The taxi was a typical black-and-white Russian-assembled Fiat wreck. I had difficulty getting the door to close, but this was not unusual. We cruised through the Dead City and I relaxed, admiring the occasional decaying monument on the way back on the main street where a roundabout is manned by motley traffic cops and today, a careful of police officers. We stopped and for some reason the police officers asked the driver for his papers. This is fairly normal. What was completely nonpareil was the driver’s response. He barked something very impolite to the officer, threw the old Fiat into second gear and pulled out posthaste, shifting brusquely to pick up steam. I shared the officer’s astonishment since the driver turned back towards the Toorab and was decidedly not going my way.
We were off like a slow-motion torpedo. I objected mildly to the driver’s indiscretion and his choice of direction. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked Samy. We’d covered a considerable amount of ground and were still being followed. He turned around casually to look out of the rear window and said, ‘It’s OK. The police are following us. We will come back later.’ I nodded with drug-induced oriental acquiescence. Samy added lamely, ‘Don’t worry, we’re in a taxi,’ meaning we were innocent of whatever our conductors were running from.
Suddenly in a gut-wrenching maneuver worthy of a Hollywood stunt driver, our chauffeur pulled off the street, jumped a curb, wheeled giddily around a massive pile of garbage and onto a tomb-lined alley. We had regained the Toorab, familiar territory to our navigator. Although the police followed us in, they slowed down a moment later while we made several quick turns into the maze. Their attempt to nab us was halfhearted at best. Samy explained, ‘It is forbidden,’ and I supposed he referred to a religious taboo to do with the cemetery. I assumed that the City of the Dead was a holy sanctuary and off-limits to the police.
Amid much thigh-slapping and congratulations we slowed to a halt and the boys jumped out of the car. Cigarettes were exuberantly offered and lit all around. The driver opened the trunk and I discovered the reason for our getaway. I drew back as I saw what appeared to be a body in a shroud. I gathered from the irreverent conversation that I was actually looking at approximately eighty kilos of hashish. I nudged Samy, speechless. ‘I told you not to worry,’ he said. ‘This is a very sacred place.’ I said that seemed appropriate, due to the presence of the dead. ‘No way,’ Samy answered, ‘it’s because it’s where they keep the hashish.’
Nile-Eyes
, 2001
Charles Nicholl
The Fruit Palace
– 1
‘I
LEARNED TO
cook cocaine in Cali, ’68, ’69. I learned from a Chilean chemist. The Chileans were the best cooks then. He was selling his secrets. There were others like him coming into Colombia at this time.
‘My first kitchen I built myself, up in the hills above the Rio Cauca, near a village called Las Animas – the Spirits. This is in the country of the Gumbianos. These are Indians that chew the coca leaf – well, a lot of them get drunk on
chicha
, but some still use the leaf. There are some
cocales
there, and plenty of coca in the markets. The Gumbianos are good, strong people. Few words, much patience. They prune the coca bush small, about a metre high. They call their bushes
ilyimera
, which in their language means little birds.
‘I was the first
blanco
to set up a cocaine kitchen in this area. At first they thought I was crazy. A Gumbiano who chews the leaf perhaps uses half a pound a week. I was going into the markets and buying up four
arrobas
– 1001b of leaves at a time. In those days you could buy an
arroba
of coca for fifty pesos. With good leaves and good chemistry, 1001b of leaves will give you 1lb of cocaine.
‘Later I made a deal with a grower and bought the leaves fresh from the
total
. The bright, undried leaves are the best for cooking.’
Mario spoke with slow, gruff precision. The voice was untroubled, but there was always a challenge in his eye. His beard jutted. He sent out jets of smoke through his nostrils like a cartoon bull. There are, he explained, essentially two stages in the ‘cooking’ of cocaine.
‘De coca a pasta, y de pasta a perica.’
From coca leaf to cocaine paste or base, and from cocaine paste to crystalline cocaine. The first is a simple process of extraction, which draws out the all-important vegetable alkaloids from the leaf.
‘The cocaine is hiding inside the leaf,’ said Mario. ‘The
cocinero
must get inside the leaf and fetch out the little bit of cocaine.’ His thin hands writhed to gesture this process.
There are many alkaloids in the coca leaf, but only one of them is the psychoactive substance known to organic chemists as benzoyl-methyl-ecgonine, and to the world as cocaine. The second, more complex stage of the cooking is designed to separate the cocaine from the other alkaloids, and to crystallise it into a salt. The coca grown in Colombia and Peru, the trujillo leaf (
Erythroxylon novogranatense
), has a slightly lower proportion of cocaine to other alkaloids than the Bolivian strain, the huanaco leaf (
Erythroxylon coca
).
‘To make the
pasta
out of coca leaves is very simple. You need some petrol: kerosene is best. You need a quantity of sulphuric acid, and you need an alkali. For alkali you can use lime or sodium carbonate. I used the simplest of all:
potasa
.’
Potasa
, or potash, is a crude form of potassium carbonate derived from vegetable ash. ‘Most of all, you need patience,’ he added.
‘The first part of the operation is what we call la
salada
, the salting. Here you sprinkle and mix the potash into the leaves. If you are treating a big volume of leaves, you can do this in a pit lined with plastic sheeting. Otherwise you do it in an oil drum or plastic bucket. When you have salted the leaves you let them stand for a few hours. The potash makes them sweat. It starts to melt the alkaloids in the leaf.
‘The second part is
la mojadura
, the soaking. This is when we pour the kerosene on to the leaves, drown the coca. You can also put in a bit of dilute sulphuric acid to help break the leaves down. After the soaking you must leave everything to steep for at least a day, better for thirty-six hours. While you wait, the potash is drawing out the alkaloids from the leaf. They float free in the kerosene, which holds them.
‘By the end of the second day you are ready to begin
la prensa
, the pressing. If you don’t have a press, you use your feet, like they do when they make
chicha
.’ (
Chicha
is maize liquor, a traditional
campesino
hooch now officially outlawed in Colombia.) ‘The purpose of
la prensa
is to get as much of the kerosene out of the leaves as possible. The kerosene is rich with the alkaloids. The leaves are dead now, black and rotten. You siphon off the kerosene into drums and throw away the leaves.
‘The fourth stage is very delicate. This is when we take the alkaloids out of the gasolene and put them in water. This is done by pouring in water and sulphuric acid. Again you leave it, absolutely still, for a day. The acid goes in and takes the alkaloids, and they are dissolved in the water. We call this part of the process
la guaraperia
. At the end you have the kerosene on the top, and the
guarapo
underneath. The
guarapo
is a solution of cocaine and the other alkaloids.’ (In ordinary circumstances,
guarapo
is the name of a drink, either a juice or a liquor, made from sugar cane.)
‘Into the
guarapo
you pour more potash. This makes the alkaloids precipitate. You see the
guarapo
go milky-white. This is the first time the cocaine becomes visible. If you have some ammonia this is the best for precipitation.
‘Now you are ready for the last part of the operation:
la secaderia
, the drying. This is filtering out the precipitate – you can use a sheet – and drying it in the sun or under lightbulbs. You dry it until it is like moist clay. And so you have it:
la pasta de cocaina
!’
So far, so good. You had your cocaine paste, the greenish-grey sludge that is the building block of the whole cocaine racket. This is already a valuable commodity. It can be dried off and sold as
basuko
. It is chemically stable, and can be transported through any climate without damaging its potency. How much it is worth depends on where you stand on the ladder, who you are selling to, and in what quantity. At today’s prices a pound of
pasta
can fetch anything from $500 to $2,000.
But what about the other half of the operation, the turning of
pasta
into pure cocaine, snorter’s snow? This is where the real money lies. A good cook can turn that pound of
pasta
into nearly the same weight of cocaine, worth around $5,000 on the Bogotá market. Here, however, I was to be disappointed. Perhaps Mario did not consider me worthy to enter this secret inner sanctum of cocaine chemistry. Perhaps I hadn’t paid enough. Perhaps he was getting forgetful himself. It was eight years since he’d done any cooking. He had been nearly killed when a carboy of ether exploded in his outhouse laboratory at Las Animas. He showed me the burns on his back, marbled whorls of tissue. The fire had destroyed his materials and, worse, it had burned up most of the money he had saved. He had given up then. One of the big, Cali-based refining groups that began to emerge in the late 1970s offered to set him up with a backstreet kitchen, but he refused. He had been a cook for the love of it, he said, not the money. He was a
mano verde
, an old-style cocaine alchemist. He spat on the mafia, the faceless
peces gordos
, who ran the business now. I tried to wheedle the process out of him, but in the scrawled scraps of my notes from that night I find only broken phrases:
Potassium permanganate: knocks out the inessential alkaloids by oxidisation . . .
Organic solvents: acetone, ether, benzole, toluol. Toluol best, balsam of
tofu
, derived from Caribbean tree . . .
Gas crystals . . .
Hydrochloric acid bonds with cocaine alkaloid to form a crystalline salt. Snorter’s snow is cocaine hydrochloride. Sometimes other acids used: cocaine sulphate, oxalate, hypochlorate . . .
Balance. Too much acid, coke will be
agrio
, sour. Too much carbonate, coke will be
jabonoso
, soapy . . .
To the aspiring drug chemist these might mean something. They don’t mean much to me, as I’m sure Mario knew. His demeanour was getting uglier. He was tired of my questions. He threw the information out impatiently He ran a hand over his furrowed brow. I decided it was time to give it a rest. I’d had my fifty quid’s worth.
The Fruit Palace
, 1985
John Hopkins
Tangier Buzzless Flies
I
N THE COUNTRYARD
of the Hotel Splendid Boujma was cutting kif. Seated on a straw hassock before a low wooden table, he began by rubbing the dry kif branches between his hands. The tiny leaves and seeds fell onto a piece of wrapping paper spread out on the table as he discarded the empty stalks one by one.
Next he shook the leaves and seeds onto a wooden cutting board, which he tilted carefully, allowing the seeds to roll down the board as he ran his hand gently over the kif. This process took some time. The seeds were placed in their own piece of wrapping paper and set aside. Now Boujma rested for a minute and took out his own supply of kif and had a smoke. Above his head the banana leaves stirred in the evening breeze. A few feet away the Sultan of Dogs lay in the hole it had dug for itself.
The hotel was quiet, with a few noises filtering in from the street. The pipe finished, Boujma resumed his work. Taking out a pocket knife, he sharpened it carefully against a stone. Separating a portion of the cleaned kif from the main pile, he pressed it firmly down on the board with his fingers and, wielding the knife like a paper cutter, commenced chopping the kif. This is a lengthy procedure, and when the kif had reached the consistency of rough powder, he poured it into a sardine can with a perforated bottom. The sardine can contained a bright Kennedy fifty-cent piece, which he shook together with the kif. The fine kif sifted onto another piece of paper, which Boujma folded over and placed beneath him on the hassock. The kif that had not passed through the perforations was dumped back onto the board to be recut with the next batch. And so, the work went on. When all of the kif had been satisfactorily chopped and sifted, Boujma reached for a wrinkled leaf of tobacco, sprinkled water on it, and began to cut and sift it as he had done the kif. This done, he brought out the kif, which had become a warm flat cake beneath his weight, mixed it with the smaller amount of tobacco, and recut and resifted it all together. The blend had a greenish-brown color, and although Boujma had chopped it very finely, each grain of tobacco and kif was separated from every other.
Now Boujma was stuffing the kif into a goat bladder, which with all the kif inside swelled to the size of a fist. The work completed, he smoothed out the wrapping papers and put them with the sardine can and knife and stone and board into a cupboard. During the whole process not one grain of kif or tobacco, not even one kif seed, had fallen to the ground, and even the barren kif stalks were wrapped carefully before being thrown away.
Tangier Buzzless Flies
, 1972
CHAPTER FIVE
CRIMINALISE IT
Howard Marks
Nature Talks
A million centuries ago, plants said ‘high’ to animals. Roots and seeds seduced tongues and stomachs. Vine, leaf and resin interplayed with hand, heart and mind. Drinking, smelling and sucking were the order, but never the regulations, of the light and the night.
And Nature said, ‘Higher.’
A pyramid here and a pyramid there. Gargling, sniffing, smoking, puking and starving for God, Siva and the Sun. Who’ll have the booze? Who’ll have the blow? Who’ll have a line? Who gets the fun?