Read Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It for Free Online Page A

American of Norwegian decent from Seattle, came here by sheer coincidence six years ago and thought he had encountered a sort of heaven: ‘The ideal climate, hot girls, and a fantastic nightlife. I love it.’
    The lower part of El Poblado is covered with Blockbusters and McDonald’s, whereas the streets a bit further up the hill offer a more refined European selection of wine shops, coffee bars, and Italian bakeries. At the end of one of these streets, embedded in the aroma of roasted coffee and freshly baked muffins, is Paul Thoreson’s Casa Kiwi, the first hostel opened in El Poblado.
    While brushing his ponytail to the side, Paul explains that he no longer accepts guests who do cocaine in front of the cleaning staff: ‘Everything got out of hand very quickly. We had to kick out a bunch of people after I found out what they were doing. Guests were starting to deal drugs and a lot of them stayed for several months.’ People simply liked the city too much and started looking for a way to make money, but they didn’t want to teach English. A deal was made with some Colombian guy who sold cheap coke, says Thoreson, and these long-term guests would buy a large amount and divvy it up. ‘They’d sell it to people staying at the hostel and make a killing. It was totally crazy. Cocaine is just so unbelievably cheap here. But now I’ve woken up to it.’
    Casa Kiwi opened five years ago, and with all the chatter about Medellín on blogs and Facebook, things have grown by leaps and bounds. Thoreson has already built a number of extensions onto Casa Kiwi, and today, in this part of the city, it is just one of many hostels acting as a budget mini-oasis in this sea of green opulence. The investment climate is ‘fantastic’, and Casa Kiwi found itself with no vacancies after it had been in operation a mere six weeks. And so it continued; the money just kept rolling in. Today, Thoreson is a millionaire. ‘I can’t complain.’
    One of the hostel employees comes upstairs and asks ‘Don Paul’ if he can take a call, which he declines. From the small terrace he glances over his creation. Below, a thin guy in a Che Guevara sweatshirt is updating a website with photos from this morning’s party, while some men with waxed surfboards wander in, and flyers advertising the night’s attractions are scattered everywhere.
    To Thoreson, the trick to sustaining his thriving business is to make sure that drug use at the hostel does not get out of control. At Casa Kiwi there is no concrete bunker and no open dealing, and there are explicit warnings on the hostel’s website under the heading ‘Thinking of Using Cocaine in Colombia?’ Everything is aimed at encouraging visitors ‘to behave’: to indulge in whatever pleasures they like but without overdoing it and, above all, not openly. Acting responsibly is what it’s all about.
    ‘A lot of the younger guys are just out for drugs. That’s all, really. They think it’s cool to come and do coke in the city of Pablo Escobar, and there was certainly a lot of this going on when we first opened and were known for our parties. But this sort of behaviour makes for a bad atmosphere and fills the place with negative energy. When a lot of people are doing drugs, you can cut the tension with a knife. It’s incredibly intense. In the early days, I thought parties were good for business, which of course is true to a certain extent: when people are enjoying themselves and having a good time, they spend money. So I was really open-minded in the beginning, but in the grand scheme of things it just means trouble. It becomes a downward spiral.’
    The maturing process that Casa Kiwi has undergone shows in microcosm what the entire city of Medellín has experienced, going back to when it was notorious as ‘the murder capital of the world’. Drug dealing is no less common today than it ever was. Crime networks are just as strong in the present as in the past, and Medellín’s role as the hub of