Lima - The cocaine chain starts in the mountainous jungles of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where peasants sell their coca leaf crop to criminal gangs. It ends on the streets of the United States and Europe. At least 16 million people used cocaine at least once in 2007, according to the United Nation's 2009 World Drug Report.
Cocaine cannot be made without leaves from coca, the plant with ancient roots in Andean culture, where indigenous people chew or brew tea from the mildly stimulant leaves, which numb the mouth. Peasants use coca to suppress hunger and fight fatigue.
The most active ingredient of coca is cocaine, an alkaloid first purified out of the leaves by a German chemist in the mid 19th century.
In the West, the drug has evolved through many uses: Pain killer, wine additive, treatment for morphine addiction. Mississippi steamboat operators and early Antarctic explorers used it as a stimulant.
As cocaine's popularity grew, so did addiction, prompting governments to clamp down on its use through the 20th century.
Colombia dominated world production in 2008 with 81,000 hectares of coca crops, followed by Peru with 56,100 hectares and Bolivia with 30,500 hectares. Together, the three Andean countries produced an estimated 845 metric tonnes that year - a drop of nearly 15 per cent from 2007, which experts attribute to seizures by police and the growing popularity of illicit methamphetamines.
In Colombia, where coca consumption is not a popular tradition, almost all of the crop goes to the drug trade. In Peru, 10 per cent of the crop goes towards traditional demand.
Traffickers buy dried coca leaves from peasant farmers for 4 to 6 dollars a kilogramme.
Processors use solvents such as kerosene, sulphuric or hydrochloric acid and sodium carbonate to extract the drug, refining just 1 kilogramme of coca paste out of 110 kilogrammes of dry coca leaves. Further refinement using more acid, acetone and ammonia or potassium permanganate reduces the 1 kilogramme of coca paste to 400 grams of pure cocaine.
As of 2007, 1 kilogramme of high-grade powder cocaine fetched about 92 dollars a gram in Europe. Under heavy pressure from police crackdowns and growing demand elsewhere, prices in New York soared to 200 dollars a gram by late 2008 even as the drug was cut, or diluted, with cheap substances.
Whatever the street price, it represents a 100-to-200-fold profit from the price paid to farmers. The phenomenal profitability feeds a global industry worth at least 70 billion dollars, experts estimate.
Cocaine follows the usual market laws of supply and demand. People in the region joke that cocaine is the only successful Latin American transnational, with production and distribution in local hands.
Colombia, followed by Peru, processes most of Latin America's crop into cocaine, with a fledgling industry in Bolivia. Venezuela is the main conduit to the Atlantic, West Africa and Spain, according to the International Narcotics Control Board. Lesser corridors traverse Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
A joint Washington-Bogota offensive in the late 1980s and early 1990s effectively shut down the Colombia-Caribbean conduit into the United States, leaving Mexico as the main route into the US.
Cocaine fuels armed political conflict in Colombia and breeds unstoppable violence in Mexico, claiming 9,000 lives since January 2008. The blood-letting spills over into Guatemala, Brazil, Peru and other countries, including West Africa's Guinea Bissau, where deaths have increased from gang violence and among an increasing number of cocaine users.
From 2000 to 2006, the US poured 6 billion dollars into Colombia's efforts to combat the drug trade. Other Latin American governments, spurred by the United States, have also tried to forcibly repress trafficking.
"It cannot be that producing countries are considered more responsible than those that demand (drugs)," Colombian Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez said. "There must be a principle of shared responsibility."
During a visit to Mexico earlier this year, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded that the United States shared part of the blame for both the flow of drugs from Mexico and the reverse trafficking of illegal weapons flowing south of the border.
While relations with Latin America may improve under US President Barack Obama, there are lingering complaints.
Peru is still fuming over a 35-per-cent drop in US assistance for its drug battle. Venezuela and Bolivia have forbidden entry to the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
"With an approach based on prohibition and repression, we have not managed to reduce either plantations or consumption or traffic," said Brazil's former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a member of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
"A key factor is missing: A reduction of demand, with the addict treated for a public health problem. This does not mean liberalizing consumption or not repressing the big drug trafficking groups, but we have to change the paradigm and act in a more intelligent way."
