Paco, a newish variation of cocaine, is in the news after the New York Times excerpted from a piece appearing in the Argentine press. The paco drug is made from the residues of cocaine processing and then cut, to perhaps 10% purity, by the addition of just about anything that comes to hand, up to and including rat poison.
Paco provides an extremely intense hit but a brief one: it is also incredibly cheap, perhaps a dollar a hit or less. These three attributes have meant that paco taking has become endemic in the slums and shantys that surround Argentina's larger cities. The best comparison for paco is probably crack cocaine: an intense high gained by smoking the drug, but a short lived one which leads to increasingly desperate attempts to get more.
But why Argentina as the country to suffer from paco? There's little or no actual growing of coacine in the country, so why should the residues from the processing be distributed there? The suspect here is Evo Morales, over the border in Bolivia. As an ex-coca farmer himself (that's coca the plant, which has a number of traditional uses, not cocaine, the drug) he has encouraged the growing of coca bushes for those traditional uses: but he has cracked down hard on those who would process the leaves into cocaine. Given the long and virtually unguarded border between Bolivia and Argentina, some of the crop is now smuggled over the border and processed into cocaine in Argentina. Thus the residues available to be made into paco.
But why should, as the headline suggests, this outbreak of paco taking and the undoubted harm it is doing be a reason for legalization? Hasn't it come about as a result of near legalization in Bolivia?
That is indeed true, but the harm from paco comes not from the cocaine part of it, but from the cutting part of it: that rat poison for example. If cocaine itself were legal and available in pure form, then no one would be smoking the paco, the sweepings from the laboratory floor.
However, we know that cocaine is not going to be made legal: among other things there are a series of treaties under the auspices of the UN to make sure that no one does indeed do that. So, sadly, paco taking will eventually reduce, but for much the same sad reason that PJ O'Rourke pointed out crack cocaine use would reduce. Because those who smoke it will die.
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