COKE COSTS THE EARTH

USING COCAINE DESTROYS RAINFORESTS

It does not matter how many bottles you recycle: if you use cocaine, you turn virgin rainforest into coca farms - which quickly become toxic and barren... 
*  4.4 square metres of rainforest is destroyed to produce one gram of cocaine
*  54million acres of Columbian rainforest has been destroyed to grow coca.

The most surprising of arguments can sometimes stop a drug user in their tracks. This might give a moment of clarity to some.  Read the full article here.

FROM LEAF TO LINE:

1  Coca leaves are harvested every 45 days or so.

2  The leaves are dried, shredded and placed in a plastic-lined pit with ammonia and lime. Petrol or disesl is added; this acts as a solvent which extracts the water-insoluble cocaine alkaloids.

3  The liquid is draiged off and more ammonia added, precipitating the cocaine alkaloids.

4  More petrol is added, as well as sulphuric acid. The liquid is filtered through fine cloth and the precipitate collected. More ammonia is added to form a sticky white paste.

5  To process the paste into cocaine base, more hydrochloric acid is added, and potassium permanganate.

6  In the UK, alcohol or acetone is added along with hydrochloric acid to form the product sold on the streets.

Comments

[Gerry Dorrian]

I think it says something about the sensitivities of modern people that a newspaper needs to highlight the environmental cost of cocaine to rainforests, because its users aren't bothered about the human costs.

The problem of cocaine is like heroin, in that it can't be solved within the borders of Great Britain. Unlike heroin, however, there is no chance of buying the crop for over the price that drug-dealers pay the farmers for it, because there is no cocaine-related therapeutic compound that can't be synthesized in a laboratory. Perhaps it will come to solving the cocaine problem using Agent Orange or some other weedkiller.

[Steve Rolles]

Coca is legally grown for traditional uses, chewed leaf and coca tea, as well as for food and beverage flavorings. Cocaine is legally produced for medical uses, albeit in limited quantities. Notably this production is not associated with any significant environmental damage, nor indeed is it funding paramilitaries or corrupting politicians, judges and police in Colombia. These are all problems created by prohibtion - which has hardly been a triumph in terms of reduced use. Cocaine misuse is bad, but the military and enforcement response has not only failed to get rid of it, but has pushed use toward ever more concentrated and dangerous versions of the drug, maximising harms, as well as creating the carnage associated with the illicit trade. We do actually have a choice.

[Frugal Dougal]

I believe some local analgaesics used in dentistry are derived from cocaine.

Using something like Agent Orange would need to be the last resort of last resorts. I would suggest a new colonialism in which, say, the US occupied Columbia and payed farmers over the odds to produce more usual crops. I expect brickbats, but colonialism is basically what the Chinese are doing in Africa, and paying farmers for farming is infinitely more intelligent than the EU strategy for paying farmers to do nothing with their fields.

[Steve Rolles]

re medical cocaine - there are a number of cocaine-like substances used in local anaestheia, but cocaine itself is also a medically licensed drug ,although its uses are now limited otolaryngology with less toxic alternatives replacing it for most other uses. It is in the British National Formulary however, and is in shedule 2, theoretically prescribable for dependency treatment, similarly to heroin prescribing with the practitioner requiring a home office license.

Regards your suggestions re Colombia - even if possible (it isnt), it would simply shift production elsewhere, as the profit incentive will remain unless demand disappears (which doesn't appear to be happening).

[Gerry Dorrian]

Steve, we have much more of a choice as regards decriminalising heroin as we do re decriminalising cocaine. As a stimulant, this causes far more antisocial behaviour from the pubs to the stock exchange and everywhere in between and, given the flood of dopamine it releases into the reward pathway, cocaine and its crack form are among the most psychologically addictive substances known. Given the poisonous effects of cocaethylene, which results when cocaine is taken concomitantly with alcohol, I don't think we have as much of a choice as you assert.