Supplemented

We want to relate to the experiences of our “star athletes,” but how do we relate to hitting a meth pipe and surfing 30-foot Maverick’s? It’s an unseemly fact that a number of surfers who first set the performance bar there did so on drugs. Darryl “Flea” Virostko and Shawn “Barney” Barron first surfed the wave in 1990 on LSD. In the years that followed, they and others from Santa Cruz used meth regularly as they turned the surfing world’s attention to Half Moon Bay. 

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle as Rick James, meth is a hell of a drug. And the possibility that it has occasionally served as big wave surfing’s performance-enhancing drug of choice makes an already-strange act like surfing giant waves begin to seem even stranger. Yet most accounts of this era at Maverick’s—such as one published in Playboy last year titled “The True Story of How Crystal Meth Almost Sank the Sport of Big-Wave Surfing”—follow the predictable formula of the rise from addiction-through-recovery, an arc found in just about every hour-long rock band documentary you’ve ever seen. These stories mainly confirm what we already know to be true about drug addiction: it destroys your life. 

But drug use is almost always an attempt to address a bigger problem, and before meth “almost sank the sport of big-wave surfing,” it also appears to have offered a basic utility in helping subdue the sheer terror of those early Maverick’s sessions. In 2009, Peter Mel described the effects of surfing Maverick’s on meth to Surfer, and how it helped lower the inhibitions that keep most people from surfing big waves altogether. He described enduring two-wave hold downs fearlessly, recalling that only after sobering up do those experiences “sit with you, they haunt you.” 

Both Mel and Flea have won the Maverick’s Invitational—the surf spot’s most prestigious competitive distinction—and Flea has won the contest more times than any other surfer. It seems evident that acid or meth may have helped instill a level of increased confidence at Maverick’s that would qualify the drugs as performance-enhancers. And yet no one seems to argue that Flea should be stripped of his achievements like Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France wins—regardless of whether a competitive edge was garnered by these drug-fueled experiences. 

Anthony Ruffo, another of Santa Cruz’s surfing meth casualties, drew direct parallels between the feeling of reaching pinnacle competitive surfing achievements and a meth high. “We’d call it ‘winning acid,’ or when you got a cover we’d call it ‘cover acid’—those good, natural endorphins,” Ruffo told Playboy, describing the highs from a contest win or from getting featured on a surf magazine cover. “What meth does is give you that feeling.”

But whatever competitive advantages the drug might render, they seem particular to big-wave surfing, and much less applicable to the kinds of conditions that the majority of surfers encounter in our daily lives. Which begs the question: what are the performance-enhancers for pedestrian surf conditions?

At the other end of the wave-height spectrum, Joel Tudor has been a vocal proponent of the pre- or post-surf toke-up, in addition to the occasional mind-expanding hit of acid. That marijuana or acid are proven pre-surf drugs of choice, in Tudor’s view, signals that surfing is more of an artistic pursuit than it is a sport, which is why surfers tend toward substances that unlock creativity, more so than drugs that might enhance traditional athletic performance like steroids. Those benefits of unlocking this creativity even apply to the surfers we’d consider “top athletes.” 

In a conversation I had with Tudor on the most memorable surf sessions he’d ever witnessed, he immediately recalled a boat trip to the Mentawais in 1997, where two world tour surfers dropped acid before paddling out at Macaronis. “You couldn’t have picked a better performance-oriented wave” to illustrate the point, he said. “There are a lot of guys who are great athletes, but who don’t have that extra special thing to open their minds and separate themselves out like that.”

Tudor had woken up late that morning, so at first he hadn’t known that his companions had dropped acid while he watched them surf, which gave him a more objective view of the session. “I’d never gotten to watch the effects of someone surfing on acid at that level,” he said. “It put them so in tune. They looked glued to their surfboards and every movement they made was perfect.” Both surfers had paddled out that day without leashes in 5- to 6-foot surf. “That’s not somewhere you’d want to surf without a leash, but even when they tip-toed in on the reef to get their surfboards, the tip-toeing in was perfect. Most people would just be trying not to get cut up walking in but you could see them keep conversations going with the local fishermen.” 

Tudor’s memory of the session underscores how many of the factors that define what we consider “good surfing” fall outside of the parameters of traditional athletic performance. “A lot of people know about the value of getting turned on to open up artistic creativity,” said Tudor. “And that applies to surfing too.”

In more than a decade, the WSL has had only a few instances of surfers coming under violation of its rules for the use of PEDs. The most notable was Neco Padaratz, who in 2005 was suspended from the tour for using steroids. More recently, Raoni Monteiro was found in violation for the use of performance-enhancers, but his use was deemed unintentional.

Since instituting drug screenings and the World Anti-Doping Agency standards in 2012—the same standards used by the Olympics—the WSL has had a policy of publicly reporting all athletes who are found using substances that it considers performance-enhancing.  Given how few violations have been cited, there’s pretty good evidence that even at surfing’s highest levels of athletic performance, very few traditional performance-enhancers are in use. 

What’s unknown is the extent to which non-traditional performance-enhancers like marijuana, LSD, or meth have been used in competition. The WSL doesn’t publicly report on surfers who test positive for these drugs, or other drugs that are viewed as recreational—further supporting the ways surfing does a poor job of fitting the mold as a sport. At a minimum, we do know that world champions, from Tom Carroll to Occy to Andy Irons, have had well-documented battles with substance abuse, a testament of the extent to which surfing attracts and rewards addictive personalities. But even surfing’s world champs seem less inclined to traditional PEDs—and for good reason. 

Surf coach and 90s pro surfer Chris Gallagher told me “the only reason surfing exists as a sport at all is that surfers had to figure ways of getting paid to do it. Tons of artists and many surfers have been proponents of psychedelics and marijuana, and I think that supports the idea that in the end, surfing is an art.” 

Gallagher has been one of competitive surfing’s closest observers for three decades, most recently as a coach to surfers on tour, including CJ and Damien Hobgood and Jordy Smith. Gallagher travels to the majority of tour stops and confirmed that he hasn’t observed the use of traditional PEDs, nor does he see their benefit from a training perspective. “Look at other athletes who try to come into surfing: they immediately look awkward. If you want to talk about a surfer as an athlete, it doesn’t really fit the mold of any other sport.” 

Gallagher believes that the stigma attached to marijuana or psychedelics is the primary reason the benefits of their use aren’t discussed openly. “Some of the best surfing in history was done when somebody smoked a joint before they went out,” said Gallagher. “There are people who have been chronic users most of their careers and have world titles, so it’s not as if it was a detriment. If you think about the fact that surfing is about being in tune with nature, it makes sense that drugs that can help you tap into a different mindset would be beneficial.” 

Surfing may fit the mold of creative pursuits more closely than traditional sports, but it seems to hold even more in common with addiction itself. We’ve all seen surfing’s beach parking lot casualties: surfers who orient their lives around the promise of that momentary thrill, prioritizing their next fix above all else. It’s the experience of addiction. Surfing makes life better, until it doesn’t. And we tell ourselves we have it under control, until we don’t.