While much of the recent attention on drug abuse in the United States has focused on heroin and opioids, cocaine has also been making a comeback. It appears to be a case of supply driving demand.

After years of falling output, the size of Colombia’s illegal coca crop has exploded since 2013, and the boom is starting to appear on U.S. streets.

“There are troubling early signs that cocaine use and availability is on the rise in the United States for the first time in nearly a decade,” the State Department noted last week in its annual report on the global narcotics trade.

According to test samples of the drug seized on the streets, 90 percent of the cocaine for sale in the United States is of Colombian origin, according to the report.

The number of overdose deaths in the United States involving cocaine in 2015 was the highest since 2006 and the second-highest since 1999, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported.

And the number of young Americans who admitted to trying cocaine increased a whopping 61 percent from 2013 to 2015, the most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found.

According to that survey, 1 in 20 Americans ages 18 to 25 used the drug in 2015, with the highest percentage concentrated in the Northeast.


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