The only reason it s more valuable than coffee say, is that cocaine is illegal. In Peru, the coca crop, which is mostly shipped to Columbia, is a billion dollar industry. Coca is the leading export in Bolivia, and Guatamala has also gotten into the act recently, to the extent that the U.S. instituted a program last month called Operation Mayan-Jaguar, featuring American gunboats and helicopters, to eradicate that country s coca production. Much of South America it seems runs the risk of becoming part of an elaborate organized crime network all because a certain small percentage of Americans refuse to curb their appetite for cocaine and the government refuses to make cocaine legal. They would rather spend a billion for helicopters in Columbia and untold billons here at home than the same amount on mentors in the Bronx, or for drug rehabilitation everywhere.
Cocaine is a relative newcomer into the American drug scene.
Until the late seventies, Columbia mostly exported marijuana to the United States. But when the government put their finger in the hole of that dike, the Columbians switched to a smaller, more valuable, more potent and addictive substance, cocaine. Demand followed supply at first. One of the effects of the drug war is it creates incentives for drug users and suppliers to switch to more potent substances that are smaller and easier to conceal. Even if the government suddenly figured out a way to control the supply side of the cocaine epidemic, the people whose crime problems are attributed to their cocaine consumption would simply switch to the domestically produced poor man s cocaine, methamphetamine.