Word: drugged
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, brought coca to earth from his father, the sun. The Indians used it to dull their hunger, cold and weariness. (When Georgia Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, he included small amounts of cocaine to "cure your headache" and "relieve fatigue," but the drug was eliminated from the syrup shortly after 1900.) Colombia's role in the coke trade is middleman and processor. At kitchen labs dotted around the country, coca leaves brought in from all over the Andes are distilled into a paste and then converted into a base (150 lbs. of leaves make...
...slightly higher level of technology, Colombia drug traffickers have started to manufacture and smuggle other drugs, most notably a counterfeit line of Quaaludes, a prescription brand of the sedative methaqualone. At least five presses for making the white pills have been smuggled into Colombia recently. For 100 apiece, they churn out tablets of methaqualone that are being popped at 35 times that price in the U.S. Last month, during a raid on a marijuana warehouse on the Guajira peninsula, soldiers found a million fake Quaaludes...
...fortune brought in by drugs has created an underground economy that fuels Colombia's 20% inflation. Prices of land and homes in coastal areas like Santa Marta have rocketed. Rolls-Royces and $30,000 beds with built-in stereos are among the signs of the drug traders' conspicuous consumption. Also being purchased by traffickers: Colombia's judges, customs agents and police. The jail in the capital of the Guajira is so corrupted that the army has quit sending captured smugglers there. They routinely escape...
...money in the Colombian drug operations goes not to those who grow narcotics or process them, but to those who get them to the American consumer. One way to get the drugs out is to fly them from one of the hundreds of clandestine airstrips that have been bulldozed in Guajira peninsula. The Colombian army's map of the region is speckled with 150 pinpoints, but an officer admits, "There are so many illegal airstrips we don't really count them...
...Pilot Riddel Marvin's pocket, however, the authorities found evidence indicating another objective: a smudged note giving the coordinates of a large clandestine airstrip in the area. The army, tipped off by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, had been waiting for the three Americans. According to intelligence, they were supposed to pick up six tons of grass and another American, who had been arrested last November after illegally flying into the country. The three are now being held in Colombia on illegal-entry charges, and DEA officials say they may be prosecuted for conspiracy to smuggle when allowed to return...