Bad Trips: How I Went from Vice Reporter to International Drug Smuggler

The memoir of a music editor at VICE who tried to become the coolest reporter the magazine had ever had -- by becoming an international drug smuggler.

In 2019, Canadian music reporter Slava P., an editor for VICE media, was sentenced to eight years in prison for recruiting friends into a scheme to smuggle cocaine from the US into Australia. Five of them were already in jail.

Immediately, Slava P. was internationally infamous. Was he a victim of pressure to commit extreme acts in the sake of a good story? A product of a drug-obsessed work environment? Or a manipulator who pushed vulnerable young people into crime?

Here Slava P. tells his side of the story: what exactly happened, and how the precarious, dog-eat-dog atmosphere of a media company can lead the young, the na鴳e and the ambitious into taking crazy risks.

Bad Trips is a story of drugs, hip-hop, influencers and glamour, set against the backdrop of one of the world's most influential news and entertainment sites, VICE. Its cast of beautiful young people and semi-famous rappers pass from the seediest apartments to the most elegant of private clubs. Slava's chronicling of his years at this famous hotbed of excess is a piercing insight into contemporary media culture.