The syndicate boss abroad, through a number of subordinates, buys coca leaves, sets up laboratories, maintains contact with local officials, arranges for payoffs, and recruits and dispatches local couriers with cocaine to the United States, mostly by plane. Some women carriers posed as being pregnant. . . . After a few of them had been arrested, however, the syndicates simply changed the style of their couriers. Subsequent reports indicated that couriers looked like businessmen or college students. A United States narcotics agent stationed in South America explained to a New York Times reporter in some detail just how this happens in the case of cocaine.
Cocaine is readily available in kilo lots in Chile and other Latin American countries.
This was price-cutting, and horning in on the trade of the established importer who had previously supplied the same dealer. Retribution swiftly followed. The flooding of the market with cocaine after 1968 represented a threat to the established black-market amphetamine interests. To the extent that such increased cocaine policing is effective, of course, it will protect the illicit speed market from too much cocaine competition. The developments of the 1960s can now be summed up.