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Cocaine, a recipe for profits
Broadcast Date: Feb. 28, 1980
What starts off as $250 dollars worth of coca leaves in the foothills of South America ends up as $800,000 dollars worth of cocaine, increasingly the drug of choice for jet-setters everywhere. With each processing and every border it crosses, the white power doubles, triples, sometimes quadruples in value, providing ample incentive for producers and traffickers. With just two to three per cent of the smuggled booty ending up in police hands, the dollars invested make for a tidy return and a supply explosion. As we see in this 1980 clip from CBC-TV, Toronto is awash in the stuff.Cocaine, a recipe for profits
• Cocaine is often miscategorized as a narcotic. Narcotics, from the Greek narkos meaning sleep, refers only to derivatives of opium and synthetic opiates. Cocaine, on the contrary, is a stimulant. It was used in leaf form for centuries by indigenous peoples in South America as an appetite suppressant and to fight fatigue. In the 19th century the process to derive cocaine from the coca leaves was developed, and Europeans and North Americans began using the drug.• Once cocaine could be extracted from the leaves, it became possible to transport the drug long distances without any degradation in quality. Taken up quickly by modern medicine as an anaesthetic, cocaine was also popularized in various beverages, from wines to Coca-Cola. However, the highly addictive properties of the drug brought it to the attention of lawmakers, who added it to the Geneva Convention of 1925 which sought to control opiates, cocaine and cannabis in signatory nations.
• From the 1930s onward, although it was still used for a small number of medicinal purposes, including ear, nose and throat surgeries, cocaine faded as a recreational drug. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, by the mid 1950s cocaine was not considered an international or domestic law enforcement problem. That began to change in the early 1970s with the rise of the Colombian cocaine cartels that enthusiastically exported planeloads of cocaine to a growing international market.
• This clip mentions that in 1961 the United Nations promoted an effort to destroy coca plants, which was one of the objectives of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. But the large scale eradication of coca, poppy and cannabis plants was not a priority until the U.S.-led "war on drugs" of the 1990s.
Cocaine, a recipe for profits
Medium: Television
Program: The Kowalski/Loeb Report
Broadcast Date: Feb. 28, 1980
Guest(s): Federico Arrarti, Brian Davis, Donald Heaton
Reporter: Henry Kowalski
Duration: 7:27
Last updated:
July 29, 2009
Cocaine, a recipe for profits.
The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Last updated: July 29, 2009.
[Page consulted on Feb. 13, 2012.]