(AP Photo)
- US authorities were mainly focused on heroin in the early 1970s.
- But cocaine, smuggled by Colombian groups, was growing in prominence, especially in the Northeast.
- A tip in 1978 would lead police in New York City to uncover the first sign of the Cali cartel’s burgeoning power.
In the early 1970s, the newly formed US Drug Enforcement Administration was focused on heroin, and its agents spent little time on cocaine.
“We really were not pursuing it like we should have,” Mike Vigil, who joined the agency a few months after it was created in mid-1973, told Business Insider, in part because it “didn’t have the social impact” that heroin did.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
NOW WATCH: Why the price of cocaine in America has barely moved in decades
See Also:
- Why the fall of the Medellin cartel failed to stop the flow of drugs, according to a DEA agent who hunted Escobar
- Pablo Escobar and ‘El Chapo’ Guzman: How 2 of the world’s most powerful and dangerous drug lords compare
- Meet the cocaine-addled, Hitler-obsessed drug smuggler who tried to take down Pablo Escobar
SEE ALSO: What the Cali cartel learned from Pablo Escobar, according to a DEA agent who hunted both of them
NOW READ: Pablo Escobar’s death cleared the way for a much more sinister kind of criminal in Colombia
