To get it, Jerimias sold his shoes. Then he sold his clothes. Then he stole and sold his sister's clothes.

Finally, says his mother María Rosa González, a welfare mom of four, her bone-thin teenage son dismantled the refrigerator to sell aluminum parts in the streets of their Buenos Aires slum.

He did all this for paco, a smokable, highly addictive street drug sweeping through Argentine ghettos, hooking impoverished teenagers, and prompting law officials here to revamp drug laws to stop its insidious spread.

A recent study by the Argentine Secretariat for Prevention of Drug Addiction and Control of Narcotrafficking, known by its Spanish initials SEDRONAR, showed paco has outpaced all other drugs in rates of adolescent users in the last two years. Based on the results of the study, officials say 70,000 Argentines between 16 and 26 years old in the greater Buenos Aires area have tried paco.

Paco's effects on users are quick and obvious.

"My son was un muerto viviendo," she says, a "living dead," before she sent him last year to live with his grandmother in the rural province of Patagonia for three months. When he returned, Jerimias, then 19, was back at it, eventually ending up in a Buenos Aires drug clinic, where he just turned 20.

The paco sold here is a chemical byproduct, a leftover when Andean coca leaves are turned into a paste, then formulated into cocaine bound for US and European markets. Paco was once discarded as laboratory trash, says Dr. Ricardo Nadra, an Argentine government psychiatrist who works with paco addicts. But Argentina's devastating financial collapse in 2001 left the poorest even poorer, creating an impoverished demand for "cocaine's garbage," he says.

"People were broke and they couldn't afford to buy anything else," says Dr. Nadra, adding that drug dealers took the leftovers, which look like salt crystals, and added substances such as ground up glass as a filler in order to increase their profits. "Drug dealers could keep selling pure cocaine in Europe or the US but now they could sell paco in [Argentina's poorer neighborhoods]," he says.

By 2002, one man's trash had become a poorer man's drug of choice. Paco had made a social impact, sparking government concerns and even earning a reference in the US State Department's annual drug reports as "a relatively inexpensive and addictive drug similar to crack."

Because it's smoked rather than sniffed, and because of the physiological impact the confluence of chemical toxins have, experts like Dr. Roberto Baistrocchi, an Argentine pharmacologist who has studied the drug, say paco is exceedingly addictive and can cause lasting physical damage. "More than any other drug, paco is the most dangerous." says Nadra.

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