Bad Trips

Bad Trips: How I Went from VICE Reporter to International Drug Smuggler is co-written by Slava Pastuk and Brian Whitney. Whitney will collect all the royalties for the book.[1] It is published by Dundurn Press.[2] It was acquired and edited by Russell Smith.

Pastuk's full name is Yuroslav Pastukhov.[3]

The book documents Pastuk's life, that started with his birth in Ukraine, and emigration with his mother to Canada.[1] He lived in Barrie, before moving to Toronto at the age of 19 for a marketing job, that he then quit to work for Noisey Canada, part of Vice Media.[1] At Vice, he reports being encouraged to use cocaine and doing so.[1] He started DJing as a side job and selling marijuana to people he met on Grindr.[1] In 2015,[3] his drug dealing escalated and he earned $20,000 from helping a drug cartel smuggle cocaine from Australia to Canada.[1] After boasting about his smuggling at work, he recruited five colleagues: Jordan Gardner, Robert Wang, Porscha Wade, Nathaniel Carty, and Ketiba Senusi into the smuggling efforts, but they failed and were arrested.[1][3] Each of the five were sentenced to between three and four years in prison.[3]

Pastuk was fired from Vice after news of his activities reached Vice management and the front page of the National Post newspaper.[3] In 2018, Pastuk was arrested and in 2019 jailed for nine years.[1][3][4]

Alan MacKenzie of the Winnipeg Free Press describes the book as entertaining, but Pastuk's self-importance as exhausting and notes his lack of remorse.[1] Publishers Weekly called it "a riveting cautionary tale."[2]

• Cool Mules, Canadaland podcast about the same subject.