This American Life comes to Toronto to do a story about cocaine

Maybe this post’s headline should have been “Rob Ford delivers promised boost to tourism”?

In any case, the first five minutes of this week’s This American Life are very much worth listening to, and not only because This American Life is great. As the lead-off to an episode titled “I Was So High,” the venerable public-radio show included a segment by producer Sean Cole about the role cocaine plays in Toronto’s bar scene. (People who do cocaine in bars probably don’t need a radio show to tell them how pervasive the drug is, but to the rest of us it’s news.) Cole interviews a few local bar workers and concludes that coke is like “fuel for the staff.” Naturally, mayor Ford gets a mention. One gets the sense that his spectacular public-relations work on behalf of Toronto’s coke scene may have been what got the story green-lit.

Host Ira Glass seems duly nonplussed by our mayor, but you know what? This American Life is based in Chicago. To the best of our knowledge, Ford is their problem now.

Audio of the segment can be found on the show’s website.