The Mystery of the Levimasole Tainted Cocaine [updated with part 2 & 4]

[Sasha]

The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine

What's a drug used to deworm livestock—a drug that can obliterate your immune system—doing in your cocaine? Nobody knows.

by Brendan Kiley (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=1124)
http://www.thestranger.com/binary/98a1/Feature1-570.jpg



A granulocytosis can kill you, but its symptoms are frustratingly broad. Some people's throats close up. Some people get diarrhea. Some people get skin infections, sores in their mouth or anus, or just a fever. Some people have it, don't know it, and get better without seeing a doctor. Some people don't see a doctor until it's too late.
Basically, agranulocytosis is a catastrophic crash in a person's immune system, which can turn a zit, a scratch, or even the bacteria that normally live in and around your body into a life-threatening infection. In one vividly described case from the 1920s, an otherwise healthy 40-year-old woman came down with a mysterious fever. Over the next nine days, under the care of baffled physicians, she sprouted "brownish papular eruptions" all over her face and body, necrotic abscesses on her neck and buttocks, and "a greyish-green dirty membrane" covering her mouth and throat with "scattered small greyish ulcers." In one cubic millimeter of blood, her doctors found 4,000,000 red blood cells but only 1,000 white blood cells. Then, after a blood transfusion, she died.


Agranulocytosis is rare and typically caused by medications: Antibiotics, gold salts (to treat arthritis), and some anti*psychotic drugs can trigger the crash. But lately, doctors have been seeing more and more cocaine users with mysterious cases of agranulocytosis linked to a mysterious cutting agent called levamisole. Levamisole was discovered in 1966 and studied for its ability to rev up the effects of chemotherapy drugs and people's immune systems. It also turned out to work wonders with intestinal worms. Levamisole is an immunomodulator, meaning it can either strengthen or weaken your immune system, depending on your genes and what other drugs you might be taking. But too many patients came down with agranulocytosis, the studies were discontinued, and the FDA withdrew its approval of the drug.
One of the last studies on levamisole use in humans was in 2001, when Iranian researchers gave the drug to a group of girls who lived in crowded, unhygienic conditions with uncontrollable lice infestations. According to the International Journal of Dermatology, a 10-day course of levamisole tablets was "completely effective": The girls took the drugs, and the drugs poisoned the lice. (The study didn't mention whether the drugs poisoned the girls.)
These days, levamisole is mostly used by farmers to deworm cows and pigs—and, for some reason, it's also used by people in the cocaine trade. The DEA first reported seeing significant amounts of levamisole-tainted cocaine in 2005, with 331 samples testing positive. Then the numbers spiked: The DEA found 6,061 tainted samples in 2008 and 7,427 in 2009. One DEA brief from 2010 reports that between October 2007 and October 2009, the percentage of seized cocaine bricks containing levamisole jumped from 2 percent to 71 percent.
Which is not only sudden, but odd. Levamisole is not like other common cutting agents—sugar, baking powder, laxatives, etc.—in three important ways:
1. It's more expensive than other cuts.
2. It makes some customers sick.
3. It's being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States.
This last mystery is the most puzzling. Typically, smugglers like to move the purest possible product—less volume means less chance of detection—and cut their drugs once they cross into the United States.
So what's the incentive to use a relatively expensive cut of something that makes your customers sick and increases your smuggling risk? Even stranger: The cocaine trade, in both smuggling and production, has fragmented in recent years (more on that in a minute). If there's no central production, how did hundreds and hundreds of independent shops come to use the same unusual cutting agent?
Nobody seems to know, including experts I spoke with on both coasts of the United States: doctors, scholars, chemists, think-tank fellows, research scientists, federal and state public-health analysts, law enforcement agencies from the Seattle Police Department to the DEA, and even people who work in and around the drug trade. Everyone has theories, but nobody has answers.
It's a mystery.

What We Do Know
Some people are getting sick from levamisole and a few have died, but it's impossible to pin down exact numbers. In April 2008, a lab in New Mexico reported an unexplained cluster of 11 agranulocytosis cases in cocaine users. In November 2009, public health officials in Seattle announced another 10 cases. The CDC began a surveillance program in eight states.
During levamisole's early clinical trials for cancer and autoimmune disorders, around 10 percent of the patients developed agranulocytosis. If the nation's cocaine supply is so thoroughly tainted, why aren't 10 percent of cocaine users going to hospitals with unexplained infections?
"Maybe 10 percent are experiencing pressure on their neutrophils," says Dr. Phillip Coffin of the University of Washington, who has studied drug use in New York City and Seattle. (Neutrophils are the type of white blood cell wiped out by agranulocytosis.) "But only a proportion of them are getting sick enough and using enough that they come to our attention. And an even smaller proportion of those people are coming to the attention of physicians who are aware of the cocaine-levamisole problem. There are many steps in the pathway that have left such a small number of cases being reported."
The problem might be—and probably is—larger than we know. And, because of budget crunches, last month the CDC abandoned its surveillance program in Washington State. This is worrisome not only for people who've already gotten sick and are likely to get sick again (doctors at Harborview have reported seeing the same patients multiple times for agranulocytosis), but because levamisole has a cumulative effect: The more you're exposed to it, the more likely you are to get sick, and even if you've had levamisole-tainted cocaine and not gotten sick doesn't mean you won't get sick from levamisole-tainted cocaine in the future. With the DEA reporting such a radical increase in the percentage of tainted cocaine (which more than doubled between 2008 and 2009), the number of people at risk is also increasing radically.

The Cocaine Trade
So who's lacing the world's cocaine with levamisole and why? "I honestly can't tell you," says Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. An internationally recognized scholar, Tree has spent his career studying the drug trade—if anyone (outside of a drug cartel) should know where and why levamisole is being cut into the world's cocaine supply, it's him.
The ubiquity of tainted cocaine could, he says, be an unintended consequence of the drug war. Centralized drug-producing operations, like the old Medellín and Cali cartels, depended more on consistency of product and long-term business relationships. But after those cartels were infiltrated and disrupted, hundreds of small shops—many of them family-operated—jumped into the void. "We can't even count those operations, much less infiltrate and break them up," Tree says.
Recent developments in Colombia's guerilla wars have also destabilized business as usual. Right-wing paramilitary death squads—which are on U.S. lists of international terrorist organizations—have been fighting against Colombia's Marxist-Leninist guerillas for years on the government's behalf. Both the guerillas and the paramilitaries have been involved in the country's black market, but, Tree says, "guerillas deal more with peso economy"—the trade within Colombia—"and the paramilitary death squads made a play for the coastal regions. They were cutting the guerillas off from weapons and from smuggling zones. Those dynamics have been shifting over the past few years. The death squads were officially disbanded by government but have reemerged: same people, different names." (In 2007, the produce distributor Chiquita pled guilty to paying almost $2 million to these paramilitary death squads. U.S. congressman William Delahunt said Chiquita was only "the tip of the iceberg" of U.S. businesses getting tied up in paramilitary groups, which means those businesses are implicitly tied up with the cocaine trade.)
"As a result, there's much less accountability within Colombia now," Tree says. "The drug market is much more fragmented. Who are you going to complain to? Plus, you've got the meat grinder in Mexico"—where gangs ship South American product into North America. "Will any of these people even see each other again? Who knows? It's shorter-term careers these days."
Meanwhile, Peruvian shops are also stepping up production to compete with the small Colombian producers—the dynamics across the South American cocaine market are shifting rapidly and violently.
Even the old Mexican shipping networks are breaking up as turf wars make the smuggling routes less reliable and more expensive. Some gangs are making an end run around Mexico by sea—the U.S. government has begun intercepting homemade submarines, loaded with cocaine, that sail by night just beneath the surface of the water. One of the first narco-*subs was found in 2000 in Bogotá. "It had Russian blueprints and the engineers fled just before the police arrived," Tree says. "In Bogotá—8,000 feet in the Andes and nowhere near any ocean. How corrupt can you get?"
The U.S. has only intercepted around two dozen narco-subs so far. "They've got no wake, no conning towers—just a snorkel sticking up for air. By day they stay idle and throw a blue tarp over themselves so they blend in with the ocean," Tree says. "As one intelligence officer put it to me, rather frankly: 'You try finding a log floating in the Pacific Ocean.'"
With such a fragmented drug market, accountability and quality control decline. As Tree says, who are you going to complain to?
Which leaves the question of why producers and/or smugglers are cutting their cocaine with levamisole. Why that, instead of a cheaper and more benign cut?
"That," Tree says, "I don't know. This is the most interdisciplinary field in the world. The people who focus on violence and the cartels don't understand the pharmacology, and the people who understand the pharmacology don't understand the economics and shifting forces of the cartels. Nobody has a bird's-eye view of the whole thing."

Working Theories
In 2004, a controversy erupted in the horse-racing world. A string of trainers with long and distinguished reputations were accused of doping their horses after aminorex, an amphetamine, was detected in their animals' urine. The penalty for doping horses with aminorex is a one- to five-year suspension and a career-ending stigma. Accusations flew, the trainers protested their innocence, and scientists stepped in to investigate.
It turned out the whole thing was an accident: The horses had been injected with levamisole for deworming, which their bodies metabolized into speed. Studies in the 1970s had discovered that dogs experienced "mood elevation" after receiving doses of levamisole. And a 1998 study at Vanderbilt University showed that levamisole eased withdrawal symptoms in rats addicted to morphine.
That study caught the attention of Dr. Mike Clark, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harborview Medical Center, who also studies cocaine addiction in lab rats. "According to the study, levamisole acts on all three monoamine neurotransmitters," he says. "That's exactly what you'd expect from something that potentiates cocaine." In other words, levamisole may heighten cocaine's effects—or might be a stimulant all by itself. In the next few weeks, Dr. Clark will begin an experiment of his own to find out (among other things) whether levamisole, without any cocaine, can produce cocainelike effects in lab rats.
If he can demonstrate that levamisole makes cocaine more potent, we'll be a step closer to understanding what it's doing in the supply chain. Other people have other theories, including:
• Something about the chemical structure of levamisole retains the iridescent fish-scale sheen of pure cocaine, according to a chemist with ties to the cocaine trade, giving cocaine cut with levamisole the same appearance as pure cocaine.
• Levamisole is a bulking agent for crack. The process of making crack involves "washing" cocaine and filtering out impurities and cutting agents. Levamisole slips through this process, meaning you can produce more volume of crack with less pure cocaine.
• Levamisole passes the "bleach test," a simple street test used to detect impurities in cocaine. When dropped in Clorox, pure cocaine dissolves clearly. Procaine (a common cutting agent) turns reddish brown, lidocaine turns yellowish, and other impurities float to the bottom. In a lab test conducted by *Dr. Clark, levamisole stayed clean and clear.
If levamisole can do all of these things—pass the visual test, pass the bleach test, pass the crack-purifying process, and provide a stimulant effect either on its own or in conjunction with cocaine—it explains not only why producers use it, but why so many small South American producers have independently decided to start cutting their "pure" product. "Think of it as evolution in action," Dr. Clark says. Like a mutated gene that is beneficial to a species and is passed on through the pressures of natural selection, levamisole has a variety of benefits that become, in essence, selective pressures.
Instead of the traditional smuggling model, where centralized producers ship pure product and cut it once it crosses the U.S. border, levamisole (theoretically) behaves enough like cocaine that producers can pass off cut kilos as 100 percent pure—even to the smugglers who may believe they're shipping pure product to sell to American wholesalers. This theory is supported by a couple of findings, including reports of seizures in the DEA's Microgram Bulletin. One flight from Guyana into New York's JFK airport contained 192 churros stuffed with levamisole-tainted cocaine. And DEA agents in Bogotá came across a magazine page coated in a "protective" plastic laminate that was 21.5 percent cocaine, cut with levamisole. The research and development labs that developed this relatively sophisticated smuggling technique were at the source of production. And the source of production was cutting its "pure" product with levamisole.
A source with close ties to the DEA confirmed this, saying a recent, still-classified report has revealed that Colombian cocaine producers are putting a great deal of effort into making sure they maintain access to levamisole. "More than that," the source says, "I cannot tell you right now."

The Test-Your-Own Kit
Because the official research on levamisole's effects on human beings was stopped years ago—and, apart from Dr. Clark's pending experiments with rats, there's been no official research on its effects when combined with cocaine—there's still a lot we don't know. It's possible that agranulocytosis is only one of its health hazards.
According to a 2009 article in the Journal of Analytic Toxicology, levamisole-laced cocaine might also increase the risk of cardiac problems: "Cocaine increases sympathetic activity by blocking the reuptake of norepinephrine at the postganglionic synapse. Additive, if not synergistic effects could be expected when the drugs are combined. Concerns of increased toxicity with exaggerated pressure response or development of arrhythmia could then arise when cocaine is combined with levamisole."
Heart attack and cardiac arrest are two of the common causes of death associated with cocaine overdoses—levamisole might exacerbate those risks. It's hard to say: Cocaine, according to the latest Seattle/King County drug trends report, released this June, is the most common illegal drug detected in deaths, but its manner of killing is less clear-cut than opiates. "Opiate overdose is pretty simple and straightforward," explains *Dr. Coffin. "It's breathing. Keep them breathing and they live. Cocaine is more difficult: Is it a massive heart attack? Is it a stroke? It's not very well defined."
Currently, people who suffer cardiac problems associated with cocaine are not tested for the presence of levamisole, so we really have no idea what kind of damage this new cutting agent is inflicting on the nation's cocaine users, nor the strain on already strapped public funds—every time someone without health insurance lands in the emergency room, it costs taxpayers thousands of dollars.
The fuzziness surrounding cocaine's destructive qualities makes harm-reduction strategies more difficult for cocaine than for opiates. Nobody doubts that cocaine is destructive. "It's toxic to heart-muscle cells," Dr. Coffin says. "Even in its purest form, it's among the worst recreational drugs for the cardiovascular system." But its spectrum of harmful qualities, some of which are exacerbated by levamisole, makes it tricky to pinpoint good maintenance programs for chronic addicts. Opiate addicts, Dr. Coffin says, can live on methadone or other controlled dosing mechanisms their entire lives with no medical harm besides constipation and loss of libido. But cocaine- and amphetamine-maintenance programs haven't shown any conclusive results, despite attempts in Colombia to prescribe coca tablets and tea to addicts.
One thing that can be done: develop an inexpensive field-test kit to try to detect levamisole. Dr. Clark has invented such a kit and—in association with The Stranger, a few folks in the local harm-reduction community, and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA), which runs the U-District needle exchange—hopes to begin distributing kits in a few weeks. Unfortunately, kits are technically drug paraphernalia under Washington State law, not only because the kits will contain cocaine residue, but because it is illegal for any person to possess something used to "process, prepare, test, analyze, pack, repack, store, contain, conceal, inject, ingest, inhale, or otherwise introduce into the human body a controlled substance." It's a perfect example of how drug prohibition laws make drugs more dangerous—an unregulated market for cocaine, with no quality control, has encouraged the use of levamisole as a cutting agent. And U.S. drug laws make it illegal for users to test their cocaine for poison—if users could, they might stop buying from dealers who sell tainted cocaine, putting economic pressure on the market to be less dangerous. It's a classically self-defeating chain of policies, but some antidrug warriors defend it on the grounds that since drugs are illegal, users get what they deserve. And if cocaine is perceived as more dangerous, perhaps fewer people will use it.
This, of course, is a cruel, stupid, and expensive way to deal with the problem. As Dr. Clark put it: "The idea of letting addicts die to make drugs scarier is reprehensible."
It's not quite the same in the heroin world: Because of the public outcry about the health risks of sharing needles, hypodermic syringes have a special exemption. Crack users need similar exemptions.
"If you read the paraphernalia laws, cocaine is both the forgotten drug and in some ways the most hated drug," says Shiloh Murphy, director of PHRA, an independent nonprofit that isn't affiliated with public-health-funded needle exchanges. He gestures behind him to a tower of cardboard boxes full of hypodermic needles. "A young person just starting to inject knows he shouldn't share his syringes," he says. "But a 20-year crack veteran doesn't realize that every time he smokes and burns his lips and passes on his stem, he could be transferring the same diseases—it's open sores to open sores."
To combat this problem, Murphy has begun a controversial program to distribute crack stems, rubber crack "condoms," and fresh steel wool to users. (Steel wool, which is used as a filter in crack pipes, weakens and flakes off after repeated use, sending red-hot chunks of metal into users' throats and lungs, which leads to infections and abscesses.) Murphy got the idea for his crack program one afternoon two years ago, when he was approached by an angry crack user.
"I was sitting at the table, handing out flyers and things," Murphy says, "and a man said to me: 'You're a real motherfucker, you know that? You're sitting here with all these syringes and talking about health. I use crack and my friends are dying of HIV and hepatitis C and there's nothing on this table for us. I guess crack users are always just left to die.' I said, 'You're right. I'm sorry. Tell me what you need.' It was an enlightening moment for me."
"All we have to do," he says, "is save one person from getting HIV, and we've become economically worth it." PHRA's annual budget is around $385,000. Its budget for the crack program is currently $6,000. The lifetime cost for the state to take care of an uninsured person with HIV, he says, is half a million dollars. "We've saved the state thousands and thousands of dollars."
Now Murphy will be at the forefront of our combined attempt to distribute Dr. Clark's levamisole kits to cocaine users. The kits will contain instructions for use, a fact sheet about levamisole and agranulocytosis, and a survey on a prestamped postcard about where and when the cocaine was purchased, whether it's powder or rock cocaine, whether it tested positive for levamisole, and a few other research questions. Hopefully, that data will help us—me, Dr. Clark, PHRA, and a local harm-reduction organization called DanceSafe—develop a better understanding of how levamisole-tainted cocaine is distributed through the city and whether some neighborhoods face greater health risks than others. (Is the cocaine you can buy on the street in Georgetown, for example, more or less tainted than the cocaine at some millionaire's house party in Bellevue?)
As for its illegality: After a meeting with ACLU lawyer Alison Holcomb, Stranger publisher Tim Keck, and me, Seattle city attorney Pete Holmes and King County prosecutor Dan Satterberg decided to allow us to distribute levamisole test kits—and collect data about whether people are finding levamisole—without prosecution. They notified new Seattle police chief John Diaz, who supports the program. http://www.thestranger.com/images/rec_star.gif
The levamisole test kits will be available in a few weeks—watch for updates in The Stranger and on Slog. This piece is the first in an investigative series.
This story has been updated since its original publication.



source: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine/Content?oid=4683741

[Sasha]

part two of the article:

The Cocaine Trade

The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine, Part II: How It's Made, How It Moves, and Who Might Be Cutting It with a Deadly Cattle-Deworming Drug

by Brendan Kiley (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=1124)
http://www.thestranger.com/binary/de1c/Feature-570.jpg Once cocaine crosses into the U.S. over the Mexico border, dealers cut it with agents other than levamisole: flour, baby powder, Epsom salts, laxatives, lidocaine, chalk. The lore is that we get some of the worst product in the country—it gets cut and stepped on, mostly by Latino narcos, at every stop between San Diego and Seattle. Meanwhile, it's rumored that Vancouver, Canada, has far superior cocaine than we do: Asian gangs import product to Canada through Vancouver and step on it as it moves eastward. The Latino and Asian gangs are said to have a gentleman’s agreement that the U.S./Canada border is also a gangland border. Latinos won’t sell north and Asians won’t sell south. As one dealer put it, “If we see any of those Asian guys down here, they’re fucking dead.”

Related Articles



The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine, Part 1 (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine/Content?oid=4683741)
by Brendan Kiley
Aug 17, 2010




How It's Made
Diego was 23 years old, a poor Colombian living in a poor section of Cali, when his girlfriend had the baby. He was broke—everybody was broke—but his grandmother knew where he could earn some money: He could go work the coca plantations in the hinterlands like she had. She could get him a job working for FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, Colombia's Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army), which was better than working for the right-wing paramilitaries.
Diego is not his real name, and he's currently living in a different Latin American country—otherwise, he said, he wouldn't be talking to me.

The Colombian cocaine trade has been tangled up in the country's guerrilla wars for decades: FARC fights the government, the government fights FARC, and the right-wing paramilitaries fight FARC on the government's behalf with an extra measure of savagery. FARC and the paramilitaries constantly jockey for territory—to gain not only political power, but access to rivers, coastal mangrove swamps, and other secret routes where they can smuggle weapons and cocaine to fund their decades-old war.
The paramilitaries, according to Diego and his family, are the worst of the bunch. FARC at least tends to pay its workers, they say. The paramilitaries, on the other hand, have a reputation for stealing coca leaves from farmers at gunpoint and making their cocaine workers labor for months for little or no pay. Sometimes, Diego said, they pay you in lead—a bullet to the brain.
"You can't talk about FARC or the paramilitaries ever, because you don't know who's working for who or who they've recruited," Diego said. "Even people you know are on both sides, so you can't be drunk at a bar and bring up anything—your cousin's girlfriend might be working for the other side. People disappear and get killed all the time. It's very dangerous to talk, to do anything."
But Diego had a family to feed and his grandmother's assurance, so off he went.
His grandmother told him to go to Buenaventura, a port city on Colombia's Pacific coast and one of the most dangerous cities in the western hemisphere. Buenaventura has the highest murder rate in Colombia, the New York Times reported in 2007, and when Diego was there, around 2000, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Buenaventura, Diego said, is "hell on earth." With no tourism to speak of, the government has limited incentive (or ability) to crack down on the leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and narcos who walk the streets with their guns out in the open.
Diego remembers getting on a ferry that left Buenaventura at 5:00 p.m. After a several- hour nighttime journey with 70 or 80 other people (plus rice, beans, beer, and other staples bound for the camp), they arrived at a dock. He was then loaded onto a speedboat that, he said, went 90 miles an hour for seven hours. He had no idea where he was or where they were going, which was the point. The speedboat traveled through swamps and up rivers, stopping only to refuel.
Some of Diego's fellow travelers were laborers, like him. Others were delivering goods (the beans and rice and beer) to the temporary village that serviced the camp—like an old Alaskan gold rush village, except in a tropical jungle patrolled by guerrilla soldiers with machine guns.
When the speedboat finally arrived at the village, it was greeted by guerrillas asking each new arrival for information: Who are you? What job are you here to do? Who told you about the camp? "You can't just not know anything," Diego said. "Some people died at the entrance because they did not have the right answers, so they got killed right there." Diego saw laborers—who said they'd heard they could board the boat in Buenaventura to make some money—murdered at the dock. This particular camp was known as the Black-Bag Camp, so called because the guerrillas would put a black plastic bag over your head before executing you.
And this was FARC—these were the good guys, according to Diego's family.
The coca camps move around to make it harder for police to find them. "It's very, very hard to get to them—it cannot be underestimated that guerrillas know the countryside and the police don't," Diego said.
The camp, Diego said, was maybe six football fields big. (We conducted our interviews over Skype, and his current girlfriend—not the one he had when he joined the coca trade—laughed in the background: "That is your measurement for everything!") He was set to work picking coca leaves, which are thick and sharp. The guerrillas don't issue gloves, and Diego was a city boy with soft hands: "It was really funny to everybody else but hard for me," he said. "It was like ripping palm trees apart. You can still see the scars on my hands."
The conditions weren't very good. He'd wake up at 5:00 a.m. on a dirt floor with 20 other people, every man under his own mosquito net. "After 5:00 p.m., it was just mosquitoes. It was boiling hot, but you had to wear long sleeves and pants, and still a lot of people got yellow fever and dengue fever." He'd work for three hours, from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., filling a 50-kilo (110-pound) sack with coca leaves, and take a break for breakfast. Then he'd be back at it until lunchtime at noon. "We ate rice and fish and lots of bananas," he said. "Sometimes they had juice. But you had to drink a lot of water, because it was really hot."
They'd pick coca leaves until dark, hoping for rain to cool them down and to make their leaves heavier, meaning they had to pick fewer to fill their sacks. (He typically filled the sack three times in a day—150 kilos total.) Sometimes, when it didn't rain, they'd piss in their sacks to make them heavier.
"Not one person I met out there used cocaine," Diego said. "We would chew on the leaves—to kill the hunger, the fatigue, to stop the pain of the work. You'd get bit by spiders and scorpions, mosquitoes or snakes, and you'd chew so you wouldn't feel the pain. Some people believed the coca leaves would stop the poison and save your life."
At his peak earning period, Diego was making the equivalent of US$600 per month. "Back then, that was good cash and it was fast," he said. It was incredibly dangerous, too: People would go back home with wads of money, usually to bring to their families, and get robbed and killed along the way, sometimes by the same people they'd been working with in the fields for four or five months. When Diego traveled, he always went with an entourage of uncles or cousins.
After a while, Diego graduated from the fields to the "factory," which was more like a shed, where he helped turn the raw leaves into cocaine paste. "Making the paste is gnarly," his girlfriend said. "That's where the real scars come in."
"There's a big pool with all the leaves, a big wood tub," Diego explained. Workers would pour leaves into the tub, stomp them down, and then add gasoline to extract the cocaine alkaloids. "That's the easiest way for the government to find the camps," Diego said. "Gasoline is expensive, and most farmers don't use that much—sugarcane and bananas are all farmed by hand—so you find whoever's buying vats and vats of gasoline."
They'd lay a tarp over the tub for 24 hours, with someone stirring the gasoline-coca stew every four or five hours. Then they'd taste the brew to see if it was strong enough. If it numbed the tongue, it was good. If not, it needed more chemicals. Diego doesn't remember exactly which chemicals they used: "There were a lot of chemicals." Eventually, they'd pull the plug on the tubs, collect the cocainized gasoline, add ammonia and sulfuric acid, and chemically reduce the brew into a paste that was taken elsewhere to be turned into cocaine hydrochloride—powder.
Diego and the other workers were encouraged to spit into the tubs holding gas and coca, and even pass spit-mugs around the camp, under the premise that saliva helped the extraction process. Workers were also encouraged to ash their cigarettes into the vats, perhaps because traditional coca chewers sometimes added a dab of quicklime or the ash of burned quinoa plants to their wad of coca. (Diego said he wasn't sure why.)
Then there were the unauthorized additives. "Sometimes we'd piss or shit in the vats, just to be fuckers," Diego said. "Only the rich use cocaine, and we thought it was funny."
The territory where Diego was working—he still isn't 100 percent sure where they were—was a death zone. The paramilitaries and guerrillas were fighting upriver, and he said that sometimes when he went to fetch water, he'd see dead bodies or severed limbs floating past. "I often heard people say things like 'Yesterday I saw four bodies going down,'" Diego said. "All the time, people were talking about bodies. A lot of times they were tied together, big groups of people."
Stories circulated from the guerrillas to the workers about small bands of soldiers who "went to make some business away from the group" and were savaged by larger groups of paramilitaries: "First they cut their hands off, then they cut their legs, and then they'd kill them." The threat of infighting and defection was constant, as workers felt the tempting urge to abscond with packages of paste and sell them on their own.
Then, of course, there was the guerrilla war. In nearby villages, guerrillas and paramilitaries enforced curfews, telling villagers to "go to bed early, because if we see anyone walking around after 10:00 p.m., we'll kill them." They also went from village to village, Diego said, conscripting boys for their armies, sometimes leaving notes under people's doors ordering them to bring their sons to the town center (the church, the plaza) at a certain time. If anyone refused, the soldiers might return to murder the entire family.
One weekend, Diego and some of the workers had a Sunday off, so they went to the little village that serviced the camp to drink beer, loaf around, and look at the women. (Most of the women in the camps, he said, were either cooks or prostitutes, some of them very young local girls.) "We were playing billiards and chess, and all of a sudden people got really quiet. Then people freaked out and were running because the paramilitaries showed up." The paramilitaries forced everybody inside a classroom, then said that government soldiers were on their way and not to tell the guerrillas. "A lot of people were shot," he said. "Then they left. That was it—people were shot because the paramilitaries wanted to show something or prove something, to make a point."
During his time working in the cocaine kingdom—several months-long shifts—Diego saw a parade of corpses, guns, bags of cocaine paste, and barrels full of U.S. dollars that mysteriously appeared and disappeared. One of his cousins and some of his uncles were killed. (He declined to say how or why.) The breaking point came one day when he went to get drinking water, saw yet another corpse floating past, and snapped. "And I was like, Oh my God, I can't do this anymore. No, no, no, no, this is not the kind of life I want for me."
Diego left the trade and eventually the country. As of our last conversation—we had multiple hours-long conversations over two months—he does not intend to return. At one point, he called his family to clarify a few details he couldn't remember. A few days later, he said his family was very upset that he'd been talking to me and upset that he'd asked them about the trade, and that he couldn't talk to me anymore. That was the last I heard from him.

The Levamisole Mystery
Diego never worked on the hydrochloride processing, the most chemically advanced and sensitive part of the process—the stage when the paste is turned into powder and, presumably, the stage at which levamisole, a cattle-deworming medicine that's been showing up in the world's cocaine supply, is added. As covered in the first part of this series—"The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine," August 19—the DEA reported finding levamisole in 73.2 percent of cocaine seized in the United States in 2009, up from a paltry 1.9 percent in 2005. The DEA has also found levamisole-tainted cocaine in busts in Colombia and even in the plastic laminate on glossy calendars shipped into the U.S.—the laminate itself is impregnated with cocaine. (The DEA has agents working across Latin America.) This indicates that levamisole is being added at the source, in the labs where the paste is turned to powder.
When levamisole is ingested by humans, it can trigger a catastrophic immune-system crash called agranulocytosis; it has led to an unknown number of hospitalizations and multiple deaths among cocaine users in the past two years. Physicians in Seattle have reported seeing the same cocaine users land in the hospital with agranulocytosis on multiple occasions.
Levamisole is an unusual—and unprecedented—cutting agent because it's more expensive than other cuts, it makes some customers sick, and it's being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States. Smugglers typically prefer to move pure product, which is less bulky and results in less chance of detection. "The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine" offered a few theories about why South American drug manufacturers (mostly Colombian) are cutting their cocaine with levamisole.
A quick review of those theories:
1. Levamisole might produce a cocainelike stimulant effect either on its own or in conjunction with cocaine (in 2004, racehorses treated with levamisole were found to metabolize the deworming drug into an amphetamine called aminorex), meaning the product could produce a more substantial high with less pure cocaine.
2. Levamisole, unlike other cutting agents, retains the iridescent, fish-scale sheen of pure cocaine, making it easier to visually pass off levamisole-tainted cocaine as pure.
3. Levamisole passes the "bleach test," a quick street test that reveals cuts like sugar or lidocaine (but, because of a chemical anomaly, not levamisole).
4. Levamisole is a bulking agent for crack. Making crack involves purifying cocaine and washing out the cutting agents, but levamisole molecules slip through this process—meaning a dealer can produce more volume of crack with less pure cocaine.
5. All of the above.
If levamisole can do several of these things, it becomes (in evolutionary terms) an advantageous genetic mutation, a cut that may have started as an accident but showed beneficial properties, so was passed on from one batch of cocaine to the next, from one generation to another, like a new gene.
The evolutionary, all-of-the-above theory is especially compelling because Colombia's cocaine-production market is so fractured and decentralized, it's unlikely that one mind is calling all the shots about cocaine's manufacture and distribution. After the breakup of the Medellín and Cali cartels in the mid-1990s, hundreds (maybe even thousands) of independent cocaine producers leaped into the void. While FARC and the paramilitaries control much of the cocaine trade—such as the camps where Diego worked—they don't control and centralize production technology to the degree that the Medellín and Cali cartels did.
Meaning: Those hundreds (and maybe thousands) of independent producers must have independently decided to use the same cutting agent. And even if levamisole looks like cocaine, behaves in bleach tests like cocaine, and can bulk up crack in a way that other cutting agents can't, why not wait to cut it once it has crossed the border?
That's still a mystery.

Three Things We've Learned Since the Last Article
First thing: The theory that levamisole is being cut into cocaine because it's a stimulant might be bunk. Dr. Geoff Baird, the director of clinical chemistry at Harborview Medical Center, has been giving patients who test cocaine-positive (or admit to having recently used cocaine) a comprehensive drug screening that detects levamisole as well as aminorex and other amphetamines. Two-thirds of his cocaine-positive patients are testing positive for levamisole—which is roughly consistent with the DEA estimates of the rate of cocaine contamination—but none tested positive for the amphetamine aminorex.
That might kill the first theory. Racehorses metabolize levamisole into aminorex, but humans don't, at least not in any significant amount. But even if levamisole isn't a stimulant on its own, it might have a synergistic effect with cocaine that boosts the high. Another doctor at Harborview, Dr. Mike Clark, is currently testing rodents to see whether levamisole plus cocaine does something that neither levamisole nor cocaine can do on its own. Results on his experiments are pending.
Regardless, levamisole is certainly out there and is still making people sick. "We've seen levamisole in rock [cocaine] for sure," Dr. Baird said. He has found it not only in the patients who use cocaine but directly in crack rocks that patients have given him for analysis.
(Please note, drug users: Dr. Baird says he and his fellow physicians have no interest in reporting drug users to the police. You can be honest about your habit without fear of prosecution—and you should be honest, both for your own sake and for the sake of research about drug-related health issues like the levamisole question. "It is not our job to arrest patients or police them or enforce those sorts of laws," Dr. Baird said. "If someone has a crack rock, we'll analyze it and that's it—we won't give it back to you, but unless you say you're going to feed it to a little girl, we don't have to talk to the authorities.")
Second thing: While reporting the first part of this series, several drug-trade experts suggested to me that cartels were only cutting levamisole into their cocaine because they happened to have piles of the stuff lying around, maybe even as part of agricultural subsidies from the United States.
Peter Reuter, a professor and drug- economy expert at University of Maryland's School of Public Policy and Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, took this line, saying "the presence of levamisole doesn't seem to be any great mystery to me," since it's a common agricultural medicine in the cocaine-producing regions of South America. Ethan Nadelmann, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in New York City (he is sometimes described as "the godfather of the drug-reform movement") echoed Professor Reuter, saying by e-mail that "it could be the case that South American cocaine producers have access to cheap (or no-cost) levamisole, making it inexpensive and convenient."
And new intelligence from the DEA shows that Colombian cocaine producers are actively trying to keep their access to levamisole. A source familiar with an ongoing DEA investigation, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, said: "When we first began testing, we found pharmaceutical- grade, highly processed levamisole that probably came from us [the United States]. New intelligence says they probably have illicit labs making levamisole in South America—it's a concerted effort. They also have evidence of container ships from China with metric tons of levamisole. The DEA is hoping to use levamisole in interdiction efforts. They can tell from the impurities, from the actual processing of coca leaves into powder form, which batch it came from, which region. Now they're adding the levamisole angle to their investigations as a way to follow where things came from and where they're going. The addition of levamisole is definitely intentional—it makes you think it's got to be something. And the DEA has no doubt it's being cut in in Colombia."
Most of the cocaine in the U.S. comes from Colombia (overland via Mexican gangs or on ships and narco-submarines sneaking up the Pacific coast), and most of the cocaine in Europe comes from Peru and Bolivia, via Brazil. (Brazil is also experiencing a cocaine- consumption boom, not only among the wealthy but also among street kids who find discarded 50-gallon drums that contained cocaine paste. They reportedly scrape the insides for the residue and smoke it as a kind of crude crack.)
As the anonymous source said, the DEA has a Cocaine Signature Program (CSP) that, according to a DEA report from January of this year, can "give evidence of how and where coca leaf was processed to cocaine base (geographical origin), and how cocaine base was converted into cocaine hydrochloride (processing method)." Traditionally, the report says, the processing from paste to powder can be broken down into a Colombian Method, a Peruvian Method (which involves acetone), and a Bolivian Method (which involves ether and acetone).
The report goes on to claim that the CSP can even detect which valley the cocaine has come from: In 2009, for example, 0.4 percent of the cocaine in the U.S. came from Peru's Cuzco/Apurímac valleys and 1.3 percent came from Peru's Huallaga/Ucayali valleys, a couple hundred miles away.
During the fourth quarter of 2009, 97 percent of the cocaine in the U.S. came from Colombia and 1.5 percent from Peru. (The remaining 1.5 percent came from undetermined sources.) And of all the cocaine bricks analyzed by the CSP (which averaged 65 to 85 percent purity), 67 percent were cut with levamisole, 9 percent were cut with diltiazem (more on that in a minute), and 20 percent were uncut.
So, you'd think levamisole was simply a Colombia/U.S. problem. The vast majority of our cocaine comes from Colombia, the vast majority of our cocaine is tainted with levamisole, and the DEA has independent confirmation that cocaine producers in Colombia are scrambling to keep ahold of their levamisole supply.
But now levamisole is turning up in Europe, in samples seized by police in France, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK. Furthermore, in 2008, the DEA arrested Colombians turning paste into powder in Bolivia. According to the CSP report, "This 'technology transfer' for cocaine HCl [hydrochloride] processing was verified by the CSP from the samples seized at the clandestine laboratory site in Bolivia. The solvent profiles of those samples"—the geography-revealing "impurities" mentioned by the anonymous source above—"were 'Colombian HCl Process'... Distinguishing the processing origin of cocaine HCl is no longer possible based on the solvent profile of a seized cocaine HCl exhibit... It should be noted that the type of HCl conversion process has no effect on the 'base origin' determination of cocaine."
In plainer words, the DEA can still tell where the cocaine was grown and turned into paste. But it can no longer tell where the paste was turned into powder.
Which may explain why the DEA is so interested in levamisole and whether it's being cooked in illicit labs or coming over on container ships from China. With the aforementioned "technology transfer," the DEA is losing the ability to pinpoint the location of paste-to-powder labs (the easiest part of the process to conceal—certainly easier than hiding the coca-leaf farms). Could the ubiquity of levamisole serve as a smoke screen for the same purpose, to confuse the DEA? It seems unlikely, given how fractured the cocaine market is (or is supposed to be). But who knows?
Third thing: Nicholas Reuter, a senior analyst at the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), says that levamisole contamination in the U.S. started to peak as other cutting agents started to drop off—specifically diltiazem, a drug used to treat arrhythmia.
There are competing theories (this is a shadowy business, there are always competing theories) about why diltiazem was being cut into the cocaine: One theory, Reuter said, is that its antiarrhythmic properties might reduce the rates of overdose. The other is that it had been shown to reduce drug cravings in cocaine-addicted rats—in humans, diltiazem might prolong the cocaine high, meaning you could produce more cocaine-pleasure with less pure cocaine. Whatever you say about the cocaine producers, they have a serious interest in R&D. "They are," Reuter says, "very sophisticated." (The DEA's Microgram Bulletin, however, dismissed the calculated use of diltiazem, saying it was "most likely... an adulterant of convenience"—just something they had lying around.)
So perhaps levamisole is a replacement for diltiazem because it does have some kind of synergistic effect that boosts the cocaine high (even though Dr. Baird at Harborview has shown that patients who test positive for cocaine and levamisole aren't testing positive for the aminorex). "None of these theories are confirmed," Reuter said. "Another is that the levamisole might affect drug-detecting canines' ability to detect the drug as it's being shipped."
The answer to the levamisole puzzle is getting murkier and murkier. We know levamisole is very prevalent in the cocaine supply, and we know it's there for a reason. But we still don't know why.

How Cocaine Gets Here
Once the cocaine crosses the U.S./Mexico border, dealers cut it with agents other than levamisole: flour, baby powder, Epsom salts, laxatives, lidocaine, chalk. The street lore among cocaine and crack dealers in Seattle is that we get some of the worst product in the country—it gets cut and stepped on, mostly by Latino narcos, at every stop between San Diego and Seattle. It's rumored that high-end cocaine clients here, who want purer product and are willing to pay a premium for it, pay freelance smugglers who don't work with large narco-organizations to drive to Mexico, pick up cocaine, and drive it straight to Seattle.
Vancouver, Canada—a two-and-a-half-hour drive north—is rumored to have far superior cocaine than what is commonly available in Seattle. Vancouver is Canada's San Diego, the stories go: Asian gangs import product to Canada through Vancouver and step on it as it moves eastward across the continent—making Winnipeg cocaine roughly as crappy as Seattle cocaine. The Latino and Asian gangs are said to have a gentleman's agreement that the U.S./Canada border is also a gangland border. Latinos won't sell north and Asians won't sell south. As one dealer put it, "If we see any of those Asian guys down here, they're fucking dead."
That could be a just-so story told by street dealers, but Norm Stamper, who was the chief of police in Seattle from 1994 to 2000, confirmed this description about the way cocaine moves across the U.S. and Canada, saying that it was "consistent with what I was given to understand while I was chief of police." Since leaving the SPD, Stamper has joined LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) and become a vigorous activist for the legalization and control of drugs—all drugs.
"The more sinister the drug, the greater the justification for their regulation instead of their prohibition," he said in an interview. "A regulatory model would give the government, imperfect as it is, the first opportunity since the beginning of the last century to exercise some control over the nation's drug consumption. As it is, it's just horrific chaos."
In the 1980s, 80 to 90 percent of the cocaine bound for the United States came in boats across the Caribbean Sea—it was the era of Miami Vice and cocaine cowboys and Pablo Escobar. Now, according to Dominic Corva, a geographer at the University of Washington who has done extensive research on the coca-cocaine commodity chain, 80 to 90 percent of U.S. cocaine comes overland through Mexico or up the Pacific coast in boats and narco-submarines.
This shift in smuggling routes is, in part, why Mexico has become a meat grinder over the past few years—30,000 dead since 2006, hours-long firefights on city streets, journalists murdered for simply reporting the news, mayors assassinated in big cities and small towns, beheaded corpses and bodies dissolved in lye dumped in downtowns in the middle of the afternoon with messages for the government and rival narcos pinned to their chests, Mexico's entire state apparatus severely compromised by violence and fear. (Not to mention, Corva says, an estimated half million Mexicans are employed in the narco-trade.)
This September, El Diario of Ciudad Juárez—one of the few Mexican newspapers to push back a bit against narco-censorship, a newspaper whose editorial staffers have been murdered for their efforts—published a pleading editorial to the narcos, titled "What Do You Want from Us?"
We'd like you to know that we're communicators, not psychics. As such, as information workers, we ask that you explain what it is you want from us, what you'd intend for us to publish or to not publish, so that we know what is expected of us.
You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling, despite the fact that we've repeatedly demanded it from them... We don't want any more dead. We don't want any more injured or any more threats. It is impossible to exercise our function in these conditions. Indicate to us, therefore, what you expect of us as a news outlet.
A newspaper publicly groveling at the feet of the narcos—it makes the Miami Vice era of targeted assassinations and speedboat chases seem almost quaint.

How Mexico Became a Force in the Cocaine Trade
Before Mexico took over cocaine smuggling, its narco-capitalists "specialized in poppy/heroin and marijuana production, while performing transit services for a percentage of the more lucrative cocaine flow," Corva writes in his dissertation. Now the narco-capitalists of Mexico have gained a much bigger stake in—perhaps even a stranglehold on—the American cocaine trade. Many factors have enabled this transition, from U.S. and Colombian fights with Colombian narcos to effective interdiction in the Caribbean to banking liberalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Corva and other drug-trade experts hesitate to call the narco-capitalist organizations "cartels" because the word implies alien entities separate from the state (the way that, say, the Bloods or the Crips are separate from the state). Mexico's narcos are thoroughly integrated into the government—through both contemporary corruption and long-standing historical alliances that predate U.S. drug-prohibition policy.
Major Mexican landowners had been growing marijuana and opium poppies and selling them to the U.S. long before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 (the first major federal drug prohibition—prior to that, even the Sears, Roebuck catalogue advertised a syringe and a dose of cocaine for $1.50). Those Mexican landowners were aligned with, or outright members of, the Mexican political establishment. One brief example: Colonel Esteban Cantú Jiménez, who had a personal army of 1,800 soldiers and political control of Baja California Norte, started taking a cut from Mexican opium traders as soon as the Harrison Act was passed. The Mexican army eventually flushed him out in 1920—with a force of 6,000—but Colonel Jiménez secured amnesty with the help of a former military colleague.
The overlap between Mexico's military officers, politicians, and drug barons goes all the way back to the beginning.
Mexico hit the big time as a destination for American vice on October 28, 1919, with the passage of the Volstead Act (alcohol prohibition—in the early 1900s, the U.S. was in a prohibiting mood). In 1919, only 14,130 American tourists formally requested to visit Mexico. The following year, after Prohibition set in, 30 times as many tourists—418,735—ran south of the border to visit its bars, brothels, and casinos. According to Mónica Serrano, a professor of politics at El Colegio de México and a research fellow at Oxford University, American celebrities Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, and Al Jolson first glamorized Tijuana by hanging around its famous racetrack. By this time, Mexico's marijuana- and opium-smuggling economy was booming. American officials, Serrano writes, "contended that drug trafficking was simply unstoppable. The unintended impact of tighter [domestic] drug-control policies on the rise of trafficking was not addressed."
The American refusal to acknowledge that illegal trafficking and its problems are a direct result of prohibitionist drug policy also goes all the way back to the beginning.
Eventually, over the course of years in the drug trade, the major landowners and marijuana and poppy growers of northern Mexico mutated into the so-called Sinaloa cartel. Their longtime political-establishment allies became the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which held power in Mexico for over 70 years. Their relationship, relative to today's narco-chaos, was mostly stable and calm. It is not entirely accidental that the PRI lost its political hegemony at roughly the same time (the late '90s) that the Sinaloa lost its narco-hegemony—nor is it accidental that "higher levels of violence connected with drug trafficking in the 1990s were observed mostly in those states where the political opposition [to the PRI] had gained power," as historian Luis Astorga notes.
As the Medellín and Cali cartels were being busted up in Colombia and the Mexican narco-political scene decentralized, political parties and narco-capitalists began seriously competing with each other—and killing each other in large numbers—for the first time. Meanwhile, other forces, especially the United States, inadvertently pushed cocaine smuggling from the Caribbean into Mexico.
The big problem for the narco-capitalists in Colombia, Corva explains, wasn't so much how to get the drugs north as how to get the cash back south. NAFTA was designed to dramatically increase the flow of goods, services, trucks, people, and money across North America's borders. It was also, in the words of Guilhem Fabre, professor at l'Institut Universitaire de France in Paris, "a true Trojan horse for the narco-traffickers."
The banking deregulation and privatization that came along with NAFTA made it much easier to launder money from the U.S. into Mexican banks, where it could disappear into South America. In an excellent story this June, Michael Smith of Bloomberg News detailed how Wells Fargo, Wachovia, American Express Bank, and Bank of America became funnels for sending narco-money back into Mexico. And (alleged) narco-capitalists like Carlos Cabal Peniche ran entire banks. "You don't have to pay a bank president (or a teller) to look the other way," Corva writes in his dissertation, "when you are already paying their salaries."
"The whole point of NAFTA was to free up the trade of commodities across the border," Corva says. "And that means all of them." Mexican narco-capitalists were now moving cocaine north and money south, the middlemen between Colombian producers and U.S. buyers.
Suddenly Mexico, in the midst of its own political and narco power shifts, found itself the central corridor for cocaine and cash—with much more product and money to fight over.
During the 1980s and '90s in South America, the United States invested money and political pressure in trying to strong-arm the Colombian government into fighting its cocaine capitalists. The U.S.'s position pinched a succession of Colombian leaders, as the country's ongoing civil strife with FARC and the paramilitaries kept domestic politics precarious. The Medellín and Cali organizations began assassinating politicians, cops, journalists, and judges—especially judges who supported the extradition of narco- capitalists for trial, at the insistence of the U.S. Some Colombian political leaders wondered if it was all worth it, and whether they should abandon the U.S.'s lead on drug policy. But defection from the U.S. meant "decertification" from participating in the war on drugs, which would lead to economic sanctions. It was like the exasperated wife of an alcoholic holding the liquor store hostage for her husband's drunkenness—the U.S. was making its own cocaine consumption Colombia's problem.
Ironically, Corva says, Colombia doesn't have a tradition of growing coca leaf. In the early days of cocaine, the plantations were mostly located in Peru and Bolivia, where farmers would make paste (like Diego did) and ship it to Colombia for processing into powder for smuggling through the Caribbean. The U.S. tried to combat this Peru-Bolivia-Colombia triangle with several tactics, including the Air Bridge Denial Program—in which Peruvian and Colombian military aircraft, with the help of the U.S. military and DEA, would identify and shoot down drug planes.
The program was briefly halted in 2001, after the Peruvian military screwed up and shot down a civilian plane full of Baptist missionaries, killing two American citizens. In 2003, George W. Bush approved the reinstatement of the program, though the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said its results were "mixed." Between 2003 and 2005, the Colombian Air Force "located only 48 aircraft out of about 390 suspicious tracks pursued; and the military or police took control of just 14 aircraft—four were already on the ground. Only one resulted in a drug seizure." During that time—again, according to the GAO—the U.S. had devoted $68 million to the program. And for that $68 million, they got one single drug seizure.
Imagine what that $68 million could have done for drug-treatment programs in the United States.
Aerial coca-eradication programs—spraying insecticide—also showed some results but poisoned big swaths of the countryside. "Where they've sprayed, nothing lives there, nothing grows there," Diego said during our conversations about his time on the cocaine farms. "The water, the rivers, they die. It's killing everything and the people who live there."
"From cancer?" I asked.
"They don't even live long enough to get cancer," he said. "They die that same year. It's really, really strong poison."
The results of spraying were uncertain at best, not least because international estimates of how much coca is being grown are, in Corva's words, "complete shit—they're all political." For example: The difference between U.S. and UN estimates of how many hectares of coca are under production in any given country can vary by as much as 50 percent.
Aerial eradication and the Air Bridge Denial Program met with "mixed" success—or abject failure, depending on whom you ask. But other factors conspired to shove cocaine smuggling out of the Caribbean and into Mexico: successful DEA and Coast Guard campaigns to interdict drugs in the Caribbean, the breakup of the Medellín and Cali cartels in Colombia (with help from the CIA and the U.S. military's elite and secretive Delta Force), and the subsequent fracturing of the cocaine-production networks in South America. The big cartels specialized in cocaine-hydrochloride production and smuggling. Once they had been broken, they left behind small producers who could make powder, but nobody who had the resources to pull off major international smuggling operations besides the narcos in Mexico.
Then there was NAFTA. Just as the deck was being reshuffled for narcos and politicos and Mexico and Colombia, the North American Free Trade Agreement showed up and suddenly made everything so much easier.

The North American Free Trafficking Agreement
Ulysses S. Grant was a famous cocaine addict. He took daily doses to kill the pain of his throat cancer so he could complete his Personal Memoirs—Mark Twain's new-at-the-time publishing company expected the memoirs to be best sellers. Twain desperately wanted Grant to finish, and some have speculated that he urged Grant to take cocaine so he could work through his pain. (In one of Twain's memoirs, he writes of "a longing" to go to the Amazon and "open up a trade in coca with all the world"—he wanted to be the first cocaine baron to the United States, but ran out of money in New Orleans before he could make the trip south.)
One hundred and ten years later, three men sat down to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement: Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, United States president George H. W. Bush (it wouldn't go into effect until Bill Clinton was in office), and Mexican president Carlos Salinas (whose brother would later be accused of being heavily involved in narco-capitalism and convicted of orchestrating a hit against their brother-in-law).
A few policymakers—including Ross Perot and Phil Jordan, one of the DEA's experts on Mexico—sounded the alarm about how much NAFTA was going to help the drug trade. But the Clinton administration, which struggled with organized labor, business, and nearly everybody else over NAFTA, gave Jordan a gag order when it came to how free trade might help the narcos. "We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes," Jordan said in an interview with ABC News in 1997. "For the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven."
Peniche, one of the (alleged) narco- capitalists who started buying up banks after NAFTA to make laundering easier, is another example (like old Colonel Esteban Cantú Jiménez) of how narcos and South American governments are fully integrated. Peniche contributed tens of millions to the PRI party, then had to flee Mexico after the government seized his Union Bank and interest in the Del Monte Produce chain.
After NAFTA, the Mexican narcos controlled both ends of the trade, allowing them to impose steep taxes on the Colombians. (The chaos and violence in Mexico does not make smuggling any cheaper.) Cutting cocaine with levamisole, which behaves like cocaine (its color, the way it responds to a bleach test), could be a strategy from Colombian producers to recover the profits they've lost to Mexican smugglers. It's possible that the Mexican narcos think they're smuggling pure product and have no idea (or don't care) that levamisole even exists.
More importantly, NAFTA revealed the fundamental contradiction of the drug war: The goal of NAFTA (and the U.S. banking deregulation that came with it) was to free the market and minimize state control. The goal of the drug war is to restrict the market and maximize state control. The result? Over 30,000 murdered in four years in Mexico alone, with all the grief and suffering that follows for each of those 30,000 families.
"The history of the last 20 years of the cocaine and heroin trade shows how much mobility there is in cultivation and trafficking," Professor Reuter told Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (and former chief of police in Seattle), earlier this year in front of a subcommittee of the House of Representatives. "What we do has a predictable effect. When we pushed down on trafficking in Florida, that led to increases in Mexico. The evidence is striking that all we are doing is moving the trade."
While Kerlikowske worked in Seattle, he was moderately progressive on drug issues—but as the nation's drug czar, he is legally bound (by the Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act of 1998) to "oppose any attempt to legalize." Even if the nation's drug czar believes that prohibition has been a failure—and it has—it's against the law for him to say so.
This state of affairs cannot last. It is fundamentally immoral—if you consider the protection and betterment of human life a moral good. U.S. drug policy has maximized the murder rate in Latin America while defaulting on the problem of addiction and treatment, opting instead for incarceration, in the United States.
By embracing a contradiction, we have created the worst of both worlds. http://www.thestranger.com/images/rec_star.gif


source: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine-part-ii/Content?oid=5393442

[Sasha]

i opend an special thread to deal with the farc bit:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/farc-cocain-trade-t144342/index.html

so not to derail this one wich should be primarly about tainted cocain

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

To think this state of affairs is being perpetuated by moralistic ideology. Disgusting.

[Sasha]

part 4 (part 3 was about the use of the levimosole test kit and only relevant for seatle residents, you can find it here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine-part-iii-how-to-use-the-levamisole-test-kit/Content?oid=5465916)

Corruption, Violence, and Doom

The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine, Part IV: Drug Prohibition, Human Suffering, and How One Act of Congress 100 Years Ago Set Us on a Global Road to Hell by Brendan Kiley (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=1124)
http://www.thestranger.com/binary/5eaf/feature-570.jpg AFP/Getty Images
NARCO KINGPIN ARTURO BELTRÁN LEYVA Killed in a two-hour gun battle at his apartment complex on December 16, 2009, while other residents cowered in the gym.

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I'm sitting on a couch with a Seattle drug dealer while he freebases heroin. Let's call him Jaybird. His apartment is mildly dingy but homey, in a basement romper room kind of way. Lighters, empty plastic bags, marijuana crumbs, pieces of metal jewelry (rings, earrings), and guitar picks are scattered across every available surface. Jaybird used to work in customer service, but has been a full-time drug dealer for several years—mostly cocaine and a little heroin for friends, though he can get you whatever you like. (I ask if that includes opium, and he says: "Oh, man. I wish I'd known. A friend of mine came through town with some opium just last week.") The business hasn't made him rich; it hasn't even made him not-poor.
He's worried that this article (the fourth and final piece in a Stranger series on the cocaine trade and a dangerous cutting agent called levamisole that has newly appeared in the worldwide cocaine supply) will make him even poorer. "Can you stop writing about cocaine for a while?" he has asked on multiple occasions. His regular customers began fretting about whether the cocaine he was selling them contained levamisole after the first piece was published, and some of his occasional customers stopped calling.


"You've got to stop writing these articles," he pleaded one time when we happened to run into each other on the street. "I'm not into murder, man, but you're messing up business and some people are upset—I don't want to see you get hurt."
Jaybird had forgotten I was coming over to his apartment in Mountlake Terrace and is just walking out the door when I arrive, saying he has something "important" to do. He leaves me sitting on his couch for 20 minutes while a dark-colored sedan picks him up, takes him somewhere, and brings him back. He bursts through the door, plops down on the couch, and pulls a small black baggie of heroin from a hiding place on his body (I won't say where, but I'll say I was surprised).
He smoothes out a piece of aluminum foil. He's holding a small glass stem about the size of a pen in his mouth. He sprinkles a little powder from the baggie onto the foil, heats it from below with a lighter, and sucks up the rising tendrils of smoke through the stem. The heroin bubbles and caramelizes. It smells like it's been cut with sugar.
We've talked about legalizing marijuana (he's pro), and I ask him, as he finishes his hit, whether he thinks all drugs should be legalized.
His eyebrows shoot up and he shakes his head. He's holding his breath.
"Why not?"
"Because people," he says, exhaling a huge plume of heroin smoke, "are fucking irresponsible."
A few nights later, I'm standing on a deck with a successful downtown businessman who sniffs cocaine several nights a week. (Some identifying details about the drug dealer and the businessman have been changed.) He used to be a daily user, but he's pulled back a bit. Only a few friends know about his habit, and some of his closest, longest-term friends have no idea. He's been following my series in The Stranger, but he says the potential dangers of levamisole (it can trigger an immune-system crash) haven't markedly slowed down his personal use. He doesn't know anybody who's gotten sick from tainted cocaine.
Does he, a serious but functional cocaine user, think his drug of choice should be legalized and regulated—at least so he wouldn't have to worry about whether his supply might make him sick?
"God no," he says, and takes a drag off his cigarette. "Cocaine fucks people up—plus, I'm a parent. When my kids become teenagers, I don't want them doing coke. It's convenient to have the law on your side when you're a parent."
I ask if he seriously thinks drug prohibition is going to keep his kids from using cocaine. After all, it hasn't stopped him.
"I don't know," he says and sighs. "I don't know. If I weren't a parent, it might be different—but you talk about legalizing drugs, and emotionally I get all eeeeeeeeee!"
A few days later, I'm talking to a retired Coast Guard captain who spent much of the 1980s working in the Gulf of Mexico busting drug smugglers. The Coast Guard, which had previously focused heavily on search-and- rescue and fisheries patrols, stumbled into the drug interdiction business by accident. "We'd go out to rescue someone," the captain says, "and there would be all this pot on board." On March 8, 1973, the Coast Guard cutter Dauntless, ported in Miami, found over a ton of marijuana on an American sailboat called The Big L. That was the beginning of the big time.
"People were generally ho-hum about search and rescue," he says. "Not that search and rescue was a ho-hum thing—it could be very dramatic—but if you brought in a big boatload of pot, it was a big news story." More importantly, it attracted serious money from the federal government, which was cranking up the drug war. "Commanders of Coast Guard vessels said to themselves, 'With drug busts, we're getting more mission recognition and more resources—and this is kind of fun!'"
He was a dedicated soldier in the drug war. "We'd get worked up about 'damn pot-smoking hippies trying to poison our schools' and all that," he says. "It was during the first Bush administration, and we just got pounded with that message." But then he found himself having to let go of crew members he liked and wanted to keep working with because they'd tested positive for marijuana. "I'd have good crew members, good sailors—good citizens who caused far fewer problems than people who abused alcohol—who, through drug testing, got caught in the net. And you begin to think, 'Well, this doesn't fit the stereotype we're hearing.' But then we'd come home from sea and watch Miami Vice and it would glamorize what we were doing, so it all fed into itself."
As his career went on, the captain—who happens to be my father, Ned Kiley, who had a 30-year Coast Guard career and retired as an O-6, the equivalent of a colonel in the army—started having quiet doubts about the ballooning bureaucracy around the drug-war industry, and the contractors and lobbyists encouraging the government to waste huge amounts of money on boats and airplanes and radar surveillance systems that weren't very useful. "Customs saw all this money and all these toys the Coast Guard was getting and wanted some, too—but they couldn't even take care of their boats. They were always broken. It was just bureaucracy run amok."
Then there were the people he was arresting at sea. "We'd get some actual bad guys," he says, most of them Americans. "Real low-life Gulf Coast types who were probably causing problems in other areas. But mostly you'd just get poor fishermen, poor Colombians, poor Hondurans. And you'd get some middle-class types who were just trying to pull some shit—we caught some poor couple's sailboat with 200 pounds of marijuana, which was a fairly small amount compared to what we were seeing."
On the morning of our conversation, he had been discussing with my mother a story in the New York Times about a major jailbreak by over 140 prisoners in Mexico (most of them accused of narco crimes—the prison director disappeared after the escape): "Your mother said, 'Oh, they should just legalize marijuana—all the cost and all the problems it causes are just way out of line.' And I agree with her! If two old farts like us—two conservative old farts—think we should legalize, then let's just get on with it!" (For the record, my parents are pro-legalization but not pro-drug. They've never taken an illicit drug in their lives and became supremely angry when I was in high school and they figured out that I was smoking pot with my friends.)
"Should the United States end prohibition on all drugs?" I ask.
"That's a little less clear," he says. "How would you do it? What would it look like? Maybe it would work—but I definitely think we should focus on treatment for drug addicts instead of punitive incarceration."
Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper had an even more dramatic change of heart about drug policy. Stamper remembers himself in his early career, a San Diego beat cop in the 1960s, as "a gleeful drug warrior making drug arrests, many of them for small possession of marijuana. I thought I was doing God's work." He had what he calls his "personal epiphany" in 1967, when he busted into a house in an affluent suburb to arrest a 19-year-old.
"I gained entrance in a manner that would be rejected today: 'knock and notice.' I tapped lightly on the door and whispered 'San Diego police,' then kicked his door in—sent it flying—and in the foot race to the bathroom, I beat him just before he made the second flush." Stamper scooped up some stems and seeds from the toilet and arrested the boy, who, on the ride to the jail, casually asked if they could stop at a store for some chips. The police radio was crackling in the background with far more serious crimes: robbery, car prowl, domestic violence. This was Stamper's road-to-Damascus moment. "I sorted through my mental inventory of what I was doing and thought: 'My God. This is just some 19-year-old kid who was in his parents' home—I've done damage to the house and damage to the Fourth Amendment, and this arrest will be a disservice to him for the rest of his life.' Meanwhile, I could've spent my time dealing with some kind of serious predatory crime."
Stamper quietly chewed over these thoughts until the early 1990s, when he began to speak out to business and chamber of commerce types. He began arguing that we should legalize all drugs. "The more sinister they are, the greater the justification for regulation instead of prohibition," he says. "A regulatory model would give the government, imperfect as it is, the first opportunity since the beginning of the last century to exercise some control over the drug trade. In recent years, we have reduced tobacco consumption by roughly half without a shot being fired. But in trying to reduce the black market for cocaine and heroin, we get guns, torture, beheadings, people being incinerated..."
In short, these two former drug warriors, who spent their careers trying to enforce prohibition, think we should legalize part of or all of the drug trade. But the heroin-smoking dealer and the coke-snorting professional lean toward prohibition.
What the fuck?
Tobacco use was responsible for 435,000 deaths in the United States in 2000, according to a 2004 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association. The same year, all illegal drug use was responsible—directly and indirectly—for 17,000 deaths. When I started working on this series, I thought, like most moderate liberals: Yes, legalize pot, that's obvious. But heroin and cocaine and meth and the rest—aren't those drugs kind of dangerous?
The more hours I spent in the library, in research laboratories, in alleyways, and on couches interviewing addicts, dealers, policymakers, law enforcement officials, lawyers, doctors, and academics, the more I came to agree with Stamper—as well as former Mexican president Vicente Fox, former UK drug czar Bob Ainsworth, Spain's former (and, to date, longest-serving) prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, and members of Mexico's Social Democratic Party, who have been attacked by anonymous gunmen and Molotov cocktails after campaigning for legalization.
The mystery of why a cattle-deworming drug called levamisole is being cut into the world's cocaine supply is just a footnote in the drug war's century-long history of corruption, violence, addiction, and doom.
We will always have drug users, drug abusers, and drug producers—just like we'll always have casual drinkers, alcoholics, and distilleries. We cannot change that. What we can change is the level of violence and cruelty associated with the drug trade by elevating it to the legal market, where business disputes are settled with the rule of law instead of with machine guns and chain saws.
The only way out is to legalize—and regulate—everything. Pot, heroin, cocaine, meth: everything.

30,196 Dead (and Counting) in Mexico
It is hard to know how many people around the world have gotten sick and/or died due to levamisole poisoning. U.S. law enforcement agencies estimate that 75 percent of the cocaine supply is being cut with levamisole, but the Centers for Disease Control stopped keeping track of levamisole-related hospitalizations and deaths in April. Levamisole test kits conceived by Nathan Messer at Dance- Safe, created by Dr. Mike Clark at Harborview, and distributed by The Stranger in late 2010—with help from DanceSafe and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance—show the Seattle cocaine supply contamination at closer to 85 percent. (Each test kit contained an anonymous survey with questions about rock and powder cocaine purchases throughout the Seattle area. So far, respondents have written in from Bremerton to Green Lake to the Central District—and one from Toronto.)
The human toll in Colombia, where most U.S.-bound cocaine is manufactured, and in Mexico, where the cocaine travels on its way to the U.S., is abundantly clear. Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported a conservative estimate of 30,196 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico alone since 2007, when Mexican president Felipe Calderón and George W. Bush, with the help of the U.S. Congress, agreed to crank up the drug war with the Mérida Initiative. Thirty thousand one hundred ninety-six deaths is the equivalent of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers 10.9 times. Or an 11-night, sold-out run at Carnegie Hall in which every seat is stuffed with a corpse.
A few of those deaths:
October 19, 2009: Police find the body of Perla Pérez Tagle, a young human rights worker, at an intersection in Ciudad Juárez (pop. 1.4 million). Her bound and gagged body shows signs of torture and is covered by a blue plaid blanket. Her head is nearby, in a red plastic bag.
December 16, 2009: In the wealthy tourist destination of Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring (pop. 350,000), narco kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva is killed in a two-hour gun battle at his apartment complex while residents cowered in the gym. In the following months, the city is taken over by narcos: "Bodies have been hung from overpasses, dumped outside police headquarters, or left on busy streets with their faces skinned," according to the Associated Press.
October 25, 2010: Police find the body of a plump old woman near her home in Nuevo Laredo (pop. 348,387). Her severed head, covered with frizzy gray hair, is tucked between her legs and one of her severed fingers is stuck into her mouth. A handwritten sign propped up by her body declares: "A esta pinche vieja la matamos por 'relaje'... esto les va a pasar a todos los pinches 'relajes.'" ("We killed this fucking old woman for snitching... this will happen to all the fucking snitches.") The message is signed in blood with a "Z" for Los Zetas—a squad of paramilitary narcos with one of the nastiest reputations in the drug war. The leaders of Los Zetas were originally trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, to fight the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Later they were deployed against the narcos in Tamaulipas, but decided that they'd get a better deal working for the narcos than trying to stop them.
November 15, 2010: The entire population of Ciudad Mier (pop. 5,423) is evacuated after war breaks out between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas' former narco employers. The breaking point for many families comes when—after months of firefights, bodies in the streets, and torched businesses—a well-known local man is chopped into pieces and hung from a tree in the town square.
December 3, 2010: The Mexican army arrests Edgar Jimenez Lugo, a 14-year-old assassin nicknamed "El Ponchis" who has confessed to four murders. El Ponchis, a U.S. citizen, becomes a symbol of narco ruthlessness after BlogdelNarco.com (http://blogdelnarco.com/) releases home videos of the boy and some friends torturing a prisoner, gagged and suspended from the ceiling, while they laugh and take pictures on their cell phones. On one YouTube video, a boy believed to be El Ponchis answers a question by saying: "When we don't find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver." A prison director in Ciudad Juárez tells a reporter from Time magazine that teenage assassins are a new trend for the narcos, since "these kids are cheap, bloodthirsty, and they know the government can't punish them much."
December 27, 2010: The Press Emblem Campaign, based in Geneva, reports that 14 Mexican journalists have been murdered in the course of their work this year, making the drug war a more dangerous beat than reporting on Iraq, where eight journalists were killed in 2010. And on this date, two days after Christmas, six family members age 16 to 34 are found floating in the crater of an abandoned mine in the small town of Urique (pop. 984).
December 29, 2010: Around midnight, several cars pull up near a club in Acapulco (pop. 718,000). Men step out of the cars, fire shots into the club, and festoon its entrance with over 40 severed body parts, including chopped-up torsos, severed hands holding severed genitals, and flayed heads. The men drape two skinned faces over stanchions in front of the club, where they hang like rubber Halloween masks.
Some suggest that Mexico's drug-war dead are solely casualties of the cocaine and opium trades. That is plainly false: In the past two months, U.S. agents have found underground storehouses holding tens of tons of pot connected to tunnels under the United States/Mexico border. And in a Reuters story on December 14, unnamed U.S. agents claim to have found acres of greenhouses where narcos were growing high-quality, top- dollar "B.C. bud" instead of the long-derided "Mexican ditch weed." The marijuana trade, as innocent as it looks when you're buying a bag of grass off of a hippie, has blood in its wallet, too.
Those 30,000-plus dead present a major problem for the government of Mexico, which seems helpless to do much about it. The narco chaos could spark another revolution. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox has argued that the drug war has deeply corrupted Mexican police and military, as well as the rule of law. In 2010, at least two cities—in addition to the abandoned Ciudad Mier, which no longer has a city government—fired their police forces. The citizens of Ascension in the state of Chihuahua and Tepoztlán in the state of Morelos decided that, owing to corruption, they would be better off enforcing the law themselves. And in early December, citizens of Apatzingan in the state of Michoacan mounted a demonstration against the government and for the narcos. An Associated Press photograph from the protest flew around blogs and newspapers—that of a grave-faced little girl with pigtails and bangs holding up a handwritten sign that said: "La Familia Michoacana somos mas que un estado." ("La Familia Michoacana [a narco cartel]: We are bigger than/better than a state.")
In Mexico, thanks to the U.S.-funded drug war, the narcos have achieved in a few years what Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas could only dream about: In towns large and small, north and south, they have mounted a strong, palpable challenge to the authority of the Mexican federal government.

A Racist History
The narcos are not a separate entity from the government in the way that, in the U.S., the Bloods or the Crips or Capone's gangsters are separate from the government. In Mexico, the narcos are fused with the government—the police, the military, the senators. They share the same DNA.
This fusion began, perhaps, with Colonel Esteban Cantú Jiménez, a military caudillo who ruled Baja California Norte in the early 20th century with political connections and a private army of 1,800. Colonel Jiménez immediately saw the profit possibilities of the U.S.'s Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which began the U.S. prohibition of opiates and cocaine. He took a cut of the illegal opium trade until he was smacked down by the Mexican government in 1920—but then secured amnesty via a former military colleague.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act came about because, around 1900, American newspapers, physicians, and politicians began to promote the idea that a white powder was a threat to white supremacy.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article announcing, "Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice—that of 'cocaine sniffing' or the 'coke habit.'" Newspapers picked up the story and amplified it, claiming that cocaine turned black men into rapists of white women, as well as expert marksmen. (See "Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are a New Southern Menace" from the February 8, 1914 issue of the New York Times.) A 1910 federal report stated that "Southern sheriffs believed cocaine even rendered blacks impervious to .32-cal. bullets (as a result many police departments switched to .38-cal)."
Cocaine plus black people equaled a white supremacist's nightmare.
Dr. Hamilton Wright, Theodore Roosevelt's national opium commissioner, railed against opium use with similarly racist arguments. During the 1909 International Opium Commission in Shanghai, he said: "One of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities." (Interestingly, the physician and researcher Stephen R. Kandall has concluded that the majority of early opium addicts in the U.S. were women—who had been prescribed opiates by their doctors for "female problems.")
Riding the wave of racist drug hysteria, five-time congressman Francis Burton Harrison—a lawyer, member of the Democratic Party, and son of a mathematician from New Orleans named Burton Harrison who served as the private secretary to Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War—proposed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. It was voted into law on December 17, 1914, shortly after Harrison had resigned from Congress to serve as the governor-general of the Philippines.
In name, the Harrison Act (by sheer accident, I happen to be writing this paragraph on the 96th anniversary of its passage) purported to tax and regulate the sale of opiates and coca products. In reality, it was a way for the federal government to get a stranglehold on the U.S. drug trade. (That's why people know it as the Harrison Narcotics Act and not the Harrison Tax Act.) The Act went so far as to prohibit doctors from prescribing maintenance doses to opiate addicts. That provision was challenged and changed in the 1925 Supreme Court case Linder v. United States, in which the court decided that the federal government could not directly control medical practice—which is why we have methadone treatment programs today.
During the debate, Representative Thomas Upton Sisson (D-Mississippi) most bluntly articulated the purpose of the Harrison Act: "The purpose of this bill—and we are all in sympathy with it—is to prevent the use of opium in the United States, destructive as it is to human happiness and human life."
The destruction to "human happiness and human life" by pre–Harrison Act opium and coca use has been dwarfed—by orders of magnitude—by the destructiveness of the post–Harrison Act drug trade.
The Harrison Narcotics Act paved a global road to hell. Not just for the United States (from kids slinging drugs in the Chicago projects to overdosed celebrities in Los Angeles), but for Afghanistan, where the Taliban has propped itself up on the opium and heroin trade; for Myanmar, where an abusive military dictatorship funds itself by being the second-largest source of opium poppies and a new powerhouse of meth and ketamine production; for Laos, where geography and new highways make the country an ideal smuggling nexus for everything and the locals have developed a recent fondness for meth; for the favelas of Brazil; for Morocco, where I have personally seen hillsides covered in marijuana plants "protected" by bored-looking teenagers toting around AK-47s; for the Dominican Republic, which has become a major transit point for cocaine and heroin bound for the U.S. via Puerto Rico; for Colombia, where cocaine production has paid for a brutal 40-year war between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, the government, and narcos (the war has displaced 3.3 million people from their homes, or 7.2 percent of the country's population); for Ghana and Mali and other West African transshipment points for European-bound cocaine; and for pretty much every other country on the planet.
Observers such as Dominic Corva, a geographer at the University of Washington who has done extensive research on the cocaine trade, predict that as the Colombian and Mexican meat grinders become more violent, more troublesome, and less profitable, the cocaine production and smuggling market will move from Latin America to Africa.
According to a New York Times story from 2000, the Irkutsk region of Siberia went from 200 cases of HIV to at least 5,000 in a single year after heroin was introduced but drug-safety education was not. And several articles, from a 1985 Wall Street Journal story to a 2008 story in the Dartmouth College student paper, have described indoor marijuana horticulture at research stations in Antarctica.
Despite prohibition's best efforts, drugs are everywhere.

The Size of the Drug Trade
Estimates about the size of the drug trade and its costs are obviously politicized and highly unreliable—Colombian guerrillas have estimated the world drug trade to be 20 to 30 percent of the world economy, and published estimates from members of the Orejuela family (formerly of the Colombian Cali Cartel) claim that drug trafficking involves 12 percent of the U.S. labor force. But it would be in their interest to overestimate their importance.
Still, the Associated Press recently put the cost of the drug war at $1 trillion over the past 40 years and coaxed Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama's drug czar, into admitting that "in the grand scheme" the drug war "has not been successful. Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." In an October editorial for CNN, Evan Wood, founder of the International Centre for Science and Drug Policy, put the cost of the U.S. drug war at $2.5 trillion—more than twice the Associated Press estimate—and cited Nobel Prize–winning conservative economist Milton Friedman: "There are some general features of a socialist enterprise, whether it's the post office, schools, or the war on drugs. The enterprise is inefficient, expensive, very advantageous to a small group of people, and harmful to a lot of people."
No matter how you play with the numbers, one thing is clear—the drug trade is making big money for the criminal side. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth the risk (life, limb, loved ones, lifetime imprisonment). And it's been lucrative for law enforcement, too: from Colonel Jiménez in the 1910s on down to contemporary Mexican officials and their relatives (the brother of Carlos Salinas, president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994, was convicted of arranging a hit against their brother-in-law) to the military-industrial business lobbyists who convince the Coast Guard and Customs to buy expensive enforcement toys.
"How much economic benefit has the drug war produced for the private sector?" asks Dominic Corva, the University of Washington geographer. "It's not just profits, it's jobs—sales jobs, accounting jobs, transportation jobs, agricultural jobs, and so forth. Obviously, no one has any remotely reliable estimate, but I bet it would dwarf the financial costs—thus making it a hell of a taxpayer- subsidized industry, a transfer of public funds to private."
Who pays for all of this? We do. Not just drug users who subsidize the crime side, but workaday U.S. taxpayers who subsidize the law enforcement side. Despite the billions of dollars we've spent trying to make them disappear, American drug users are not disappearing.
Plus, there are the human costs to U.S. families disrupted by drug incarcerations, or innocents slaughtered not by narcos in Mexico or Colombia but by law enforcement officials in the United States.
Take the story of Esequiel Hernandez Jr., an 18-year-old goatherd living in Texas, a mile from the border. On May 20, 1997, he was tending his family's goats and carrying a .22-caliber, pre-WWI rifle that he routinely had with him to defend the goats against rattlesnakes and wild dogs, according to his family. The U.S. Marines on drug patrol were carrying M-16s. Dressed in ghillie suits (a kind of shaggy camouflage that makes the wearer look like a Sasquatch), the marines spotted Hernandez watering the family goats and stalked him for 20 minutes before the boy, according to the marines, fired a single shot. It's unclear whether he was shooting at a tin can or at the marines—or whether he was even aware he was being watched. Maybe he thought the four creatures in ghillie suits were hairy monsters. Whatever happened, Hernandez was shot and the U.S. government paid his family $1.9 million to settle a wrongful death claim. No evidence has ever been presented that Hernandez was involved in the drug trade, and the marine who shot Hernandez was never charged. He was the first American civilian to be killed by the American military since the Kent State massacre.
Or take Kathryn Johnston, the 88-year-old Atlanta woman who, when she saw men breaking into her house of 17 years, fired a shot into the ceiling. Unbeknownst to her, the men were undercover narcotics agents, who fired 39 shots back, killing her. Once the agents realized she was innocent—they had falsely claimed to have purchased cocaine at her house in order to get a no-knock warrant—they planted marijuana in her basement, framing the dead woman. Eventually, the agents' stories came to pieces. In 2009, three years after killing Johnston, three officers were sentenced for manslaughter. It came out at the trials that other Atlanta police officers have used similar tactics.

What Most Pro-Legalization Arguments Are Missing
For too long, the critique of drug prohibition has been framed selfishly—it's all about us and our liberty and our right to seek pleasure however we see fit. A passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is a favorite in pro-legalization editorials published everywhere from the Economist to High Times:

The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part that merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. But let's set aside that abstract selfish stuff for a second. Put aside the facts about domestic costs for law enforcement. Put aside the fact that the U.S. has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, that the number of people in jail on drug charges has increased twelvefold since 1980, that (in 2000) 22 percent of U.S. prisoners were in for drug charges (according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, each prisoner costs roughly $22,600 per year).
Also put aside the fact that every state in the union is in a major budget crisis, many of which could be solved altogether by legalizing, regulating, and taxing the drug market so states like Washington wouldn't have to ax health care for children and job programs for adults with developmental disabilities. (Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron estimates that legalization, through a combination of law enforcement savings and tax income, would put $76.8 billion per year into the U.S. economy.)
Let's think about the rest of the world for a moment.
One law, passed in 1914 and designed to save lives, has resulted in uncountable deaths: from the deaths that result from the dangers of unregulated product (which results in overdoses and dangerous cutting agents like levamisole and costs taxpayers every time an uninsured person winds up in the emergency room) to the extraordinary violence of the extralegal market (where people settle disputes with machetes and bullets instead of lawsuits).
The argument that prohibition is a profound and catastrophic failure has already been made by intelligent people across the political spectrum: the middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution (in 2008), economist Miron (for the past 15 years), even John D. Rockefeller Jr., a lifelong teetotaler who donated between $350,000 and $700,000 to the temperance movement (that's between $3.8 million and $7.7 million in 2010 dollars). After years of watching the alcohol prohibition laws, he had to admit that they simply didn't work. In a letter printed on the front page of the New York Times in 1932, he wrote:

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before. In 2008, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution, sponsored by Representatives Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Howard Coble (R-NC), celebrating the 75th anniversary of repeal. Oddly, the language in the resolution doubles as an excellent argument for ending all prohibitions. The resolution pointed out that

passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the United States, resulted in a dramatic increase in illegal activity, including unsafe black market alcohol production, organized crime, and noncompliance with alcohol laws. Dramatic increase in illegal activity? Check. (Those 30,000-plus deaths in Mexico since 2007.) Unsafe black market? Check. (Levamisole is one tiny example of how prohibition laws make drugs more dangerous.) Organized crime? Check. (Drug gangs in Mexico are holding entire cities, states, and law enforcement agencies hostage—see also the Taliban, the Bloods, the Crips, Latin Kings, and the Salvadorian gang MS13, which is currently helping run the cocaine trade to Seattle and has distinguished itself with cruel machete murders and by calling out hits on U.S. federal agents.) Noncompliance with the law at every level? Obviously.
Why does the logic of that 2008 resolution apply to alcohol but not to other drugs? I call Congressman Coble to ask him and I get through to his press liaison, Ed McDonald. "It's ironic you should call with that question today," he says. "Right now, I'm in North Carolina in a beautiful vineyard owned by Richard Childress, the NASCAR driver. You know Richard Childress?"
Not really.
"Anyway, we're having a party for the staff: There are these beautiful buildings, acres of beautiful vineyards..."
He says he'll ask the congressman—who is feeling under the weather—my question and get back to me the next day.
"You know," McDonald says the next day, "I asked him, and he said pretty much what I said yesterday—that as a society we perceive alcohol to have a value that we don't apply to hard drugs. He sees a value that alcohol provides to society that he doesn't see provided by narcotics."
So it's about social perception? Nothing empirical? Just popular cultural notions?
"Yes, that's right."
So there you have it, straight from Representative Coble, who cosponsored the resolution to celebrate repeal and its attendant increase in product safety and decreases in violence and organized crime—the difference between prohibition of alcohol and prohibition of other drugs isn't about data and rational argument. When will American policymakers, and the American public, start to take these questions seriously—based on facts, research, and real stories, instead of the race-baiting bogeymen and puritan fictions of a century ago?
The impetus for this series was to investigate—with the assistance of law enforcement agencies, doctors, academics, policymakers, and drug dealers—why a dangerous chemical called levamisole is being cut into the world's cocaine supply. We have failed to figure it out. Some lab techs and high-level research-and-development narco scientists probably know, but they haven't been forthcoming.
Nevertheless, we have discovered something—the mystery of the tainted cocaine is a just a speck, a tenpenny nail holding down a single shingle on the giant, monstrous mansion of the drug war. When will we get serious about tearing down this house of horrors?
That's the real mystery. http://www.thestranger.com/images/rec_star.gif
This article has been updated since its original publication.



source: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine-part-iv/Content?oid=6163374

[Sasha]

part 4 (part 3 was about the use of the levimosole test kit and only relevant for seatle residents, you can find it here: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine-part-iii-how-to-use-the-levamisole-test-kit/Content?oid=5465916)

Corruption, Violence, and Doom

The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine, Part IV: Drug Prohibition, Human Suffering, and How One Act of Congress 100 Years Ago Set Us on a Global Road to Hell

by Brendan Kiley (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Author?oid=1124)
http://www.thestranger.com/binary/5eaf/feature-570.jpg AFP/Getty Images

NARCO KINGPIN ARTURO BELTRÁN LEYVA Killed in a two-hour gun battle at his apartment complex on December 16, 2009, while other residents cowered in the gym.


I'm sitting on a couch with a Seattle drug dealer while he freebases heroin. Let's call him Jaybird. His apartment is mildly dingy but homey, in a basement romper room kind of way. Lighters, empty plastic bags, marijuana crumbs, pieces of metal jewelry (rings, earrings), and guitar picks are scattered across every available surface. Jaybird used to work in customer service, but has been a full-time drug dealer for several years—mostly cocaine and a little heroin for friends, though he can get you whatever you like. (I ask if that includes opium, and he says: "Oh, man. I wish I'd known. A friend of mine came through town with some opium just last week.") The business hasn't made him rich; it hasn't even made him not-poor.
He's worried that this article (the fourth and final piece in a Stranger series on the cocaine trade and a dangerous cutting agent called levamisole that has newly appeared in the worldwide cocaine supply) will make him even poorer. "Can you stop writing about cocaine for a while?" he has asked on multiple occasions. His regular customers began fretting about whether the cocaine he was selling them contained levamisole after the first piece was published, and some of his occasional customers stopped calling.


"You've got to stop writing these articles," he pleaded one time when we happened to run into each other on the street. "I'm not into murder, man, but you're messing up business and some people are upset—I don't want to see you get hurt."
Jaybird had forgotten I was coming over to his apartment in Mountlake Terrace and is just walking out the door when I arrive, saying he has something "important" to do. He leaves me sitting on his couch for 20 minutes while a dark-colored sedan picks him up, takes him somewhere, and brings him back. He bursts through the door, plops down on the couch, and pulls a small black baggie of heroin from a hiding place on his body (I won't say where, but I'll say I was surprised).
He smoothes out a piece of aluminum foil. He's holding a small glass stem about the size of a pen in his mouth. He sprinkles a little powder from the baggie onto the foil, heats it from below with a lighter, and sucks up the rising tendrils of smoke through the stem. The heroin bubbles and caramelizes. It smells like it's been cut with sugar.
We've talked about legalizing marijuana (he's pro), and I ask him, as he finishes his hit, whether he thinks all drugs should be legalized.
His eyebrows shoot up and he shakes his head. He's holding his breath.
"Why not?"
"Because people," he says, exhaling a huge plume of heroin smoke, "are fucking irresponsible."
A few nights later, I'm standing on a deck with a successful downtown businessman who sniffs cocaine several nights a week. (Some identifying details about the drug dealer and the businessman have been changed.) He used to be a daily user, but he's pulled back a bit. Only a few friends know about his habit, and some of his closest, longest-term friends have no idea. He's been following my series in The Stranger, but he says the potential dangers of levamisole (it can trigger an immune-system crash) haven't markedly slowed down his personal use. He doesn't know anybody who's gotten sick from tainted cocaine.
Does he, a serious but functional cocaine user, think his drug of choice should be legalized and regulated—at least so he wouldn't have to worry about whether his supply might make him sick?
"God no," he says, and takes a drag off his cigarette. "Cocaine fucks people up—plus, I'm a parent. When my kids become teenagers, I don't want them doing coke. It's convenient to have the law on your side when you're a parent."
I ask if he seriously thinks drug prohibition is going to keep his kids from using cocaine. After all, it hasn't stopped him.
"I don't know," he says and sighs. "I don't know. If I weren't a parent, it might be different—but you talk about legalizing drugs, and emotionally I get all eeeeeeeeee!"
A few days later, I'm talking to a retired Coast Guard captain who spent much of the 1980s working in the Gulf of Mexico busting drug smugglers. The Coast Guard, which had previously focused heavily on search-and- rescue and fisheries patrols, stumbled into the drug interdiction business by accident. "We'd go out to rescue someone," the captain says, "and there would be all this pot on board." On March 8, 1973, the Coast Guard cutter Dauntless, ported in Miami, found over a ton of marijuana on an American sailboat called The Big L. That was the beginning of the big time.
"People were generally ho-hum about search and rescue," he says. "Not that search and rescue was a ho-hum thing—it could be very dramatic—but if you brought in a big boatload of pot, it was a big news story." More importantly, it attracted serious money from the federal government, which was cranking up the drug war. "Commanders of Coast Guard vessels said to themselves, 'With drug busts, we're getting more mission recognition and more resources—and this is kind of fun!'"
He was a dedicated soldier in the drug war. "We'd get worked up about 'damn pot-smoking hippies trying to poison our schools' and all that," he says. "It was during the first Bush administration, and we just got pounded with that message." But then he found himself having to let go of crew members he liked and wanted to keep working with because they'd tested positive for marijuana. "I'd have good crew members, good sailors—good citizens who caused far fewer problems than people who abused alcohol—who, through drug testing, got caught in the net. And you begin to think, 'Well, this doesn't fit the stereotype we're hearing.' But then we'd come home from sea and watch Miami Vice and it would glamorize what we were doing, so it all fed into itself."
As his career went on, the captain—who happens to be my father, Ned Kiley, who had a 30-year Coast Guard career and retired as an O-6, the equivalent of a colonel in the army—started having quiet doubts about the ballooning bureaucracy around the drug-war industry, and the contractors and lobbyists encouraging the government to waste huge amounts of money on boats and airplanes and radar surveillance systems that weren't very useful. "Customs saw all this money and all these toys the Coast Guard was getting and wanted some, too—but they couldn't even take care of their boats. They were always broken. It was just bureaucracy run amok."
Then there were the people he was arresting at sea. "We'd get some actual bad guys," he says, most of them Americans. "Real low-life Gulf Coast types who were probably causing problems in other areas. But mostly you'd just get poor fishermen, poor Colombians, poor Hondurans. And you'd get some middle-class types who were just trying to pull some shit—we caught some poor couple's sailboat with 200 pounds of marijuana, which was a fairly small amount compared to what we were seeing."
On the morning of our conversation, he had been discussing with my mother a story in the New York Times about a major jailbreak by over 140 prisoners in Mexico (most of them accused of narco crimes—the prison director disappeared after the escape): "Your mother said, 'Oh, they should just legalize marijuana—all the cost and all the problems it causes are just way out of line.' And I agree with her! If two old farts like us—two conservative old farts—think we should legalize, then let's just get on with it!" (For the record, my parents are pro-legalization but not pro-drug. They've never taken an illicit drug in their lives and became supremely angry when I was in high school and they figured out that I was smoking pot with my friends.)
"Should the United States end prohibition on all drugs?" I ask.
"That's a little less clear," he says. "How would you do it? What would it look like? Maybe it would work—but I definitely think we should focus on treatment for drug addicts instead of punitive incarceration."
Former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper had an even more dramatic change of heart about drug policy. Stamper remembers himself in his early career, a San Diego beat cop in the 1960s, as "a gleeful drug warrior making drug arrests, many of them for small possession of marijuana. I thought I was doing God's work." He had what he calls his "personal epiphany" in 1967, when he busted into a house in an affluent suburb to arrest a 19-year-old.
"I gained entrance in a manner that would be rejected today: 'knock and notice.' I tapped lightly on the door and whispered 'San Diego police,' then kicked his door in—sent it flying—and in the foot race to the bathroom, I beat him just before he made the second flush." Stamper scooped up some stems and seeds from the toilet and arrested the boy, who, on the ride to the jail, casually asked if they could stop at a store for some chips. The police radio was crackling in the background with far more serious crimes: robbery, car prowl, domestic violence. This was Stamper's road-to-Damascus moment. "I sorted through my mental inventory of what I was doing and thought: 'My God. This is just some 19-year-old kid who was in his parents' home—I've done damage to the house and damage to the Fourth Amendment, and this arrest will be a disservice to him for the rest of his life.' Meanwhile, I could've spent my time dealing with some kind of serious predatory crime."
Stamper quietly chewed over these thoughts until the early 1990s, when he began to speak out to business and chamber of commerce types. He began arguing that we should legalize all drugs. "The more sinister they are, the greater the justification for regulation instead of prohibition," he says. "A regulatory model would give the government, imperfect as it is, the first opportunity since the beginning of the last century to exercise some control over the drug trade. In recent years, we have reduced tobacco consumption by roughly half without a shot being fired. But in trying to reduce the black market for cocaine and heroin, we get guns, torture, beheadings, people being incinerated..."
In short, these two former drug warriors, who spent their careers trying to enforce prohibition, think we should legalize part of or all of the drug trade. But the heroin-smoking dealer and the coke-snorting professional lean toward prohibition.
What the fuck?

Tobacco use was responsible for 435,000 deaths in the United States in 2000, according to a 2004 issue of the Journal of the National Medical Association. The same year, all illegal drug use was responsible—directly and indirectly—for 17,000 deaths. When I started working on this series, I thought, like most moderate liberals: Yes, legalize pot, that's obvious. But heroin and cocaine and meth and the rest—aren't those drugs kind of dangerous?
The more hours I spent in the library, in research laboratories, in alleyways, and on couches interviewing addicts, dealers, policymakers, law enforcement officials, lawyers, doctors, and academics, the more I came to agree with Stamper—as well as former Mexican president Vicente Fox, former UK drug czar Bob Ainsworth, Spain's former (and, to date, longest-serving) prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, and members of Mexico's Social Democratic Party, who have been attacked by anonymous gunmen and Molotov cocktails after campaigning for legalization.
The mystery of why a cattle-deworming drug called levamisole is being cut into the world's cocaine supply is just a footnote in the drug war's century-long history of corruption, violence, addiction, and doom.
We will always have drug users, drug abusers, and drug producers—just like we'll always have casual drinkers, alcoholics, and distilleries. We cannot change that. What we can change is the level of violence and cruelty associated with the drug trade by elevating it to the legal market, where business disputes are settled with the rule of law instead of with machine guns and chain saws.
The only way out is to legalize—and regulate—everything. Pot, heroin, cocaine, meth: everything.


30,196 Dead (and Counting) in Mexico
It is hard to know how many people around the world have gotten sick and/or died due to levamisole poisoning. U.S. law enforcement agencies estimate that 75 percent of the cocaine supply is being cut with levamisole, but the Centers for Disease Control stopped keeping track of levamisole-related hospitalizations and deaths in April. Levamisole test kits conceived by Nathan Messer at Dance- Safe, created by Dr. Mike Clark at Harborview, and distributed by The Stranger in late 2010—with help from DanceSafe and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance—show the Seattle cocaine supply contamination at closer to 85 percent. (Each test kit contained an anonymous survey with questions about rock and powder cocaine purchases throughout the Seattle area. So far, respondents have written in from Bremerton to Green Lake to the Central District—and one from Toronto.)
The human toll in Colombia, where most U.S.-bound cocaine is manufactured, and in Mexico, where the cocaine travels on its way to the U.S., is abundantly clear. Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported a conservative estimate of 30,196 drug-war-related deaths in Mexico alone since 2007, when Mexican president Felipe Calderón and George W. Bush, with the help of the U.S. Congress, agreed to crank up the drug war with the Mérida Initiative. Thirty thousand one hundred ninety-six deaths is the equivalent of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers 10.9 times. Or an 11-night, sold-out run at Carnegie Hall in which every seat is stuffed with a corpse.
A few of those deaths:
October 19, 2009: Police find the body of Perla Pérez Tagle, a young human rights worker, at an intersection in Ciudad Juárez (pop. 1.4 million). Her bound and gagged body shows signs of torture and is covered by a blue plaid blanket. Her head is nearby, in a red plastic bag.
December 16, 2009: In the wealthy tourist destination of Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring (pop. 350,000), narco kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva is killed in a two-hour gun battle at his apartment complex while residents cowered in the gym. In the following months, the city is taken over by narcos: "Bodies have been hung from overpasses, dumped outside police headquarters, or left on busy streets with their faces skinned," according to the Associated Press.
October 25, 2010: Police find the body of a plump old woman near her home in Nuevo Laredo (pop. 348,387). Her severed head, covered with frizzy gray hair, is tucked between her legs and one of her severed fingers is stuck into her mouth. A handwritten sign propped up by her body declares: "A esta pinche vieja la matamos por 'relaje'... esto les va a pasar a todos los pinches 'relajes.'" ("We killed this fucking old woman for snitching... this will happen to all the fucking snitches.") The message is signed in blood with a "Z" for Los Zetas—a squad of paramilitary narcos with one of the nastiest reputations in the drug war. The leaders of Los Zetas were originally trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, to fight the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Later they were deployed against the narcos in Tamaulipas, but decided that they'd get a better deal working for the narcos than trying to stop them.
November 15, 2010: The entire population of Ciudad Mier (pop. 5,423) is evacuated after war breaks out between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, the Zetas' former narco employers. The breaking point for many families comes when—after months of firefights, bodies in the streets, and torched businesses—a well-known local man is chopped into pieces and hung from a tree in the town square.
December 3, 2010: The Mexican army arrests Edgar Jimenez Lugo, a 14-year-old assassin nicknamed "El Ponchis" who has confessed to four murders. El Ponchis, a U.S. citizen, becomes a symbol of narco ruthlessness after BlogdelNarco.com (http://blogdelnarco.com/) releases home videos of the boy and some friends torturing a prisoner, gagged and suspended from the ceiling, while they laugh and take pictures on their cell phones. On one YouTube video, a boy believed to be El Ponchis answers a question by saying: "When we don't find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver." A prison director in Ciudad Juárez tells a reporter from Time magazine that teenage assassins are a new trend for the narcos, since "these kids are cheap, bloodthirsty, and they know the government can't punish them much."
December 27, 2010: The Press Emblem Campaign, based in Geneva, reports that 14 Mexican journalists have been murdered in the course of their work this year, making the drug war a more dangerous beat than reporting on Iraq, where eight journalists were killed in 2010. And on this date, two days after Christmas, six family members age 16 to 34 are found floating in the crater of an abandoned mine in the small town of Urique (pop. 984).
December 29, 2010: Around midnight, several cars pull up near a club in Acapulco (pop. 718,000). Men step out of the cars, fire shots into the club, and festoon its entrance with over 40 severed body parts, including chopped-up torsos, severed hands holding severed genitals, and flayed heads. The men drape two skinned faces over stanchions in front of the club, where they hang like rubber Halloween masks.
Some suggest that Mexico's drug-war dead are solely casualties of the cocaine and opium trades. That is plainly false: In the past two months, U.S. agents have found underground storehouses holding tens of tons of pot connected to tunnels under the United States/Mexico border. And in a Reuters story on December 14, unnamed U.S. agents claim to have found acres of greenhouses where narcos were growing high-quality, top- dollar "B.C. bud" instead of the long-derided "Mexican ditch weed." The marijuana trade, as innocent as it looks when you're buying a bag of grass off of a hippie, has blood in its wallet, too.
Those 30,000-plus dead present a major problem for the government of Mexico, which seems helpless to do much about it. The narco chaos could spark another revolution. Former Mexican president Vicente Fox has argued that the drug war has deeply corrupted Mexican police and military, as well as the rule of law. In 2010, at least two cities—in addition to the abandoned Ciudad Mier, which no longer has a city government—fired their police forces. The citizens of Ascension in the state of Chihuahua and Tepoztlán in the state of Morelos decided that, owing to corruption, they would be better off enforcing the law themselves. And in early December, citizens of Apatzingan in the state of Michoacan mounted a demonstration against the government and for the narcos. An Associated Press photograph from the protest flew around blogs and newspapers—that of a grave-faced little girl with pigtails and bangs holding up a handwritten sign that said: "La Familia Michoacana somos mas que un estado." ("La Familia Michoacana [a narco cartel]: We are bigger than/better than a state.")
In Mexico, thanks to the U.S.-funded drug war, the narcos have achieved in a few years what Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas could only dream about: In towns large and small, north and south, they have mounted a strong, palpable challenge to the authority of the Mexican federal government.


A Racist History


The narcos are not a separate entity from the government in the way that, in the U.S., the Bloods or the Crips or Capone's gangsters are separate from the government. In Mexico, the narcos are fused with the government—the police, the military, the senators. They share the same DNA.
This fusion began, perhaps, with Colonel Esteban Cantú Jiménez, a military caudillo who ruled Baja California Norte in the early 20th century with political connections and a private army of 1,800. Colonel Jiménez immediately saw the profit possibilities of the U.S.'s Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which began the U.S. prohibition of opiates and cocaine. He took a cut of the illegal opium trade until he was smacked down by the Mexican government in 1920—but then secured amnesty via a former military colleague.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act came about because, around 1900, American newspapers, physicians, and politicians began to promote the idea that a white powder was a threat to white supremacy.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published an article announcing, "Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice—that of 'cocaine sniffing' or the 'coke habit.'" Newspapers picked up the story and amplified it, claiming that cocaine turned black men into rapists of white women, as well as expert marksmen. (See "Negro Cocaine 'Fiends' Are a New Southern Menace" from the February 8, 1914 issue of the New York Times.) A 1910 federal report stated that "Southern sheriffs believed cocaine even rendered blacks impervious to .32-cal. bullets (as a result many police departments switched to .38-cal)."
Cocaine plus black people equaled a white supremacist's nightmare.
Dr. Hamilton Wright, Theodore Roosevelt's national opium commissioner, railed against opium use with similarly racist arguments. During the 1909 International Opium Commission in Shanghai, he said: "One of the most unfortunate phases of smoking opium in this country is the large number of women who have become involved and were living as common-law wives or cohabitating with Chinese in the Chinatowns of our various cities." (Interestingly, the physician and researcher Stephen R. Kandall has concluded that the majority of early opium addicts in the U.S. were women—who had been prescribed opiates by their doctors for "female problems.")
Riding the wave of racist drug hysteria, five-time congressman Francis Burton Harrison—a lawyer, member of the Democratic Party, and son of a mathematician from New Orleans named Burton Harrison who served as the private secretary to Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War—proposed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. It was voted into law on December 17, 1914, shortly after Harrison had resigned from Congress to serve as the governor-general of the Philippines.
In name, the Harrison Act (by sheer accident, I happen to be writing this paragraph on the 96th anniversary of its passage) purported to tax and regulate the sale of opiates and coca products. In reality, it was a way for the federal government to get a stranglehold on the U.S. drug trade. (That's why people know it as the Harrison Narcotics Act and not the Harrison Tax Act.) The Act went so far as to prohibit doctors from prescribing maintenance doses to opiate addicts. That provision was challenged and changed in the 1925 Supreme Court case Linder v. United States, in which the court decided that the federal government could not directly control medical practice—which is why we have methadone treatment programs today.
During the debate, Representative Thomas Upton Sisson (D-Mississippi) most bluntly articulated the purpose of the Harrison Act: "The purpose of this bill—and we are all in sympathy with it—is to prevent the use of opium in the United States, destructive as it is to human happiness and human life."
The destruction to "human happiness and human life" by pre–Harrison Act opium and coca use has been dwarfed—by orders of magnitude—by the destructiveness of the post–Harrison Act drug trade.
The Harrison Narcotics Act paved a global road to hell. Not just for the United States (from kids slinging drugs in the Chicago projects to overdosed celebrities in Los Angeles), but for Afghanistan, where the Taliban has propped itself up on the opium and heroin trade; for Myanmar, where an abusive military dictatorship funds itself by being the second-largest source of opium poppies and a new powerhouse of meth and ketamine production; for Laos, where geography and new highways make the country an ideal smuggling nexus for everything and the locals have developed a recent fondness for meth; for the favelas of Brazil; for Morocco, where I have personally seen hillsides covered in marijuana plants "protected" by bored-looking teenagers toting around AK-47s; for the Dominican Republic, which has become a major transit point for cocaine and heroin bound for the U.S. via Puerto Rico; for Colombia, where cocaine production has paid for a brutal 40-year war between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, the government, and narcos (the war has displaced 3.3 million people from their homes, or 7.2 percent of the country's population); for Ghana and Mali and other West African transshipment points for European-bound cocaine; and for pretty much every other country on the planet.
Observers such as Dominic Corva, a geographer at the University of Washington who has done extensive research on the cocaine trade, predict that as the Colombian and Mexican meat grinders become more violent, more troublesome, and less profitable, the cocaine production and smuggling market will move from Latin America to Africa.
According to a New York Times story from 2000, the Irkutsk region of Siberia went from 200 cases of HIV to at least 5,000 in a single year after heroin was introduced but drug-safety education was not. And several articles, from a 1985 Wall Street Journal story to a 2008 story in the Dartmouth College student paper, have described indoor marijuana horticulture at research stations in Antarctica.
Despite prohibition's best efforts, drugs are everywhere.


The Size of the Drug Trade

Estimates about the size of the drug trade and its costs are obviously politicized and highly unreliable—Colombian guerrillas have estimated the world drug trade to be 20 to 30 percent of the world economy, and published estimates from members of the Orejuela family (formerly of the Colombian Cali Cartel) claim that drug trafficking involves 12 percent of the U.S. labor force. But it would be in their interest to overestimate their importance.
Still, the Associated Press recently put the cost of the drug war at $1 trillion over the past 40 years and coaxed Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama's drug czar, into admitting that "in the grand scheme" the drug war "has not been successful. Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." In an October editorial for CNN, Evan Wood, founder of the International Centre for Science and Drug Policy, put the cost of the U.S. drug war at $2.5 trillion—more than twice the Associated Press estimate—and cited Nobel Prize–winning conservative economist Milton Friedman: "There are some general features of a socialist enterprise, whether it's the post office, schools, or the war on drugs. The enterprise is inefficient, expensive, very advantageous to a small group of people, and harmful to a lot of people."
No matter how you play with the numbers, one thing is clear—the drug trade is making big money for the criminal side. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth the risk (life, limb, loved ones, lifetime imprisonment). And it's been lucrative for law enforcement, too: from Colonel Jiménez in the 1910s on down to contemporary Mexican officials and their relatives (the brother of Carlos Salinas, president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994, was convicted of arranging a hit against their brother-in-law) to the military-industrial business lobbyists who convince the Coast Guard and Customs to buy expensive enforcement toys.
"How much economic benefit has the drug war produced for the private sector?" asks Dominic Corva, the University of Washington geographer. "It's not just profits, it's jobs—sales jobs, accounting jobs, transportation jobs, agricultural jobs, and so forth. Obviously, no one has any remotely reliable estimate, but I bet it would dwarf the financial costs—thus making it a hell of a taxpayer- subsidized industry, a transfer of public funds to private."
Who pays for all of this? We do. Not just drug users who subsidize the crime side, but workaday U.S. taxpayers who subsidize the law enforcement side. Despite the billions of dollars we've spent trying to make them disappear, American drug users are not disappearing.
Plus, there are the human costs to U.S. families disrupted by drug incarcerations, or innocents slaughtered not by narcos in Mexico or Colombia but by law enforcement officials in the United States.
Take the story of Esequiel Hernandez Jr., an 18-year-old goatherd living in Texas, a mile from the border. On May 20, 1997, he was tending his family's goats and carrying a .22-caliber, pre-WWI rifle that he routinely had with him to defend the goats against rattlesnakes and wild dogs, according to his family. The U.S. Marines on drug patrol were carrying M-16s. Dressed in ghillie suits (a kind of shaggy camouflage that makes the wearer look like a Sasquatch), the marines spotted Hernandez watering the family goats and stalked him for 20 minutes before the boy, according to the marines, fired a single shot. It's unclear whether he was shooting at a tin can or at the marines—or whether he was even aware he was being watched. Maybe he thought the four creatures in ghillie suits were hairy monsters. Whatever happened, Hernandez was shot and the U.S. government paid his family $1.9 million to settle a wrongful death claim. No evidence has ever been presented that Hernandez was involved in the drug trade, and the marine who shot Hernandez was never charged. He was the first American civilian to be killed by the American military since the Kent State massacre.
Or take Kathryn Johnston, the 88-year-old Atlanta woman who, when she saw men breaking into her house of 17 years, fired a shot into the ceiling. Unbeknownst to her, the men were undercover narcotics agents, who fired 39 shots back, killing her. Once the agents realized she was innocent—they had falsely claimed to have purchased cocaine at her house in order to get a no-knock warrant—they planted marijuana in her basement, framing the dead woman. Eventually, the agents' stories came to pieces. In 2009, three years after killing Johnston, three officers were sentenced for manslaughter. It came out at the trials that other Atlanta police officers have used similar tactics.


What Most Pro-Legalization Arguments Are Missing

For too long, the critique of drug prohibition has been framed selfishly—it's all about us and our liberty and our right to seek pleasure however we see fit. A passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is a favorite in pro-legalization editorials published everywhere from the Economist to High Times:
The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part that merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.But let's set aside that abstract selfish stuff for a second. Put aside the facts about domestic costs for law enforcement. Put aside the fact that the U.S. has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world, that the number of people in jail on drug charges has increased twelvefold since 1980, that (in 2000) 22 percent of U.S. prisoners were in for drug charges (according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, each prisoner costs roughly $22,600 per year).
Also put aside the fact that every state in the union is in a major budget crisis, many of which could be solved altogether by legalizing, regulating, and taxing the drug market so states like Washington wouldn't have to ax health care for children and job programs for adults with developmental disabilities. (Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron estimates that legalization, through a combination of law enforcement savings and tax income, would put $76.8 billion per year into the U.S. economy.)
Let's think about the rest of the world for a moment.
One law, passed in 1914 and designed to save lives, has resulted in uncountable deaths: from the deaths that result from the dangers of unregulated product (which results in overdoses and dangerous cutting agents like levamisole and costs taxpayers every time an uninsured person winds up in the emergency room) to the extraordinary violence of the extralegal market (where people settle disputes with machetes and bullets instead of lawsuits).
The argument that prohibition is a profound and catastrophic failure has already been made by intelligent people across the political spectrum: the middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution (in 2008), economist Miron (for the past 15 years), even John D. Rockefeller Jr., a lifelong teetotaler who donated between $350,000 and $700,000 to the temperance movement (that's between $3.8 million and $7.7 million in 2010 dollars). After years of watching the alcohol prohibition laws, he had to admit that they simply didn't work. In a letter printed on the front page of the New York Times in 1932, he wrote:
When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.In 2008, Congress passed a bipartisan resolution, sponsored by Representatives Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Howard Coble (R-NC), celebrating the 75th anniversary of repeal. Oddly, the language in the resolution doubles as an excellent argument for ending all prohibitions. The resolution pointed out that
passage of the 18th Amendment, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" in the United States, resulted in a dramatic increase in illegal activity, including unsafe black market alcohol production, organized crime, and noncompliance with alcohol laws.Dramatic increase in illegal activity? Check. (Those 30,000-plus deaths in Mexico since 2007.) Unsafe black market? Check. (Levamisole is one tiny example of how prohibition laws make drugs more dangerous.) Organized crime? Check. (Drug gangs in Mexico are holding entire cities, states, and law enforcement agencies hostage—see also the Taliban, the Bloods, the Crips, Latin Kings, and the Salvadorian gang MS13, which is currently helping run the cocaine trade to Seattle and has distinguished itself with cruel machete murders and by calling out hits on U.S. federal agents.) Noncompliance with the law at every level? Obviously.
Why does the logic of that 2008 resolution apply to alcohol but not to other drugs? I call Congressman Coble to ask him and I get through to his press liaison, Ed McDonald. "It's ironic you should call with that question today," he says. "Right now, I'm in North Carolina in a beautiful vineyard owned by Richard Childress, the NASCAR driver. You know Richard Childress?"
Not really.
"Anyway, we're having a party for the staff: There are these beautiful buildings, acres of beautiful vineyards..."
He says he'll ask the congressman—who is feeling under the weather—my question and get back to me the next day.
"You know," McDonald says the next day, "I asked him, and he said pretty much what I said yesterday—that as a society we perceive alcohol to have a value that we don't apply to hard drugs. He sees a value that alcohol provides to society that he doesn't see provided by narcotics."
So it's about social perception? Nothing empirical? Just popular cultural notions?
"Yes, that's right."
So there you have it, straight from Representative Coble, who cosponsored the resolution to celebrate repeal and its attendant increase in product safety and decreases in violence and organized crime—the difference between prohibition of alcohol and prohibition of other drugs isn't about data and rational argument. When will American policymakers, and the American public, start to take these questions seriously—based on facts, research, and real stories, instead of the race-baiting bogeymen and puritan fictions of a century ago?
The impetus for this series was to investigate—with the assistance of law enforcement agencies, doctors, academics, policymakers, and drug dealers—why a dangerous chemical called levamisole is being cut into the world's cocaine supply. We have failed to figure it out. Some lab techs and high-level research-and-development narco scientists probably know, but they haven't been forthcoming.
Nevertheless, we have discovered something—the mystery of the tainted cocaine is a just a speck, a tenpenny nail holding down a single shingle on the giant, monstrous mansion of the drug war. When will we get serious about tearing down this house of horrors?
That's the real mystery. http://www.thestranger.com/images/rec_star.gif
This article has been updated since its original publication.

source: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-mystery-of-the-tainted-cocaine-part-iv/Content?oid=6163374

[Raúl Duke]

Thanks for the interesting articles

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

A resolutely comprehensive breakdown of why the War on Drugs fails on so many levels. Thank you for posting these.

[Sasha]

i hope he wins an pulitzer for it