Cocaine: Middle Class High

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What persuaded her to seek drug treatment was an experience that could have killed her and her brother. Like many freebasers, they used sedatives to come down off a high. "You're wired up like a mad dog," says Mary, "and your body's been running at 150 miles an hour for days." One night, after freebasing in the rear of her van, they took some Quaaludes and passed out, leaving an unlit propane torch with its nozzle open—creating a risk that a stray spark could ignite the propane and blow up the van.

At least 90% of all the coca leaf in the world comes from moist, infertile mountain land in Peru and Bolivia, whose governments cherish the crop as one of their principal exports. Raw coca leaves are soaked in various chemicals and oil. The result is a muddy brown paste, which is purified into so-called coca base, a dirty white, almost odorless substance, which is usually shipped to laboratories in Colombia for refining.

The final product is not as much in demand in Europe as in the U.S. Explains an Italian drug expert: "On such things Europe is about five years behind." Nonetheless, in cosmopolitan cities from Munich to Milan, prostitutes have easy access to cocaine for their customers, and fashionable restaurants and nightclubs have a ready supply for the would-be snorter.

From the Andes to the American nose, the trade is almost entirely controlled by Colombians, who process the drug and smuggle it into the U.S., largely by boat and plane. Enterprising individuals have hidden cocaine in everything from hollowed-out candy bars and native "carvings" to wigs, souvenirs and even plastic sacks in their stomachs, which occasionally burst, causing death.

In Bogotá, the Colombian capital, a kilo of 90% pure cocaine costs $4,000; in New York City, it is worth $60,000. It is then cut or "stepped on" with adulterants like lactose (a nutrient), to add weight and volume, amphetamines to give a cheaper high and procaine to simulate coke's numbing effect. Since the powder that reaches the street often contains no more than 12% pure cocaine, the original kilo, or "key," has now been fattened to some eight kilos and will bring $500,000 or more.

Despite the dilution, so suggestive is coke's mystique, and so eager are people to believe in its efficacy, that buyers usually feel that they get high on it anyway. As a Manhattan coke connoisseur puts it, "Anyone who puts out a hundred bucks for a gram figures it has to be good."

The cocaine trade may be the most lucrative form of commerce in the world. Periodic glimpses of its staggering scale are afforded by headlines such as those in Wilmington, N.C., early this month. DEA and U.S. Customs officials swooped in on a twin-engine Cessna that made an unscheduled nighttime landing, arresting the pilot and a passenger and seizing their cargo of 440 lbs. of cocaine. The estimated wholesale value of the shipment: $16 million.

The drug's main port of entry is Miami. By no coincidence, the Miami branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta is the only branch bank in the U.S. Reserve system to show a cash surplus—$4.75 billion worth in 1980. A likely explanation: laundered cash from drugs.