.

She waved us through, and we got into a car that had been arranged to pick us up. My heartbeat steadied, but my brain synapses continued to fire on all cylinders. I had just successfully muled hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine on behalf of the cartel, all based on a chance encounter I had in Toronto just a few weeks prior. As we rode down the highway past modest Australian houses, Pope and I exchanged sly looks, careful not to say anything that could tip the driver off to the fact that he was unwittingly transporting about sixteen kilograms of cocaine to a hotel in downtown Sydney.

Can I play music off my phone? asked Pope, who somehow was full of energy despite the fifteen-hour flight from San Francisco and the effects of the sixteen-hour time change from our home in Ontario. The driver, a well-groomed and deeply tanned man in his forties, wordlessly passed us the aux cable and changed the input on the BMWs console. With an impish smile Pope put on Futures Move That Dope and blasted it through the cars speakers.

When I collapsed onto my hotel bed later that night, I realized I had just pulled off the sort of mission at twenty-five that I had dreamed of having the balls to do when I was a pimply, fat fifteen-year-old who watched VICE travel videos in my moms basement.

I came of age consuming content from VICE journalists who travelled to Liberia to buy guns or to South America to lick a frog and experience wild hallucinations. Now, after two years of working for that same company as the guy who covered emerging rappers, I had finally earned my stripes by doing some early era VICE shit.

I felt I could finally breathe again. I had fulfilled my obligations to the cartel representatives who had promised to slide razor blades underneath my fingernails if I backed out of my agreement to travel to Las Vegas and then Sydney.

No drug I had ever smoked, railed, or ingested brought me the same euphoria that I felt as I lay there, and I had spent the past few months trying them all.

The high lasted for about a month.

First, my roommate and four others found themselves in Australian prison for attempting to recreate the same run I had completed with Pope. I then found myself outed as a criminal on the front page of a national newspaper, losing my career, friends, and way of life in the process. Finally, I found myself handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser in Montreal, where I had spent two years cobbling together a new life under a new identity, only to have it all fall apart again.

Four years after my trip to Australia, I sat in front of a judge and pleaded guilty to the crime of conspiracy to import forty kilograms of cocaine. My mother held back tears beside me as she silently wondered how things had gone so wrong. The only other people in that room were members of the press, who later asked me if I blamed anyone for the mistakes and decisions that cost me nine years of my freedom.

Did I blame the five forsaken travellers who gave my name to the authorities? Without them, the police wouldnt have had enough evidence to lay charges.

Did I blame my friend and co-worker Ali, a twenty-eight-year-old of Pakistani descent, for introducing the masterminds of this scheme to my life? If not for him going to Australia first, Id never have thought taking my own trip would be a foolproof scenario to suggest to others.

Was VICE to blame for encouraging a culture where thrill-seeking and operating on the fringes of legality were encouraged? Had I never taken that job I would still be working in software marketing, discouraged by the lack of professional upward mobility in the music-blogging scene.

Was Drake to blame for never granting me an interview? Was it my fathers fault for leaving before I was born and never being a positive role model? Was society at large a scapegoat for my actions?

Even after all of these months spent in prison in Kingston, Ontario, I cant put the blame on anyones shoulders but my own. But the circumstances of how I came to act, as well as the situations I found myself in, are too extraordinary to ignore.

While I am far from a victim, Im also no villain. The problem is that I dont think anyone else is a victim or villain either, including the aforementioned razor-blade-toting cartel representatives.