“A concentration of product was generated… that could not be exported due to this strong anti-drug policy,” said toxicologist Juan Carlos Sanchez.ĭomestic clients, however, are not getting the best of what the world’s largest cocaine exporter has to offer. With aid from the US, leader in the global “war on drugs”, a Colombian crackdown since the early 2000s has forced traffickers to look homeward. In 2013, some 3.5% of Colombians said they had ever taken an illegal substance, according to the state statistics agency.īy 2019, the number had almost tripled to 9.7 percent. Researchers estimate the figure is now closer to 800. Morales’s downfall, he said, started at a so-called “vice plaza” – drug vending points that numbered about 160 in Medellin ten years ago, according to police. “The truth is that one is less cautious and it (the basuco) can cause you to do stupid things,” said Morales, who lost his job due to drug use.įour brief months later, all his worldly belongings fit into a worn briefcase, and he often sleeps rough.
His hands shaking, 32-year-old Morales inhaled a dose in a public park, using a pipe fashioned from a PVC tube, even as pedestrians and police milled around. Even on the floor you find drugs,” Manue Morales, an out-of-work engineer and chronic user of “basuco” – the cheapest drug on the market – told AFP.īasuco is derived from the coca leaf also used to make cocaine, and mixed with other low-grade substances. Junkies frequent hundreds of sales points dotted around Colombia’s second city, which has become the epicenter of the domestic drug trade. Three decades after cartel boss Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police on a rooftop in Medellin, the very city he had sought to uplift with drug money is being ravaged by it.