Welcome to Route 36, The World’s First Cocaine Bar

La Paz, Bolivia, is home to a lounge called Route 36.  The bar often gets noise complaints from neighbors and rarely stays open in one location for more than a few months at a time.  But backpackers from around the world give it superlative reviews:

“Everyone knows about this place,” says Jonas, a backpacker who arrived two days earlier. “My mate came to Bolivia last year and he said, ‘Route 36 is the best lounge in all of South America.’…  [Said another,] ”I travelled the world for nine months, and for sure La Paz was the craziest city and Route 36 the best bar of my entire trip.”

On the surface, it probably looks like a lame scene: the jukebox only plays “Americana” and “Jump Around,” all anyone wants to talk about is photography, college, and how hot it is, and forget even trying to get into the bathroom.  But Route 36 does serve something most bars don’t.  Can you guess?  Don’t read the post title, it will give it away.  

It’s cocaine.  The freshest cocaine in the world, straight from the Andes!  (Like how Coors Light comes from the Rockies, they harvest cocaine from the Andes.)

Each table has candles and a stash of bottled water, plus whatever mixers one cares to add to your drink. In the corner, a pile of board games includes chess, backgammon, and Jenga, the game in which a steady hand pulls out bricks from a tower of blocks until the whole pile collapses. If it weren’t for the heads bobbing down like birds scouring the seashore for food, you would never know that huge amounts of cocaine were being casually ingested. There’s a lot of mingling from table to table.

En fuego metaphor there, see, because instead of eating food, they are eating cocaine.  With their noses.  Also, ridiculous choice of board games.  Jenga?  Sounds like basically the field sobriety test for cocaine.  ”Sure officer, let me just remove this small precariously positioned wooden piece from this tower and– GODD*MN IT!  GODD*MMMMIT!  [slaps Jenga tower down.]  Where the f*ck is my bubblegum? [quiet sobbing, followed by high-pitched laughter.]“

Apparently the stuff is purer than an angelic infant soundly asleep and costs less, too: only about $20 for a gram.  The bartender done seen some stories in his day:

“We had some Australians; they stayed here for four days. They would take turns sleeping and the only time they left was to go to the ATM.”

I’ll bet those guys were way fun to hang out with on that fourth day.

Source: The Guardian via The Awl.