Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel.

IN Kings of Cocaine, Guy Gugliotta land Jeff Leen-expanding upon their award-winning series of articles for the Miami Herald-detail the rise of the murderous Colombian drug-smuggling syndicate-popularly known as the Medellin cartel-that today controls as much as 80 per cent of the international cocaine supply.

In the early 1970s, Chile was the hub of worldwide cocaine distribution. However, following the overthrow of Marxist President Allende, General Pinochet put the Chilean cocaine dealers out of business within a year, whereupon the trade moved to Colombia.

At first, the Colombians were content to serve as refiners for the coca raised in Peru and Bolivia, shipping the produce to Cuban distributors headquartered in Miami. As the demand for cocaine in the U.S. and Europe grew, however, a group of Colombians based in the city of Medellin decided to break the Cubans' hold and assume control of both the production and distribution of the drug. The authors relate how the Medellin combine succeeded in getting rid of their competitors and developing a sophisticated distribution network that now employs thousands of people in Latin America, the U.S., and Europe.

The Medellin cartel is credited with introducin "crack," the almost instantly addictive smokeable form of cocapaste derivative, to the U.S. market. By this means, cocaine was transformed from a drug for the decadent wealthy into a product available to the masses.

By 1983, our able ambassador to Colombia, Lewis Tambs, was convinced that drug traffickers and Marxists there had formed an alliance. Gugliotta and Leen affirm the essential validity of Tambs's assessment and detail the ties the Medellin cartel forged with leftist guerrillas at home in Colombia, with the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, with Fidel Castro, and with Panama's General Manuel Noriega. The guerrillas provide security for coca farmers, while Panama and Nicaragua have been used for the refining and transshipping of cocaine.

The Colombian government has cooperated sporadically with U.S. drugenforcement efforts; by the end of 1986 a dozen cocaine distributors had been extradited to the U.S. to stand trial. But the cartel fought back, and in recent years has been responsible for the murder of Colombia's minister of justice; the chief of the country's National Police Anti-Narcotics Unit; fifty judges, including 12 members of the Supreme Court; scores of journalists; and countless informers. Colombia is a country faced with the collapse of her major social institutions, as the multi-billion-dollar drug trade headquartered there continues to thrive.

Other countries have successfully coped with emergent drug epidemics. But there is as yet no indication that the United States is willing to duplicate the measures-generally including a combination of stiff jail sentences for possession and swift execution of dealers-that have been found necessary to stem a plague of this kind. Unless such actions are taken here, there is no reason to suppose that the so-called war on drugs, currently being waged under the command of Field Marshal Bennett, will amount to much more than a war of words.