Word: guajira
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...farmers of Guajira do not like visits from inquisitive reporters or other strangers. They have good reason. For the grassy harvest ripening in the sun is marijuana, a luxurious marijuana of heady strength known as Santa Marta Gold. Most of it is destined for the U.S., where the 42 million Americans who have tried pot have made smoking it the most widely accepted illegal indulgence since drinking during Prohibition. They now consume about 130,000 lbs. per day, quadruple the 1974 consumption, and they spend $25 billion per year on their pleasure. Mexico provided most of the best marijuana until...
...Colombia, a relatively backward land, become the world's drug provider? One reason is that climate and soil conditions in the Andes are ideal for growing high-quality marijuana. Another is that Guajira is remote and inaccessible, hard to police from Bogota, with a long and irregular Caribbean shoreline that is ideal for smugglers. Still another reason is that after World War II, Colombia was prey to 15 years of civil strife, generally known simply as "La Violencia." That left 200,000 dead and a society habituated to frontier justice and pervasive corruption. There were widespread rumors that government officials...
...acres were being used to grow marijuana. To disprove what he considered wild overestimates, he took a three-day helicopter tour of the northern provinces and made a "strict calculation." His final report: the weed was flourishing on not 25,000 but about 250,000 acres in Guajira. Perhaps 50,000 more acres are cultivated in the southern plains. "I was shocked," he said. "No one thought the problem could be of such dimensions." At a maximum yield, such fields have a potential of producing annually 6 billion lbs. of marijuana, each pound worth $600 on American streets...
...even more potent variety of pot: Mona (blond) plants so pale that they look bleached. The Cielo Azul heights produce a pale plant known as Blue Sky Blond, developed as a hybrid two years ago with seeds from Thailand. Even the arid and low-lying fields of the Guajira peninsula, which are irrigated and farmed with tractors, grow a good green grass. The broiling sun forces the plants up to 15 ft. within six months and infuses them with an abundance of powerful resin. The emerging new drug-cultivation area is the Llanos plains, on the edge of the Amazon...
...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...