translated from Spanish: El Turco García on his addiction: “From the world of football I received no help from almost anyone”

Claudio El Turco García stood out as a striker who wore the Racing and Argentina national team, among other shirts. But after football, he had a ride through hell: cocaine. “I stopped playing in December 1999, in January 2000 my dad died and I started with addiction. While I played football, never,” he said “My relationship with drugs was very distant. The first time was at a bowling alley, out of curiosity. Apart from big: in 2000 he was 37 years old, almost 38. I tell you the truth: I felt different, I felt good, in quotes”, he recalled in a chat with Gastón Pauls in his program Seres Libres.After his retirement from football and death, García began to consume and administered that “from the world of football I did not receive help from almost anyone” and that “with the death of my old man I began to consume much more”.

So in the intimate talk he described: “I bought a little piece of icing paper, as it was sold at the time: I bought a gram and it lasted me a month. Afterwards, it was no longer a ‘tac’: it was one gram per day. And then two per day. I never said how much I took per day, because if people see me like that, they say, ‘The drug isn’t that bad, look how good it is.’ But I took a lot, enough to die, for a stroke to grab me,” he said, recalling that he was on the verge of reaching that limit.” One day my head started buzzing and I rescued the scene from a movie: I cut my fingertip, my blood jumped and he relaxed me a little. I took what it took to make anything happen to me: I knew, but I didn’t care, because you’re at Disney, you don’t see the reality,” he said. After the death of his father, El Turco entered a spiral of unbridled consumption: “Five years in a row, every 25, I bought a dozen crumbs, a cider, and drugs. I was going to the type 5 and a half cemetery. and I hid when they closed. From 6pm to 7.8am, I would stay with my old man. I put cigarettes on him, because he smoked. I ate, Drank, everything… it was a thing I couldn’t get off the ground from, I couldn’t cut that. Two years before I stopped drinking, I said, ‘That’s it, I said goodbye well, why do I have to do this? I’m suffering too much.'” Regarding consumption, he explained that an addict always finds an excuse to do so: “Cocaine is a raincoat: you cover the rain but you see your clothes. The addict, when someone dies, takes because he died and is sad. When you are born, you celebrate and drink because you are happy. If it rains, take it because it rains. If the sun rises, take because the sun rises. There’s always an excuse.”

Original source in Spanish