Word: grams
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...Peruvian and Bolivian youths are rushing to become cokeheads. South American governments have been generally unsympathetic to U.S. jeremiads about the northward flow of South American drugs. But now they are seeing stylish cocaine abuse firsthand. And because the drug is so cheap in the Andes ($14 a street gram), it is more often smoked liberally in cigarettes than snorted...
...year. Cocaine has become a $25 billion business, about three times as big as the recording and movie industries put together. (The manufacture of cocaine paraphernalia is a small industry in itself: users spend millions of dollars a year on coke spoons, free-base pipes and extraction kits, digital gram scales and the like.) Selling coke is, in the words of one U.S. drug official, "the most lucrative of all underworld ventures...
...street prices that range from $ 100 to $ 150 a gram, which is about a teaspoonful, enough to keep two people well stoked for a few hours, cocaine is as pricey as it is evanescent. And for many people, conspicuous consumption is the point. Says a drug counselor in Houston: "The very expense makes people think they're special." Even the cocaine high seems unattractively linked to cash. "It's the drug for the all-American middle class," says Chuck, the insurance executive, who for 18 months spent nearly a third of his $35,000 salary on coke. "It makes...
...quintessentially suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, David, 21, was not reduced to stealing from his family to support his five-gram, $750-a-week habit. Instead, during six months last year, he embezzled $20,000 from the camera store where he worked. His thefts were discovered just before Thanksgiving, but the police were not called, and David's father repaid the $20,000. David cannot figure it. "I was the all-American kid who had never been in trouble," he says. "I was popular. I taught religion classes at the synagogue. How could a well-brought...
...refining process one ill-advised step further: the active drug is "freed" from its "base," a hydrochloride salt. Extraction techniques involve dissolving the cocaine and adding chemical catalysts-sodium hydroxide and ether or, more prudently, baking soda-that cause the free-base to separate. The precipitate, about half a gram from each gram of regular coke, is filtered or skimmed off and dried...