DRUG CARTELS DEVELOP SUPER-COCAINE PLANT

Traffickers Spend $140M Producing Strain

Colombian drug cartels have developed a new strain of coca plant that
yields up to four times more cocaine, dealing a setback to a campaign
against production of the drug that was beginning to show results.

The new plant was discovered by police during an operation in the
mountains of the Sierra Nevada.

Experts pronounced it to be a new strain developed by drugs
traffickers.

It is estimated that the traffickers spent $140 million Cdn in
research to develop the new plant, crossbreeding strains from Peru
with potent Colombian varieties, and using genetic
engineering.

While traditional coca plants grow 1.5 metres tall, the new strain
grows to more than three metres.

"What we found were not bushes, but trees," said Col. Diego Leon
Caicedo of the anti-narcotics police.

Camilo Uribe, a toxicologist who studied the new plants, said: "The
yield from this plant is much higher. It produces not only more drugs,
but of a higher purity.''

The investment to unearth a new strain of coca, the raw material for
cocaine, is small compared to the earnings.

Traffickers can produce a kilo of cocaine for less than $3,500.

This will sell in Miami for $33,000, in London for $80,000 and in
Tokyo for $120,000 (all funds in Canadian dollars).

The widespread introduction of the new coca strain could undermine the
efforts of President Alvaro Uribe to win the 40-year civil conflict.

By destroying the burgeoning drug crops, Uribe had hoped to weaken the
warring factions, both Marxist guerrillas and right-wing
paramilitaries, who earn more than $1.2 billion a year between them
from the illicit drug trade.