Aspen – So far this year, the rough-and-tumble party scene in this resplendent resort has claimed more lives than the mountains.
Through March, cocaine has been a factor in the deaths of at least four people. Typically, it plays a role in five or six deaths in the Roaring Fork Valley every year, according to the Pitkin County coroner.
The recent deaths are the most dramatic evidence that Aspen’s historic taste for the high life hasn’t ebbed.
“We had kind of hoped that that so-called ‘coke epidemic’ talk from the 1980s had gone away, but in the last year or so, we have been hearing more and more about it,” says Shelley Molz, executive director of the Valley Partnership for Drug Prevention.
Rarely a week goes by when the local papers in this town of 5,500 don’t report on a car accident, drunken-driving arrest or barroom brawl that yields cocaine.
On April 18, for example, the District Court docket included the cases of three men arrested for dealing or possessing cocaine, according to the Aspen Times, and another in which two teens are accused of savagely beating an acquaintance with a golf club and leaving her for dead atop Independence Pass for fear that she might disclose their coke dealing.
“Every time I work, I get hit up (for cocaine). Every time,” says deejay Mike Nakagawa, who spins tunes at several Aspen nightclubs. “People do it like they are drinking champagne. The tourists always come to me. I say, ‘Go to the bathroom; it’s always in there.”‘
Go into those bathrooms and chances are strong you’ll find telltale signs of cocaine use – stalls crowded with three or more people – and barkeeps’ battle to minimize it: Vaseline smeared on bathroom counters and holes drilled in the tops of toilet-paper holders to prevent users from spreading out lines of the white powder.
“That’s standard operating procedure. Always has been,” says Charles Wolf, owner of the Cooper Street Pier bar in downtown Aspen. “There is nothing you can do to stop it. You can control it, but you can’t stop it.”
For those who feed Aspen’s appetite for cocaine, selling the drug is big business.
“This town is ridiculous. All day long, I get a hundred phone calls,” says a 20-something cocaine dealer, who asked that he not be identified, as he saunters through a local bar on what he called “his rounds.”
“Why do they want it? I don’t know,” he says. “It’s … Aspen, man. We are crazy here. We live hard, and we play hard.”
The dealer says he makes $5,000 a week selling bags, or “bindles,” of the white powder for 50 to 75 bucks a pop to Aspen’s party-time troops.
And, he says: “I’m small-time.”
Police Chief Loren Ryerson, who has lived in Aspen for nearly 30 years, says that from his vantage point, cocaine use has remained steady and is not out of line with other communities.
What has changed, Ryerson says, is that public money for treatment is dwindling.
“Substance abuse is happening in everybody’s community,” he says. “The human tragedy for those people looking for help, is that the resources are just disappearing.”
Cocaine is readily available throughout the state and is characterized as a “significant drug threat,” according to the most recent statewide drug assessment by the National Drug Intelligence Center. Federal agents seized 153 pounds of cocaine statewide in 2001, up from 132 pounds in 1998.
Another report, the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health, ranks Colorado tops in the nation for cocaine use. The same survey put Colorado in the top five for cocaine use among three age groups: 12 to 17, 18 to 25, and 26 and older.
Like many of Colorado’s party-centric ski towns, Aspen’s modern history – at least since the ’70s – is steeped in powder – one skied, the other snorted.
Cocaine once ruled Aspen’s party scene, with high-profile dealers buying huge mansions and cruising town in fancy sports cars. Storefronts peddled T-shirts reading: “Aspen: Soft powder, hard drugs, casual sex.”
Two pivotal events exposed Aspen as a mountain hamlet with big-city problems.
The first came in 1984, when novelty-shop owner Keith Porter, a former Vietnam sniper, shot and killed his party pal and millionaire playboy Michael Hernstadt during an early- morning cocaine-fueled rage.
And in 1985, ski instructor and known coke dealer Steven Grabow was killed by a car bomb shortly after he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he paid a Florida cocaine kingpin as much as $7 million to fly the drug into Aspen.
By the ’90s, with a lack of high-profile dealers and busts, the cocaine rush appeared to have faded away.
The recent spate of Aspen- area cocaine deaths suggests that the fad is back, or perhaps never left.
“There is that jet-set attitude out here,” says Pitkin County Coroner Steven Ayers, an emergency-room doctor, estimates five or six of his 30 annual coroner cases are cocaine- related, a figure that has remained steady during the past decade.
“There’s a line between recreational use and addiction, and most of what we have here is recreational use,” Ayers said. “Still, drugs and alcohol are a big problem for the health of this community.”
Ayers says he has not seen a drastic increase in cocaine-related admissions to the emergency room at Aspen Valley Hospital, but in the past year “we have seen a few more cocaine-induced heart attacks in young people, which is odd.”
In late January, 29-year-old bartender Sarah McLennan died after a night of heavy drinking and cocaine use. A couple of weeks later, police found 46- year-old Donald Turner dead from a cocaine overdose at his Basalt home.
A month later, Chris Cox, a local musician who was battling a long addiction to cocaine and recently was sentenced for cocaine possession, killed himself at age 58.
Local law enforcement believes there are no longer any big dealers in the valley. Now, cocaine is distributed almost exclusively by Mexican nationals, say Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis and Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario, who leads the Two Rivers Drug Enforcement Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional effort tackling the illegal drug trade along the Interstate 70 corridor.
“They can make up to $150,000 a year selling grams on a mom-and- pop-type basis in the bars and nightclubs of Aspen,” Braudis says.
The department run by Braudis, whose philosophy leans toward educating locals on the dangers of drugs as opposed to punishing occasional users, posted one drug arrest among 280 arrests in 2003, according to state figures.
The same year, one in 17 arrests made by Aspen police was drug-related, a ratio similar to those reported in resort areas such as Crested Butte, Telluride, Steamboat Springs and Summit County.
Something about resort life fuels the “live hard, play hard” ethos.
“A lot of people here do coke so they can drink more. It makes you feel more sober,” says a tall, happy girl who asked to be identified only as KMB.
Local police busted her with a bindle of cocaine a year ago, and she says she hasn’t touched the stuff since.
“I would go entire weekends without sleeping,” she said. “It’s a nasty drug, and it will mess you up bad.”
Curtis Hubbard of The Denver Post contributed to this report.
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
