Last June, Alejandro Arboleda Uribe was awakened from an afternoon nap by police kicking in the door of his apartment in a posh district of Medellín. The 32-year-old drug kingpin probably assumed the protection of Mexican cartels and renaissance elements of the old Medellín cartel inoculated him from this kind of raid. Not so. Capping years of investigation, Interpol and the Colombian police nailed him and 13 others in his organization and seized their stash, but it wasn’t cocaine. Uribe peddled synthetic drugs: ecstasy, MDMA, acid and his own recipe for a new favorite among Colombia’s youth – a pink powder called 2C-B.
The cartels are rethinking the South American market. And they’re here not to buy, but to sell.
"DESIGNER DRUGS GENERALLY ARE ASSOCIATED WITH LA RUMBA, FUN AND THE GOOD LIFE, UNLIKE COCAINE, WHICH HAS A RAP FOR BEING THE STUFF OF VIOLENT GANGS."
Places like Colombia, Central America and Brazil are usually thought of as producers and conduits — not consumers. That’s changing. Criminal groups across the region are tapping into Latin America’s growing demand for “new psychoactive substances” — a catchall class of drugs like the ones found in Uribe’s apartment. Colombia and Brazil especially are turning into import hubs. Seizures of ecstasy in Colombia increased seventeenfold from 2010 to 2015, according to the International Narcotics Control Board. In Brazil, seizures of ecstasy-like substances increased 379 percent in 2014 alone. “About 10 to 15 years ago, a lot of countries in Latin America said that they produced and acted as corridors for drugs but didn’t consume,” says Bo Mathiasen, the chief of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia. “Today, there isn’t even one country that’s not reporting drug use.”
It’s not as though consumers are looking for a bargain. On one Bogotá-based dealer’s menu, a single ecstasy pill runs from $7 to $14. A hit of 2C-B (2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine), a psychedelic pink cocaine, sells for about $50. A gram of pure MDMA? About the same price tag. Compare that to cocaine, which you can get on the streets of Bogotá for $5 per gram — 10 times cheaper.
