Sniffing out a fruit-flavored trend in cocaine

Federal drug agents say candy-flavored cocaine is a new and troubling development and are hoping to keep it from spreading to the rest of the country after its recent emergence in California.

Drug rings have occasionally sold cocaine mixed with candy powder, but investigators said the new product was significantly more sophisticated and lucrative. Cocaine cut with an added flavoring is less potent, but the 1½ pounds seized last month were a full-strength powder into which strawberry, coconut, lemon and cinnamon flavoring had been chemically synthesized.

The flavored cocaine would command $1,100 to $1,400 an ounce on the street, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said after DEA agents and state investigators seized the flavored drugs at two homes in Modesto, Calif. Regular powder cocaine, by comparison, fetches $600 to $700 an ounce, the agency said.

Three people were arrested in connection with what DEA agents called “a significant organization.” Two of them, believed to be the ringleaders, could face five to 40 years in prison if convicted.

Gordon Taylor, the DEA’s assistant special agent in charge of the investigation, called the emergence of the candy-flavored cocaine especially disturbing because it suggested that manufacturers and pushers were developing more sophisticated techniques to appeal to children and teenagers.

“Attempting to lure new, younger customers to a dangerous drug by adding candy flavors is an unconscionable marketing technique,” Taylor said. He said it was vital that law enforcement authorities work together quickly to shut down operations that could spread the new drug to other parts of the country.

Taylor and other DEA agents said their next steps would be critical, as the flavored drug, apparently intended to appeal to children and women, had not been seen elsewhere in the country.

‘My daughter would take it’
“I think it’s entirely reprehensible,” police Sgt. Dave Hatfield of Cathedral City, Calif., said of the flavored cocaine. “It’s already a scourge on our society to begin with.”

Jai Barajas, who lives near Palm Springs, Calif., said: “If someone gave it to your child, what would you think? My daughter would take it. She would think it’s candy. She would taste it if it’s powdered.”

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Drug dealers and street pushers have long disguised powder and rock cocaine by dyeing it or concealing it in candy wrappers. Police in Virginia, for example, arrested a New Jersey man in February after seizing about 4½ pounds of cocaine hidden in lollipop, chocolate and toffee wrappers.

But the seizure last month is believed to mark the first time that distributors have managed to directly fuse flavoring into the powder itself, and it raises the stakes in a relatively new front in the war on street drugs.

The case comes as authorities were already wrestling with the emergence last year of pink, strawberry-flavored crystal methamphetamine, which hit the streets in California in early 2007 and has since spread as far east as Virginia, where state police seized a pound of the drug three weeks ago in the small town of Galax.

“Meth has sort of a bitter, nasty taste, so it’s kind of easy for the young kids to get into this,” said Henry Spiller, director of the Kentucky Regional Poison Center in Louisville. “It’s an effort to make meth more appealing.”

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