An Ancient Indian Herb Turns Deadly

Why are we writing so many articels about drugs? It's just because we want to show you the danger of them. I hate drugs (except alcohol and cigarettes), they change your personality and make you a slave. So don't take them! Here is an article about Coca, based on an article from the National Geographic (1/89). If you want to comment on this article, then write to us! (Address somewhere else)

From the leaves of a South American shrub comes a substance with immens power to stimulate pleasure, to generate wealth - and sometimes to kill. Hailed as a wonder drug in the late 19th century, cocaine was outlawed in the United States in 1914. As an illict drug it fuels a multibillion-dollar industry with a staggering impact on both supplier nations and their chief customer, the U.S. !

Coca stimulates the pleasure centers in the human brain: So much, so that it fosters the most dynamic variety of free enterprise in our time. That's the coca plant. And the drug is cocaine. Those little leaves have long been chewed by people of the Andean highlands as a tonic. By 1862 German chemists had taken coca leaves through by an Austrian scientific expedition from Peru and isolated from them an alkaloid, or nitrogen-based compound: C(17)H(21)NO(4). They labeled it cocaine. Today at least 6 million Americans keep buying it - to sniff, smoke, or inject. This brings'em indescribable pleasure, unbounded energy. Often misery. Sometimes death. Under U.S. law - and a 1961 treaty ratified by 125 nations - it is forbidden to produce cocaine, or to possess it, except for prescribed medical use. Yet such is the demand that the illicit buying and selling of it generates stupendous quantities of money - with profound effect, on varied people far beyond the coca planters and cocaine consumers. On Colombian guerrillas, say, and top political leaders across the Caribbean, on international bankers and American inner-city teenagers. Cocaine money means economic growth for entire regions in Peru, economic survival for Bolovia. For some individuals, it is said, billions of dollars. For some, murder most gruesome...

Yankee/BRS

This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #3" by Brainstorm 1990.

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