This shot was taken in a coke lab in Colombia.

I have text that goes with the shot......

On the 6th day a man in a bright red shirt popped out of the jungle as we were trying to dry our socks. He asked us if we wanted to see a coke lab. Applying the obvious “when-in-Rome” rule, we said sure. It was 5 dollars a head admission. I was sick and tired of carrying some expensive, but heavy ass binoculars I had gotten from my company for my five year anniversary. I asked it I could use them for the price of 3 of us. The tour guide did not even go through the normal negotations so I know I could have gotten much more paid for.

45 minutes into the jungle. Remember we had been hiking for days with weight upon our backs, so 45 minutes into the jungle was easy.

Our tour guide, who would also become our lab technician, told us the coke lab was not a full on coke lab. There were two many tourists around the parts we were in (Evidence A: Ourselves) so it was more of a coke lab on the run, kind of like a 8th graders “Science is fun” birthday themed party set up. The real coke labs had concrete walls and tin roofs. This place was a bunch of chemicals, a couple of tables, lots of bowls and a weedwacker in the shade of a huge tree, 35 feet from a deep creek.

Apparently the first step(,) in the cocaine-making process is you dump a large garbage bag of coca leaves and stems into a 35 gallon drum, mix in a half gallon or so of gasoline, then mix with A weedwacker. My reaction after seeing (only) step one was “and people cram this shit up their nose and straight into their brains?”

Steps 2 through 30 WERE one (more) chemical after another. Your goal in this process is to use a whole lot of chemicals to pull one batch of chemicals out, and a another whole batch of chemicals to nullify the last batch of chemicals. I tried to jot notes to keep track of each step, but lost track quickly.

It is a complicated process.