How Crystal Meth Almost Sank Big Wave Surfing | History of Santa Cruz’s drug abusing surf scene
The surf scene of Santa Cruz is one of legend. Big tough personalities charging massive cold sharky waves like Mavericks. Add a bunch of mind altering drugs like crystal meth to this equation and you get Hollywood like story lines. Aggressive ego’s throwing fists in the line-up is just the beginning. Suicides, overdoses, big-money sponsorships, jail-time, mind-control, revenge, smuggling rings, and more is where it went for Santa Cruz surfers like Shawn “Barney” Barron (RIP), Darryl “Flea” Virostko, Vince Collier, Zach Acker, Jeff Ayers, Peter Mel, and many more.
This article from Playboy (who is maybe rivaling the New York Times as the best long-form documenter of boardsports these days) details the history of Santa Cruz and the messy relationship the local surf scene has had with drugs since the beginning. It started innocently enough with some weed running and ended up in disaster with meth binges before Mavericks sessions, jail, and death. A few managed to pull their lives back together, but not all.
Read this one to the end. It’s serious. Here’s a sample…..
“In the mid-2000s meth hit California hard. By 2005 the state had experienced a 100 percent increase in meth-related arrests. Santa Cruz surfers became poster children of the epidemic. Young surfers were afraid to walk by the Lane. When pro surfer Nat Young was growing up, his mother drove him to the beach rather than risk having him walk the few blocks from the cliffs. It was rumored that meth was being used as a big-wave performance enhancer. More common were stories of strung-out big-wave surfers: a paranoid Peter Mel on the roof of his house, trying to disconnect the telephone wires; Jeff Spencer losing his home and living like a lost boy in the caves by the beach. In 2007, a surfer from Monterey named Peter Davi—who had been surfing another new big-wave spot called Ghost Tree with Ruffo—was found floating facedown in a kelp bed. Davi’s drowning shocked Santa Cruz. He was a family man, not one of the Steamer Lane wild men. Nevertheless, the coroner’s report found meth in his blood.
Ruffo says meth’s appeal was that it offered so much more than a rush. When he smoked meth, he felt good about himself—he felt like he did when he won the 1985 O’Neill Coldwater Classic or when he opened a surf magazine and saw his image frozen on a wave, framed by a crescent of whitewater spray.
“We’d call it ‘winning acid,’ or when you got a cover, we’d call it ‘cover acid’—those good, natural endorphins,” Ruffo says. “What meth does is give you that feeling.”
Click over to PLAYBOY for the feature on Santa Cruz: The True Story of How Crystal Meth Almost Sank the Sport of Big-Wave Surfing
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