which has the consistency and color of putty.  It takes about a hundred pounds of leaves to make a pound of paste, so this process usually takes place near the coca fields.

The second step calls for a more sophisticated facility and greater skill.  The coca paste is dissolved in water and acid, potassium salt is added to settle out the garbage, and the liquid that’s left is dosed with ammonia, which causes the pure cocaine to settle to the bottom.  This residue, dried with heat lamps, is cocaine base, which can be smoked but not snorted.

Making snortable cocaine powder from base is the most delicate step of all because it involves volitile chemicals like acetone or ether that can blow up in your face.  The cocaine base is dissolved in ether, then dosed with hydrochloric acid, causing the cocaine to crystallize, and it rains to the bottom of the vessel. These crystals—cocaine hydrochloride—are dried in microwave ovens and packaged for shipment to L.A., Houston, Miami, and points north.^[25]  From farm to lab, it takes about 250 pounds of leaves, worth say $150, to make a pound of cocaine you can sell in the provincial capital for $1500.  But it is in the next step—getting it from the jungle to the streets of Cleveland—that the price takes a spectacular leap from $1500 a pound to $15,000.^[26]  This staggering profit reflects the risk involved in moving the product from factory to market, and the handful of fearless killers at the top of this distribution network—the so-called “drug kingpins”—are among the wealthiest men in the world. Geography and history dictated that they would be Colombians.  The country’s position at the top of the continent made it the natural jumping off-place for U.S.-bound traffic, and its access to ports on both the Pacific and the Carribean combined with native hustle to create a hothouse environment for smugglers. By the time Bush reached the Oval Office, one particular gang of traffickers from Medellin was said to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine entering the U.S.^[27]

Here was a target tailor-made for a military solution. The coca eradication effort might be foundering in the jungles of Peru and