RED RIBBON WEEK: THE COCAINE ROAD- FROM COLUMBIA TO COLUMBUS

From Tunnels to Ships, Manufacturers Come Up With New Ways to Get Drug into States

It's a long way from Colombia to Columbus.

But cocaine finds a way, from the farmer's field to the dealer's
corner. And between the farmer trying to feed his family and the
crackhead feeding his addiction, a lot of people make a lot of money.

It's a multinational trade, ranging the Western Hemisphere as far as
from Peru to Canada, as not all the cocaine that comes into the United
States stops here. Some keeps going.

As it goes north, cash goes south. But just as an addict gets only so
much cocaine, the farmer at the other end gains only so much profit.

The money is in the middle -- in the cartels and corrupt governments
that siphon off the growers, manage the manufacturing and protect
shipments from South to North America, bloodying the United
States-Mexico border with battles over major crossings; the in-country
smugglers who take it from there; and the dealers who dole it out.

Here in the states, cocaine is distributed much like any other product
in demand -- along major travel routes, from those thinning out like
the strands of a spider web.

America's war-on-drugs mentality tends to view the fight against
cocaine as a battle against the drug itself, but eradicating the drug
here in the United States essentially means dismantling an economic
system, according to Paul Gootenberg, author of "Andean Cocaine: The
Making of a Global Drug."

Gootenberg says cocaine now is part of the global economy, a product
imported not only in the United States, but also in Europe and elsewhere.

A curiosity

Cocaine is a purified form of an alkaloid found in the leaves of the
coca plant, which the natives of the Andes Mountains of South America
have used for centuries. Chewing coca leaves or brewing them in tea is
common practice, in some cultures, and U.S. drug interdiction efforts
aimed at criminalizing it have provoked resentment.

Though Andeans were well aware of the energizing effects, coca use
elsewhere remained a curiosity, attracting little international
attention until around 1860, when a German chemist extracted the
alkaloid, cocaine hydrochloride. A Frenchman added it to wine.

The elite became enamored with the drug's medicinal properties. It was
touted as a cure for fatigue, pain, alcoholism, morphine addiction and
other ailments.

When Columbus native John Pemberton incorporated it into his Coca-Cola
precursor "French Wine Coca," his elixir was promoted as miraculous.

An 1885 ad in the Atlanta publication "The Southern World" proclaimed:
"The wonderful invigorator and health restorer conduces to mental
calmness and activity, freedom from all nervous troubles, dissipates
the blues, leaving the mind calm and contented: destroys the craving
for alcohol, invigorates the exhausted sexual organs, restores all the
nerve force, vim and vigor of youth."

Said an ad in "The Weekly Constitution": "Cures diseases of the BRAIN
and NERVES, called Neuralgia, Epilepsy, Fainting Fits, Paralysis ...
loss of appetite, weight of fullness under left breast and stomach,
nausea, flatulence, costiveness, diarrhea, palpitation of the heart,
dizziness, pain in the head, despondency, peevishness, irritability,
general debility, and cold feet. PEMBERTON'S FRENCH WINE COCA is the
medical wonder of the world."

It remained part of the Coca-Cola formula until 1903, when the company
removed it, a public relations move to appease whites fearing cocaine
inflamed the passions of African-Americans, Gootenberg said.

Alarmed by reports of abuse, reformers pushed for approval of the
Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, which restricted cocaine's use. In
1920, the Prohibition era came in with the 18th Amendment, and people
became much more interested in obtaining illegal alcohol, which the
government then focused on eliminating.

"Prohibition was one of the reasons cocaine did not become a big
industry in the United States at that time, because there was so much
money to be made in alcohol," Gootenberg said. "So the criminal
organizations went into alcohol rather than drugs like cocaine and
heroin."

Cocaine retreated into the shadows, and it stayed there for decades.
Americans found other stimulants, such as amphetamines, to consume.

"The Federal Bureau of Narcotics declares by World War II there is no
more cocaine in the United States. They may have been right. There was
a growing heroin subculture, and marijuana was beginning as well,"
Gootenberg said.

After the war, cocaine started gaining ground again, but its use was
limited.

The balloon effect

Then came the 1970s.

Gootenberg cites President Richard Nixon's crusade against marijuana
and heroin as creating a market for cocaine, which in the later disco
era became a fashion drug.

Nixon blockaded Mexican and Colombian marijuana and cut the heroin
supply as well. Cocaine had a market again.

"It was a substitution for these other drugs, and the United States
had no idea there was the resurgence in cocaine coming at them, and it
moved very quickly in the '70s to become this huge industry,"
Gootenberg said.

Meanwhile, U.S. efforts to eradicate the drug at its source had the
unintended consequence of spreading production.

It's called the "balloon effect," analogous to squeezing an inflated
balloon: Pinch it in one place, and it bulges in another.

Attack coca cultivation and processing in Colombia, where the United
States lately has concentrated its efforts with some success, and
production increases somewhere else.

This past March in Honduras, narcotics agents were surprised to find a
cocaine-processing camp, hidden in the jungle near the border of Guatemala.

Such facilities are crucial to the cocaine trade. Coca farmers can
produce a paste by drying and then crushing the leaves in a mix of
kerosene and water, in a pit or a barrel. The U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration estimates 250 pounds of dried coca leaves produce 2.2
pounds of paste.

The chemistry of making powdered cocaine from paste is more involved,
requiring equipment and ingredients not readily available to mountain
farmers.

It also requires a dependable power source. Authorities raiding the
complex in Honduras found electrical cables running half a mile to
draw power from a facility roasting coffee beans. "At the hidden camp,
agents found containers and barrels of acetone, acetic acid and
calcium chloride, among the chemicals needed for turning coca paste
into refined cocaine," reported McClatchy Newspapers, noting a
government official said enough chemicals were there to produce eight
tons of coke. "Littered about the camp were microwave ovens, presses
and filters. Two large air compressors sat off to the side."

The workers had fled. Their vacant quarters showed about a dozen had
worked there. It was the first major processing plant found in Central
America.

A regional DEA director said authorities had destroyed about 250
processing plants in Colombia and restricted access to the chemicals
needed.

So processing had spread to Honduras, where the security minister said
the lab likely supplied the Sinaloa Cartel.

It's among seven Mexican-based "transnational criminal organizations"
fighting for control of major smuggling routes into the United States,
according to the 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment compiled by the
National Drug Intelligence Center of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Crossing the border

The Mexican mobsters control the U.S.-Mexico border, where most drug
shipments come in. Colombian drug traffickers may route their products
through the Caribbean to the United States, using commercial airlines
or maritime vessels bound for the East Coast, the feds say, adding in
their assessment that Colombian crime syndicates "generate tremendous
profits by selling cocaine and heroin to Mexican and Caribbean
traffickers for distribution in the United States, as well as by
selling illicit drugs in non-U.S. markets such as Europe."

Cocaine and other drugs cross the U.S.-Mexican border by increasingly
ingenious means, in addition to standard conveyances such as boats and
trucks. Ultralight aircraft have been employed. Sophisticated tunnels
have been found, almost 100 between 2005 and 2010. Most were crude,
some following existing drain pipes. Others were not. Two in San Diego
"had advanced rail, electrical and ventilation systems," said the
Justice Department. "One of the tunnels was half a mile long and
reached a depth of 90 feet."

Cocaine also comes in on container ships, and on commercial airlines,
concealed in passengers' luggage or shipped air cargo.

An innovation discovered this year is the "narco-sub" the U.S. Coast
Guard intercepted in the Caribbean, detaining five crew members who
managed to sink the sub and cargo, which the Coast Guard later
retrieved, finding 7 1/2 tons or about $180 million worth of coke aboard it.

Once it reaches the states, cocaine hits the road, sometimes following
a distribution network maintained by gangs. The feds say that in 2010,
at least 15 gangs worked with Mexican traffickers to distribute drugs
in the states.

From the Texas border, cocaine heads toward the big cities of the
East.

"Atlanta, in particular, has emerged over the past several years as a
key wholesale cocaine distribution hub," says the 2011 drug threat
assessment.

Coming to Columbus

Cocaine can reach Atlanta on one interstate and come to Columbus on
another, or some portion of a shipment can be dropped off here on its
way there.

A large shipment likely will go into storage. Authorities here have
found it in rented storage units, and also in homes, in a condo just
off Lakebottom Park and in a house in Beaver Run.

Where they usually don't find a large quantity is where street dealers
operate -- in Beallwood or East Highland or East Carver Heights. The
major stash needs to be secure, not left where police pursuing crack
dealers might come across it, or where rivals might pull off a heist.

Cooking cocaine into crack helps stretch the supply and boost the
profit. A tiny chunk of crack, about the size of an M&M, sells for
about $20, says Capt. Gil Slouchick of the Columbus Police
Department's Special Operations Unit.

Smoking crack provides an immediate rush, comparable to injecting it
directly into the bloodstream. But the euphoria is short-lived, and
the desire to do more immediate. It keeps the customers coming back,
and it makes them commit other crimes to get money to buy more.

Paul Morris, medical director at the Muscogee County Jail, encountered
a young woman who at one point was consuming $600 worth of a crack a
day. No regular job she could have got would have paid enough to
support her habit, had her habit left her time for a 40-hour work
week. Prostitution paid her coke bill -- until she wound up in jail,
in Columbus, Ga., a continent away from the coca fields in the
mountains of South America, where the drug she came to crave began.