Crashing on Cocaine

(8 of 13)

constitute a third of the country's cocaine abusers. (Free-basers cannot be surprised by the findings: they often cough up black phlegm and sometimes blood.) Last year coke problems brought almost 3,000 New Yorkers to emergency rooms, 50% more than in 1981, and in Colorado the number of such panicked hospital visits doubled between 1979 and 1982. The increase may be, in part, a hopeful sign: more users now know that the drug carries genuine medical risks.

Free-basers are apparently the likeliest to die. The high is more intense than the high from snorting (and equal to that from injection) because the pure, heated cocaine vapor is absorbed into the bloodstream so fast. The speed of absorption, not the size of the dose, also seems to be the operative factor in cocaine deaths. Blood vessels are simultaneously constricted and cardiopulmonary muscles overstimulated; heart attacks (sometimes not diagnosed as cocaine-triggered) or lung failure are the direct causes of death.

National fatality figures are approximate, since coroners do not or cannot always find the evidence that cocaine was lethal. But overdoses of coke were directly or primarily responsible for as many as 300 deaths in 1981. Last year Dr. Charles Wetli, the deputy chief medical examiner for Miami's Dade County, attributed 14 local deaths exclusively to cocaine. All of those who died had been frequent users. But the alarming fact is that most of the dead had not been especially reckless: two-thirds died after merely snorting coke—not after free-basing or shooting up—and, according to Wetli, "[none used] any more on the day they died than they had previously." A stark example came last week near Palm Beach, Fla. Socialite William Ylvisaker Jr., 27, died of respiratory failure after snorting cocaine late into the night. His friends insisted that Ylvisaker, a champion polo player and son of a Chicago electronics mogul, had not been a heavy user.

The cocaine trail to the U.S. begins 2,500 miles southwest of Florida, on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains. The cash-crop cultivation of coca is divided primarily between Bolivia (86,000 acres) and Peru (123,000 acres). The DEA, which has five agents in each country, estimates that 23,000 Bolivian peasant families depend on coca for their livelihoods, and that the crop generates nearly $1 billion a year for Peru, where the entire national budget is just over $5 billion. But the business is controlled by Colombians. All but a small fraction of cocaine headed for the U.S. comes first to Colombia, generally as a gooey coca paste, for final refining into crystalline white cocaine.

Some 7,500 acres of coca are grown by Colombian farmers. Until 1980, José Antonio Monroy, 50, grew corn on his ten acres near San José del Guaviare, southeast of Bogota. Now he tends 15,000 coca bushes. He harvests the leaves three times a year and processes them in a bath of gasoline, sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate and ammonia. "You can't blame me if others get poisoned with this stuff," Monroy says. "This is what they pay me for." Colombia's annual per capita income is about $1,150. From his annual end product, 35 lbs. of paste, Monroy nets $65,000. Inflation along this booming stretch of the Guayabero River is understandably rampant: prostitutes can earn $3,000 a month, coffins cost $450 each. The