Word: kilo
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...Administration's various efforts to curtail the drug trade have by no means been fruitless. The amount of cocaine seized in the U.S. has increased thirtyfold since 1977, and the wholesale price of a kilo of coke in Miami has jumped from $23,000 to $35,000 in the past six months. In one two-week period a month ago, Florida authorities confiscated over two tons of the drug, more than was seized by all federal agents in 1981. But the record amounts of cocaine intercepted may only serve to prove that there are record amounts of cocaine pouring into...
...border. Soon enough, however, the cocaine czars could afford to send bulk shipments into the U.S. in their own DC-6 aircraft or by high-powered speedboats. By 1983, indeed, the system was running so efficiently that the market was glutted with cocaine, and the wholesale price of a kilo in Colombia plunged from $20,000 to $5,000 (it is now roughly $7,500). All the while, million-dollar bribes, backed often by threats, bought the coqueros official indulgence at home and abroad. "These are vicious people with huge amounts of money at their disposal," says Francis ("Bud") Mullen...
...secrecy laws in the hemisphere by laundering drug dollars. Last June U.S. customs agents in Miami discovered that a DC-8 jet transport, owned by Inair, at the time Panama's largest air cargo company, was carrying more than a ton of coke, stuffed in freezers, neatly packaged in kilo-size parcels and specially coded for efficient delivery in the U.S. "They had been shipping the Colombians' coke for them for some time," says a former Inair associate...
Arriving at village processing facilities in 50-kilo bales, the harvested leaves are laid out in the sun to dry. They are then soaked in a solution of water and kerosene, which releases the cocaine contained in the leaves. Peasants stomp on the soaking mixture for several hours to turn it into coca paste, which is then mixed with sulfuric acid, lime, potassium permanganate and more kerosene. The cream-colored substance that is left after the liquid is squeezed out is coca base, the raw material that is sent to refineries to be turned into cocaine. This transformation is accomplished...
...takes 300 kilos of coca leaves to produce three kilos of paste and one kilo of pure cocaine. The markup in price, according to current U.S. estimates, is no less dramatic. A dollar's worth of leaves costs a trafficker less than $3 as paste and a consumer on the streets of Miami $315 as white powder. Smoking the much cheaper raw coca paste has therefore increasingly become a popular high throughout South America. In Bolivia a matchboxful of paste, enough to make 100 cigarettes, sells for as little as 50 cents. Warns Dr. Ronald Siegel, a psychopharmacologist...