In Peru, they bought the cocaine paste, which they refined in a laboratory in a two-story house in Medellín.

Every night in the poor sections of this city of 170,000 people, as many as 11,000 youths smoke monos, or monkeys, cigarettes made of cocaine paste and tobacco.

In Argentina, cocaine paste used to go for about 30 cents (in USD) a dose, enough for a powerful two-minute high.

It is reportedly a mixture of cocaine paste, petrol, kerosene and quicklime (calcium oxide).

Since November, Federal agents and the police have discovered five laboratories that use ether to covert impure cocaine paste into powder.

They bought the cocaine paste in Peru.

The result is a putrid, bile-colored stew that, when filtered, leaves a gummy mass called cocaine paste.

Seizures of cocaine paste fell from a 1988 high of about three tons to perhaps one ton in 1991.

But the smugglers' version, created from cocaine paste, had a street value of around 50,000 euros a pair.

But it has had little success in reducing the flow of Bolivian cocaine paste to the cocaine refineries in Colombia.