Published at: 03/12/2025 09:00 PM

(Time, April 11, 1983 and July 6, 1981)

• At the beginning of 1981, the upper echelons of the decaying American consumer society were diagnosed with a new hobby: the mass consumption of cocaine.
• Time magazine published several articles referring to the new vice of billionaires: “A high-status drug... Millions of addicts... billions of dollars”.
• The most conservative figures estimate that 25 million daily users inhaled the lethal alkaloid. Its high cost, by then, restricted access to other sectors of addicts with lower incomes.
• Cocaine (Erythroxylin Coca) was called among wealthy elites as: “nasal candy, white lady or happy snow”, it was currently produced and processed in its entirety by laboratories located in Bolivia and Peru, which is why it was also nicknamed “the Peruvian one”.
• “High Society” circles portrayed their consumption as a symbol of reserved social status: $100 a line of high purity, with one hour of guaranteed euphoria.
• Behind this new social pathology, thanks to the fury of the rich and famous, there were gigantic sums of a big business unprecedented in the world economy.
• As reported by experts in Fortune magazine, the 60 tons of high-purity cocaine sold annually in the United States produced, in 1983 alone, $37 billion, placing this figure in the range of net profits earned per year by companies such as Ford Company and Gulf Oil Corporation.
• This demand was ahead of the immense fortunes generated by the illegal sale, on the streets, of marijuana: $30 billion, and other mass-use street drugs that generated profits for American drug gangs of $24 billion.
• The hot border, through which the majority of the Peruvian border entered the United States, was, coincidentally, that of the islands of the Bahamas archipelago, under British control; a smaller number entered through the thousands of greenways between Mexico and the voracious consumer market in the north.
• This ipso facto resulted in the well-known declaration of a new war to eradicate another drug pandemic.
• Already, in the 1960s, the war against heroin had been fought, as well as another very condescending and small war against marijuana, which was generally accepted.

Mazo News Team