 No place on earth harbors more species, more mysteries, more oddities than the Amazon jungle. Yet few species of plant or animal evoke the fascination of a common-looking leaf that grows at the jungle's edge. A leaf with extraordinary powers. Cross four millennia and the natives have chewed the leaf, warding it in their cheeks, unlocking a stimulant once treasured by the Incas. Today the leaf prized by Indians is turned by modern alchemy into a devilish, white gold, cocaine. Five times more valuable than gold itself. As in other ages, a source of riches begets violence, anguish, even desperate experiments. Led by Jean-Michel Cousteau, a calypso team sets out on a special mission for the source of a present-day calamity, a hidden jungle underworld obsessed not with gold or jewels, but leaves of the cocoa bush, leaves invested with a terrible magic. Once patrolled by Indian hunters, the Cousteau team watches police stalk a new quarry, a cocaine producer to study wildlife. Calypso teams discover a remote world in combat. Over a drug, calypso, on the main Amazon, the teams report their findings to Captain Cousteau. Cocaine problems confront them everywhere along the expedition route, Jean-Michel says. Ruthlessly, smugglers threaten even missionaries. Cousteau wonders if the cocaine is produced locally. The leaves are grown and the first processing step takes place in the jungle. The Peruvian newspapers reveal a preponderance of cocaine articles, a hundred million dollar deal, a trial killed and then stuffed with cocaine by smugglers. Proposing an unusual expedition into this dangerous underworld, Jean-Michel explains that all the world's cocaine comes from the eastern slopes of the Andes in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, then is smuggled to the United States and increasingly to Europe. Cousteau endorses the mission as a part of Calypso's overall study of Amazonia. Though forest is being cleared to grow coca, exacerbating erosion problems, the greater menace is to human ecology. We cannot be indifferent, he says, to the internal pollution of man. Yet there is a final caution. Take extreme care among traffickers who protect their anonymity with guns. We must do something about it. The coca has been chewed for thousands of years, but really these plants are cultivated to prepare the coca paste. The coca paste is an intermediate phase of the preparation of cocaine hydrochloride. Hydrochloride is the pure cocaine, it's the white powder. They prepare the coca paste using sulfuric acid, kerosene, sodium benzoate and other chemicals. The coca paste is used as smoking or it is the pure hydrochloride is sniffed or injected into the vein. Once it is developed it goes into the brain and it produces at first a very marked stimulation. And if you continue to use cocaine and finally you may have myoclonic jerks and even convulsions, generalized convulsions. Cocaine has killed many people in South America and in North America. How many cigarettes a day? Eighty. Eighty? Eighty. Did some of his friends die? Yes, what if his friends died? They had spent three or four nights without sleeping as they smoked coca paste. His friend continued until he passed out and his heart stopped. Scientists have reported unusual cocaine addiction in animals when given the opportunity to self-administer the drug. How unusual is this and how does it compare to man? Monkeys given free access to cocaine will self-administer the drug until they die. This compulsive behavior is very similar to that of man self-administering cocaine. Yet in the Peruvian Andes the team learns that an entire culture has long chewed the same leaves that yield cocaine. Today some would ban coca chewing, others defend it. I consider that these are two different problems. The growing of coca leaves for human consumption as coca leaves is a different thing completely from cultivating coca leaves to produce cocaine or coca paste. We do need coca leaves because it's part of the culture. In other words, millions of people must have coca. Oh yes, yes, definitely thanks. For four thousand years they have been chewing it and enjoying it and using it as a part of their social customs and etiquette. In order to combat something that is bad for the United States we cannot step on the rights of our poor people. Do you consume coca leaves? Well, I don't belong to that culture. When I go to visit their homes or I go to the field with them, I chew coca. When the first pharaohs arose in Egypt, Indian natives were already chewing coca. Today three to four million descendants of the Inca Empire, the Quechua, still treasure coca is a mild stimulant. Chewing it, steeping it for tea or medicine. They believe it essential for heavy work at high altitudes and for relief from hunger and cold. Though some critics charge that coca chewing fosters a passive society doomed to poverty, governments still permit the cultivation and sale of coca for personal use. Among natives whose culture it permeates, to do otherwise would undoubtedly provoke widespread revolt. Coca leaves holder, mystical allure, are charged with the energy of life itself. In remote Colombian jungle, Yakuna Indians gather each year to pay homage to their gods with gifts of coca. Anthropologist Martin van Hildebrand and Cousteau team member Arturo Calvo will observe a ceremony seen by few outsiders. Like priests preparing wafers or communion, villagers first toast their sacred offering. Others fashion totem masks to incarnate the animal spirits they believe own the jungle's resources and share them with man. When dry, the coca leaves are reduced to powder. Next, sycropia leaves are burned to a limey ash that enhances the effects of coca. Now in the Maloka or central house, the liturgy begins. The ritual will last for 20 hours, a marathon of dance, food and coca. The Yakunas believe they briefly partake of the mind of the spirits, the vital energy of nature. Symbolically sharing it with the animal gods, they give thanks for the jungle's bounty. They give mystical societies only in ritual will the Yakunas consume large doses of their sacred drug. Yet the leaf that transports them to the world of the gods takes others far beyond their villages. On a passage into hell, it's isolation. Countless Indians today harvest coca, not for medicine men, but for drug merchants who invade the jungle like modern conquistadors. A teacher who turned cocaine dealer agrees to speak anonymously with the Cousteau team. For three years he has bought leaves from Indians producing coca paste. Even the police here are corrupt, he says, blackmailing Indians and small coca farmers. Perhaps the only authority who doesn't pay to be assigned here is the bishop. Where does the coca go? Carvaless. The United States consumes most of it. Organized crime families transported from hidden airstrips in the jungle. There's no mystery. Everyone knows that. They take it to the United States. Even though most cocaine moves in small planes or boats, smugglers use a thousand ploys. Narcotic squads learn that a clay souvenir plate can be 75% cocaine. As a drug can be pressed between the sides of a phonograph record, concealed in the heel of a shoe in a child's doll, in a pineapple, in a flashlight battery. To stop the ever greater northward flow of cocaine, the United States sends millions of dollars to outfit and train young narcotics police in South America. Yet that task is formidable in one of the world's most lawless towns, Tingo Maria, Peru, called by dealers, the white city. Despite threats from drug lords, Jean Michel and his team fly to the coca capital of Tingo Maria. Here 95% of the population is involved in the illicit coca trade. Once rich in food crops, the valley around Tingo Maria now grows little more than coca. We're making our mission by accompanying a narcotic squad as observers. An old farmer has been arrested for growing and selling coca illegally. His field will now be destroyed. Having at his farm, we find only a half acre of coca bushes, worth a few hundred dollars a year. In an experiment, agents will destroy the coca with herbicides, then we turn the farmer to jail. A great wealth from coca is in the hands of traffickers, but punishment falls to the poor who cannot buy freedom. Facing months or years in jail, he tells us that he grows coca only for chewing. I need it, he says. I was taught to chew it as a young boy. There seems a fine line between villain and victim. Police too fall victim to ambush or deadly surprise. In another farm, a common hazard, a tripwire, is sighted. Looks like it could be one of those booby traps. The type of booby traps they show us at their place. Yeah, look at that thing. I'm sure it's very nice. Yeah? Yeah. Did you see that? It came apart. Goodness. Think what that could do to your leg or... Pretty dangerous. Not to say the least. And it's a... That's what they always look like. A plumbing pipe. With some kind of wood. Yeah, a rat trap. With Cousteau expedition leader Dominic Soumian following, the team hurries to find what the booby trap protected. Behind a wall of trees, they find a primitive refinery, even now turning coca leaves to coca paste. In a plastic lined pit, the narcotic in coca leaves is leached out by kerosene treated with sulfuric acid. The residue is coca paste smuggled elsewhere and refined to cocaine. The tiny refinery is destroyed, but the pacemaker is escaped to quickly fashion another. The young captain has spotted two suspects at a roadside cantina. The clue of bag abandoned as the police cars approached, tuition or pure luck. The squad happens upon two possible couriers. Confiscates seven pounds of paste, merely a drop in the sea of cocaine. In the country, there are 50,000 hectares of illicit coca crops. The 125,000 acres of illicit coca in this country can produce 620,000 pounds of paste, yet relatively little is confiscated. So to think the police alone can solve the problem would be naive. At a bus stop in Tingo Maria, we witness another happenstance arrest. Two young mothers, 18 and 25 years old, were searched on the policeman's hunch. They were carrying coca paste for a stranger who hired them to deliver it to Lima. Like many here, they know little of the faraway effects of the drug. The younger girl now learns heartbreaking news. To this young lady, for example, I understand that she's going to be now in jail for 10 to 15 years. She tells us they would have been paid the equivalent of $75 to ride the bus with the paste. She needed the money to feed her baby. She has no husband. The other mother understood the risk, but she has five children and her husband left her for another woman. I think of the drug victims half the world away tormented as they try to escape reality. And the victims here trapped as they try to escape poverty. Neither knows the existence of the other, yet both are preyed upon by the drug mafia. Today, two young mothers are about to lose everything. Their freedom, their youth, and even the unimaginable, the babies they were desperate to feed. Somewhere a drug peddler lost two pounds of paste. Easily replaced. The price leads to the Tingle Maria prison, who are felons. Most are youths who simply struck a devil's bargain, carried a bag of cocoa paste to earn a few dollars, and were caught. Built for 60 inmates, the prison now holds 200. In a mere corral without cells, they will stay on average 10 years, dine on manioc soup and bread each day, and wait. As Dominic Sumian sees, young mothers serve time in a separate room. Their infants, when old enough, will be sent to the prison. Their infants, when old enough, will be sent to families outside. Sumian recognizes a baby, now two months older, and a girl still wearing the dress she put on for a bus ride to Lima. The cocoa paste that puts poor farmers and mothers behind bars now imprisons others in a grim addiction. Dr. Martin Nizama shows us what has become the worst drug problem in Peru, common cigarettes in which cocoa paste has replaced most of the tobacco. In an outlying area of Tingle Maria, called Little Chicago, an addict allows us to watch as he prepares one of a hundred paced cigarettes he may smoke in a day. Once merely an export, cocoa paste is boomerang-backed on South American society, spreading like an epidemic among an entire generation. Yet in smoking the unrefined paste, they consume as well the kerosene and the chemicals that still taint it. The result is often not only compulsive smoking, but brain damage. Once a college student, the young man before us now seems a lost soul. To tell the truth, he says, I don't even remember my age. I was born in January, but I don't remember the year. I studied to be an electronics engineer, but once people see you like this, they don't give you work. This vice, unfortunately, is easy to enter. It is hard to get out. In desperation or compelled by families, some paced addicts seek help at narcotic treatment centers. Why are you here? I'm here because consuming drugs. First, marijuana. I liked it very much. After I tried with cocoa paste, that is more dangerous. You were not scared? At the beginning, I was scared. But you did it again, huh? I did it again many times. Well, you've been having problems with drugs for 12 years, and you're trying. I know you're trying to get out of this. Because the drugs will kill ourselves. We have to get conscious that the drugs are bad, that they kill little by little, and that is the only way that we can get out of that garbage. Yet so few escape the addiction that parents in despair now turn to radical and experimental therapies. Obsessed with the need to buy cocoa paste, smokers often steal and sell the belongings of their families. To support his habit, one young man robbed taxis, brandishing a blank cartridge pistol. Using massive doses of tranquilizers for months at a time without his patient's knowledge, one lemur's psychiatrist reduces addicts to a near infantile state, then tries to restructure their attitudes, while depriving them of cocoa paste. Finally, the addict is reintegrated into his family. We have a family parents club here. We meet every Monday. There are more than 50 families. The problem is terrible, really, very terrible. Can I ask you a personal question? Yes, sir. You think that at the very beginning of the problem of your son, you did the right thing for your son? Well, I had to say the problem was three, four years ago. I talked with all several people, doctors, priors, religious for their church. And they said, well, the boy is 24 years old, who is a real man. You don't have much responsibility over him. But in that, I forced it to him. When I go out, I throw out for the house. You take out the house in order to force him to work for himself. But the problem was the medicine was worse than illness. So you agree you did the wrong thing? Yes. How come the patients are not aware of the fact that this medicine is put in their food? No, he's taking medicine. But he knows that as vitamins. Your child has been driving without him knowing about it? Sure, no, he knows nothing. We give him the medicine, vitamin from Houston. Astronaut, we call astronaut vitamins. In another lima clinic, the most controversial therapy of all, a brain operation called a singulatomy, as the psychiatrist who conceived the operation explains, classical treatments constantly fail with some cocaine addicts. For those considered irrecoverable, surgery was begun. I accept it as an extreme method, he says. I prefer the classical methods. Those deemed irrecoverable are 16 years old. Paste is the worst rubbish, the worst thing in the world, he says. To protect his identities, he speaks to Jean-Michel. A mask is fashioned. He is called simply patient 29. As Jean-Michel learns, in a matter of hours, the boy will undergo the 29th singulatomy performed in Peru. He and his family have chosen it as a last resort, fearful of the consequences, more afraid of the addiction that killed his brother. When was the decision made, when did he finally decide to go ahead with it? The idea is to alter behavior by altering the brain, deep in the core of the brain. Cocaine artificially stimulates the same mechanisms that provide us with a sense of pleasure as we satisfy hunger, thirst, or the sex drive. Yet cocaine induces a fierce craving. The theory is that to remove part of the singulum, containing transmission lines between the brain's center of pleasure and conscious behavior is to remove the craving. Few operations in the world provoke such vehement arguments. Night the radical surgery also eliminates life's other pleasurable sensations. It's a question not lost on the young patient. Telling that we are with him. Good luck. In a five hour operation never before documented on film, doctors now attempt to alter behavior mechanisms in the brain of our new friend. Learned man huddle over a living mind, preparing to tamper with emotional circuitry only dimly understood. I wonder at the audacity. Are we witnesses to human progress or recklessness? Right or wrong, the operation is a testament to cocaine's power. Desperate to loosen the drug's grip, a society is now willing even to enthrone dangerously into the sanctity of the brain. Five weeks later, I again visit patient number 29. I share an afternoon with him, playing innocent games, talking of jobs of his future, laughing. His personality senses and intellect appear sound. Yet a year later, we learn further proof of cocaine's insidiousness. Half of the single-otomy patients have relapsed into cocaine addiction. One of them is patient number 29. As the casualties mount among Peru's young people, authorities seek to convince the public that progress is being made. In Lima, police investigators display a stockpile of drugs seized in only a few months. As government representatives in the press watch, the bags are tested for the presence of cocaine. Each bag is tagged with a number. Each number corresponds to a suspect, now held in prison, whose future depends on a chemist's finding. Positive or negative, each bag is tagged with a number. Each number corresponds to a suspect, now held in prison, whose future depends on a chemist's finding. Positive or negative, loaded in an open truck, the bags amount to more than three tons of coca paste, with a street value estimated at $15 million. The truck now carries a contraband fortune through the streets of Lima, bound for an incinerator. Go up in smoke. Yet the ceremony is a measure of failure, as well as success. Despite the fanfare, this is merely three tons of illicit coca paste, out of the 300 tons produced annually in Peru alone. There is a haunting sense of futility to the scene before us. The people try to read themselves of a menace, bearing white bags, as their ancestors bore sacrificial offerings. Yet efforts to intercept the traffic may hold only 10% of the cocaine streaming into society, probably less, and each year production expands. We need radar, planes, helicopters and arms, says the Minister of Interior, so we can fight the drug traders. Frustrated by the endless flow of cocaine, undermanned, outspanned by rich drug cartels, some authorities would raise veritable armies to conquer cocaine. Yet some question whether such a valuable substance producing remote regions too large to police can ever be stopped. At the presidential palace in Lima, I talk with the President of Peru. What appears to be a real problem which has ramifications all the way out to other countries, particularly the United States? There are many things for which we are very grateful. Grateful for literature, art, technology, medicine, many things. But we are certainly not grateful for the manufacturing of cocaine, which is a foreign enterprise in Peru. And then the consumer countries are sent here with money and weapons. So, I believe this is a problem more of the consuming countries than of the producing countries. Which the consuming countries borders must be crossed. Major South American airports are today the scenes of a tense cat-and-mouse game with high stakes. Those of travelers, customs agents, try to detect a growing number of drug runners. Those believed to fit a smuggler's profile are subject to thorough searches. Could the powdered milk be cocaine? Or is it concealed in the stuffed alligator? The agents are lucky. And suddenly tension mounts as all await the tell-tale blue reaction of cocaine. Yet most cocaine escapes detection, reaches distribution centers like Miami and proliferates. 5,000 Americans try cocaine for the first time every day. Dr. Nass, the cocaine situation today brings to mind the opium world in the mid-19th century. Opium, in great quantities, was carried from India and dispersed into China by British traders. Though the Chinese tried to ban the opium, the traffic was protected by the British military. When Chinese commissioner Lin Zushu ordered 1,300 tons of opium dumped into the sea, it triggered a series of wars concluded by the Treaty of Tianjing, which legalized the opium trade in China. 75 million Chinese became addicted to the narcotic. A British civil servant claimed, China is now asleep for a century. The Western world may enter such a decline if we do not react against a major threat of what may be called someday the cocaine war. Perhaps such a war is underway already, deep in the Colombian Amazon in March 1984. An army video camera records the largest drug rate in history, nearly 14 tons of pure cocaine, worth well over a billion dollars, with planes that a cache of weapons believed imported for leftist guerrilla fighters. Cocaine now also supports insurgent armies and is sent northward to the United States by some jungle militants to poison the population of a perceived enemy. The Kusto team asks, are you worried about the effects of cocaine on other countries such as the United States? No, the trafficker says. Because a lot of us consider this is a way of responding to the attack of imperialism in South America. It's a cultural response. If a lot of people are going to die here because of imperialist policies from the United States, a lot of people there are going to die from cocaine. This is war. It is a sad irony that we too often misuse a gift of nature. Turn energy to explosive, turn medicine to menace. The alcaloid extracted from coca leaves is the only naturally occurring local anesthetic on earth. Yet from this potential blessing, we manufacture a misbegotten magic. The tyrannies unleashed by a tiny leaf filled prisons was the poor, kill police, corrupt governments, fuel wars, ravage brains and hearts. Those who turned to cocaine often seek the euphoric sense of success and power that eludes them in reality and find themselves in stated drift in oblivion. Yet man has survived the ages, conquered other agonies using a different source of magic ultimately greater than any other. It is the power to understand and to overcome. It is the hope of the hopeless. It is the human mind. The cocaine problem or for more information, please call any of the following toll-free numbers 1-800-241-7946 1-800-554-KIDS or 1-800-COCAIN