‘Cocaine of the Poor’ Coming Home to Roost in 3 S. American Nations

Jesus said he was 13, and he admitted smoking basuco, South America’s noxious equivalent of crack.

He was a small boy with round, dirty cheeks. His droopy-lidded eyes gazed from under the tattered brim of a straw hat. Speaking softly and slowly, slurring his words, he told a stranger on the street that he had been smoking basuco with his father just a few minutes earlier.

“When he gives it to me, I smoke,” Jesus said. They also had been drinking aguardiente , he said, drinking and smoking since the day before. What does it feel like?

“You forget everything,” he mumbled. “You feel like you are going, going. . . .” He didn’t finish. His father, slumped against a wall in the shadows behind him, said nothing.

Jesus and his father gather discarded paper, cardboard and bottles from the streets of Bogota. They sell them for recycling in a littered alley where they and other homeless people also sleep. Many of them spend their meager earnings on basuco. Many steal or beg for money to buy more.

Colombia, Peru and Bolivia produce the bulk of the highly refined cocaine that is smuggled to the United States, where the drug is a national problem. Now, a by-product of that lucrative export trade is causing equally serious domestic problems for the three producing countries.

Basuco is low-grade cocaine, either impure paste extracted chemically from the leaf of the coca plant or chalky, semi-refined cocaine base distilled from the paste. The same substance with another name, pitillo, is widely smoked in Peruvian and Bolivian cities. Peddlers or users put it in cigarettes with tobacco or marijuana.

“The habit of smoking coca paste is a grave plague with grave consequences for the individual, the family and the community,” Raul Neri, a professor of neurology at Peru’s San Marcos University, concluded in a study. “More effective measures are urgently needed in the countries where this plague has become generalized.”

The use of basuco or pitillo has spread for some of the same reasons crack has proliferated in American cities: both are cheap in comparison to pure cocaine powder, and both produce a quick, powerful “rush” when smoked.

Unlike crack, however, basuco contains toxic residues of chemicals used to process coca--items such as leaded gasoline, potassium permanganate, sulfuric acid and caustic soda. Those chemicals add to the risk of using basuco, said Camilo Uribe, chief toxicologist at a clinic here.

“It is much more serious than crack,” he added. “Crack is made with pure cocaine and basuco with all the toxic elements it contains.”

He said that habitual use of basuco has been shown to cause toxic hepatitis, damage to the pancreas, chemical pneumonia, lead poisoning, cerebral atrophy and other serious ailments.

Uribe called basuco the “cocaine of the poor,” but its use is also common in the middle and upper classes, especially among young people. Private clinics, like the one where Uribe works, treat hundreds of patients for dependency on basuco.

“Of course it is an epidemic,” Uribe said.

Augusto Perez, professor of psychopathology at the University of the Andes in Bogota, directed a survey for the municipal government showing that 3.8% of the city’s male residents have used basuco. Because those interviewed often lie and because it is hard to interview drug users in poor neighborhoods, Perez said that the real percentage probably is three times as high.

Most users of basuco develop problems of dependency, he said, estimating that a total of 150,000 people in Bogota have had problems with the drug.

“Medellin is much worse,” he said.

When basuco is smoked, its narcotic alkaloids and other chemicals enter the bloodstream from the lungs and pass directly to the brain. “The impact is brutal,” Perez said. “It is a violent jolt to the nervous system.”

He and other experts said the initial rush of pleasure from the drug rapidly gives way to feelings of anxiety and irritation, and so the smoker wants another dose to recapture the high.

Smokers often go on long binges, smoking until they run out of the drug.

“You can smoke 200 cigarettes without stopping, and they do,” said Perez.

Cell destruction to the brains of basuco users can result in loss of concentration, lack of motivation and incapacity for abstract reasoning, he said. “Their behavior becomes that of a stupid person.”

According to different studies, heavy use of basuco also can produce such psychological disorders as insomnia, anorexia, hallucinations, paranoia, depression, aggressiveness and suicidal tendencies.

In the Bogota alley were papers and bottles are collected, a man who called himself Vicente said he saw no great harm in smoking basuco.

“It is like spending your money on women or on drinking,” he said.

When he came to Bogota from a provincial town two years ago, Vicente said, he was a house painter. For the past eight months, he has been smoking basuco and gathering paper and bottles. The bill of his cap and the sleeves of his suit were shiny with accumulated grime, and the dark stubble on his thin cheeks was several days old.

“All the money I have I spend,” he said. That day, he had spent nearly $6 on basuco. He said he pays less than 30 cents for each basuco cigarette.

At first, Vicente claimed that basuco had not hurt him.

“The minute I want to quit, I will quit,” he said. Asked if he knew basuco could cause brain damage, he replied, “I consider myself 95% normal.” After reconsidering, however, he admitted:

“It doesn’t do anyone any good. But getting someone to quit is like dragging a burro by the tail.”