Colombia's New Cocaine?

The molecular structure of H2CB, or pink cocaine, on the right.

Just what Colombia needed - now it's also making synthetic cocaine.

That's according to news reports that a synthetic drug called 'pink cocaine' invented in Holland is being manufactured in the Zona Cafetera and the Norte del Valle. The stuff, whose chemical name is H2CB, is said to be relatively easy to make, transport and hide.

If this is true, and not another legend-from-the-Colombian-jungle like the Roundup-resistant coca bushes Wired magazine wrote about a few years ago, then it's got a significance far beyond being yet another criminal enterprise.

Where is it? "The Conjurer," by Hieronymus Bosch,
shows a shell game and a pickpocket.

Have you ever watched those swindlers playing the shell game on a sidewalk? No matter which shell the poor victim looks under, the ball's somewhere else. That's what the War on Drugs often feels like: a nation makes progress, as Colombia has against cocaine, only to have the industry shift somewhere else, like Peru, and the violence migrate to Mexico.

But this brings something more like a pardigm shift. If this 'synthetic cocaine' is really easier to manufacture, transport and hide than normal cocaine while being more profitable, it just might accomplish drug warriors' goal: reduce the traditional cocaine industry - but by replacing it with something even worse.
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours