Cocaine

One of the side-effects of prohibition is contamination of unregulated illicit drug supplies, putting users at risk. Two now familiar, but disturbing, contaminants are in the news this week: anthrax in European heroin and levamisole in North American cocaine.

Drink up -- it's Coca Colla time! Yes, it's a coca-based soft drink, but you'll have to go to Bolivia to try it. And this isn't some de-cocainized soft drink; it's the real thing.

The illegal drug supply is increasing, and Mexican narcos are public enemy #1, according to the Justice Department's primary drug intelligence unit. There's no end in sight, the unit concludes.

Being a thoughtful, compassionate, and curious physician dealing with hard-core addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside makes Dr. Gabor Maté especially well-placed to write an important book about addiction. He has done so. You should read it.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved a bill that would reduce -- but not eliminate -- the infamous sentencing disparity between federal crack and powder cocaine offenses. The House Judiciary Committee has already passed a similar measure that would completely eliminate the disparity. Now it is up to the House and Senate leadership to get those bills to a floor vote, and advocates say it is the House bill that should move.

Cocaine contaminated with a veterinary de-worming agent called levamisole made the news last fall when coke users started coming down with a nasty disease called agranulocytosis and a few of them died. While the clamor has quieted, the tainted dope hasn't gone away. In fact, there seems to be more of it than ever.

A pair of sociologists get inside a San Diego area network of campus drug sellers and users to ask and answer the question of why privileged youth on the path to success would risk everything to peddle pot or pills. The short answer? They're not really very much at risk -- they're rich and white.

Bolivian President Evo Morales wants to amend his country's drug law to legalize coca farmers' small holdings and to bring allowed national cultivation limits in line with Bolivian reality. This won't go over well in Washington or with the UN anti-drug bureaucrats.

West Africa has become an important transshipment point for cocaine headed from South America to Europe. They also grow a lot of marijuana there. Now, the Liberian government wants to crack down, and it's reading from the old US drug war playbook.

More than a year after the DEA quietly reported that a veterinary anti-parasitic agent was showing up in cocaine, and after at least two US deaths linked to the tainted drug, federal public health officials have finally issued an alert warning doctors, treatment centers, and public health professionals of the menace.