Banker’s Drug Bust Spotlights Colombians’ Hidden Habits

Smoking marijuana is not exactly a new practice here. Ever since renowned poet Porfirio Barba Jacob in the 1920s wrote his ode to the weed, “Ballad of Crazy Joy,” a number of Colombians have dabbled in marijuana use.

But when one of the nation’s leading government bankers was caught with a small stash as he attempted to board an international flight last month, a lively debate followed.

Suddenly, Carlos Ossa, the banker, became a lightning rod for Colombia’s deep and contradictory feelings about the use and legalization of drugs.

Ossa, co-director of Colombia’s national bank and a former mayoral candidate, was scolded by a senator for disgracing his children and the nation; he was questioned by another senator as to whether his faculties were intact and was censured by 44 other lawmakers, who demanded his resignation.

As some rushed to attack Ossa, others acted just as swiftly to defend him--often hinting at their own drug use. They saw the handsome 45-year-old as a yuppie being crucified for simply carrying a bit of marimba on a business trip.

Antonio Caballero, a leading columnist, said the banker had no reason to apologize for what was “simply a matter of personal or generational tastes.”

Finally, the pressure of the scandal was too great, and Ossa this week announced he would leave his position at the bank. But he’s not discounting a future in politics.

Ossa’s indiscretion uncapped the lid on an open national secret. Colombia is home to two of the world’s most powerful drug cartels and a booming industry in cocaine, marijuana and, most recently, heroin. Yet Colombian governments have been slow to recognize drug consumption among their own people.

Governments here have traditionally regarded drug use as a foreign vice, blaming American and European consumption for the drug wars that kill hundreds of Colombians every year. And Colombians viewed with morbid fascination the cocaine trial of former Washington Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr., seeing in it a glaring example of uniquely American decadence.

With television news reports showing daily raids of cocaine laboratories or poppy plantations--yet very few arrests of consumers--many here seemed convinced that drug use was not a Colombian problem.

But that is finally, slowly changing. A recent national drug survey revealed that 11.7% of the population had consumed illegal drugs at least once in their life, including 10% of men who had tried marijuana and 1.5% of the population who had tried cocaine and basuco , a highly addictive and dangerous form of unrefined cocaine.

Experts said the figures underestimated domestic drug consumption. The surveys were conducted in people’s homes, where they may have been reluctant to talk about their illegal habits. The surveys also omitted “high-risk” sectors of the population, including inmates at reformatories and prisons and the homeless.

Experts also pointed to the simple evidence of the streets. Homeless children, known here as gamines , wander the city sucking on bags filled with glue, used to stave off cold and hunger, or smoking basuco.

Young people fill the flea markets on weekends, openly smoking marijuana; hawkers of drug paraphernalia are ubiquitous on Bogota’s major thoroughfares, spreading row after row of Indian blankets with rolling papers and pipes.

“In any part of the city, you will be offered packets of basuco, cocaine or marijuana,” said Gloria de Salvador, a clinical psychologist, who argues that drug abuse has risen due to stress, the breakdown of families and American influence. “Our culture has changed. Today, youth see drugs on the streets, in their schools, in their clubs.”

After poet Barba Jacob memorialized marijuana use, celebrating the “crazy joy” of being “a lost one, a marijuana smoker--a drinker,” Colombian university students took up the cause in the 1960s. They reveled, along with their foreign equivalents, in rebellion, counterculture and an occasional toke.

Ossa himself, shortly after being caught with the drug, commented: “One cannot deny what one has been. The sixties was a very beautiful time.”

But experts here agree that a wave of cocaine use is related to mimicking of U.S. fashions of the 1980s. And they worry that the same thing could happen with heroin, now that thousands of acres of Colombian land are planted with heroin-producing poppies for export to Europe and the United States.