Word: deas
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...dealers), nor should smug cocaine apologists be permitted to bandy the distinction about as a shield. But it is necessary to an understanding of just how such a dangerous drug could become so pervasive, even routine. "The only way to cut down the demand for coke," says a senior DEA agent in the South, "is to prove what the effects...
...know I'm powerless with cocaine." Says Kevin McEneaney, senior vice president of New York's Phoenix House drug-treatment center: "We all think our personalities are well grounded and well formed, but it doesn't take a lot to tilt the psychological balance." Bensinger, the former DEA chief, has his own plausible criterion for measuring that tilt: "What will they do to get it again? That's how you tell what's addictive...
...cocaine trail to the U.S. begins 2,500 miles southwest of Florida, on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains. The cash-crop cultivation of coca is divided primarily between Bolivia (86,000 acres) and Peru (123,000 acres). The DEA, which has five agents in each country, estimates that 23,000 Bolivian peasant families depend on coca for their livelihoods, and that the crop generates nearly $1 billion a year for Peru, where the entire national budget is just over $5 billion. But the business is controlled by Colombians. All but a small fraction of cocaine headed...
...Colombia as in the U.S., says John Bacon, head of cocaine-intelligence gathering for the DEA: "There is no Mr. Big." But another U.S. official estimates that there are 100,000 Colombians living in the U.S. who "earn major dollar figures in drugs." According to DEA officials, there are ten principal Colombian cocaine rings with members in Bogota, Miami and the middle-class New York City borough of Queens. Each ring takes in at least $50 million a year. Says Bacon about the Colombian coke gangsters: "They are tremendous organizers. They deal very effectively with Americans." They also operate...
...grams of coke to undercover cops for $300. Consider a sampling from the past three months in the Washington, D.C., area: a suburban couple picked up with 8 lbs. of coke, a Virginia accountant arrested when 45 lbs. shipped from Ecuador were intercepted and delivered to his door by DEA agents posing as deliverymen, an Air Force member of the presidential honor guard charged with distribution of cocaine, and in Frederick, Md., a six-person coke ring (including a local lawyer and a banker) busted. "It used to be that a pound of cocaine was a big seizure," says Assistant...