Word: etherization
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...seat in the balcony of the operating room, transfixed for hours by amputations and appendectomies. Back home, while his father was at the office, he would persuade his mother to help her precocious only child round up stray cats and dump them into a sterile trash can with an ether-soaked sponge so that he could perform exploratory surgery. He brags that he never lost...
Police confiscated about 1.3 tons of cocaine in base and finished form. But what left law-enforcement officials gloating was the seizure of unprecedented quantities of chemicals used in the manufacture of cocaine. The cache included 417,095 gal. of ether acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and 95 tons of potassium permanganate -- enough chemicals to make 104 tons of cocaine, a third of the estimated annual cocaine output of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined...
...chemicals seized during Operation Primavera were stored in standing tanks or 55-gal. drums. In some cases the drums were stacked 15 ft. high, creating Andean peaks of testimony to the proportions of the smuggling operation. Ethyl ether, for example, is essential to the final processing of cocaine base into a white hydrochloride powder. The manufacture of ethyl ether has been outlawed in Colombia, and importation is closely regulated. A 55-gal. drum of ethyl ether that sells for $500 in the U.S. fetches more than $12,000 in Colombia. Says Alfonso Barragan, president of the Colombian Society of Chemical...
...contraband chemicals are not all from the U.S., or even from other industrialized nations. Much of the ethyl ether was manufactured in Brazil. The potassium permanganate, normally used as a water purifier, came from China, which is the world's leading producer...
...chemicals manufactured in the U.S. may be another matter, at least in the future. Last year the U.S. passed a new ( law, which will take effect in the next few months, requiring closer supervision of the overseas sales of chemicals used in the production of cocaine, including ethyl ether and acetone...