FLAVORED COCAINE HITS LOCAL STREETS

Experts Say It Poses The Same Dangers As Regular Cocaine

Coconut, strawberry, banana and chocolate may not sound like drugs,
but those are a few of the flavors that cocaine now comes in.

In what Yolo Narcotic Enforcement Team (YONET) Commander Roy Giorgi
is calling "another tool to put out their product or make it more
appetizing for our younger generation," dealers are now offering
cocaine with flavoring and coloring for up to 40 percent more than
the cost of regular cocaine.

The variation, Giorgi said, is new to California and has only
resulted in one major bust in June, which involved the cities of West
Sacramento and Stockton and about 3 pounds of the flavored drug.

"It's a relatively new issue for us, and we're still collecting more
and more intelligence," said Gordon Taylor, head of the Drug
Enforcement Administration's Sacramento office. "I'm not really
prepared at this point in time to say what areas it's prevalent in,
but certainly we've seen it in the Sacramento Valley area."

Giorgi said the substances used to flavor and color the cocaine are
unknown as of yet, but so far the drug seems to carry the same risks
as unflavored cocaine.

"You're going to get the elevated heart rate, the respiratory rate
[and] the psychological [problems]," Giorgi said. "We have very
little information on what part of the process they're doing it.
We'll have a lot more when the analysis comes back. We have some
information, but we're not putting it out to the public yet because
of pending investigations."

Far from being watered down, however, Giorgi said he suspected that
the inflated price is due to a product that retains more purity than
most shipments.

"Whatever process they're using is taking a lot of work," Giorgi said.

Giorgi distinguished between the recent bust and those on university
campuses; he said campus drug busts are exceedingly rare. When they
do occur, Giorgi said, most involve marijuana, ecstasy, or cocaine.

Taylor said no arrests have been made within the Sacramento region itself.

"It's also maybe [just] a fad too," Giorgi said. "It's not a new
drug, but it's a new style of the drug, just [like] the flavored
methamphetamine.... We've had flavored ecstasy pills."

Stephanie Lake, program coordinator for the Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Treatment and Prevention Program at UC Davis, said that although
flavored cocaine is growing in the Midwest, there is no evidence of
the drug on campus.

"I've been here eight years, and I've never seen a student that's
used flavored cocaine," Lake said. "There's actually controversy
around whether it should even [be] talked about because we don't know
the amount of people that are actually using it right now."