🌊 Inside the Global Cocaine Boom

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By Max Frost

Last month, gunmen armed with AK-47s attacked a prison in Toulon, France, while setting buildings on fire and blowing up cars from the suburbs of Paris to Marseille and Lyon, France’s second and third largest cities.

Thousands of miles to the west, just weeks before, 22 people were murdered in a single day in the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. Around that time, two German port workers were jailed for helping transport millions of dollars worth of cocaine from Ecuador.

Data suggest there may be more cocaine in the world right now than at any other point in history. The growing availability of the drug is being felt across the world, from South America to Africa and Europe. While no one has a perfect solution to drug trafficking, many note that the business has boomed during the presidency of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro.

Petro, a former leftist guerilla, won power in Colombia in 2021 with promises to end the country’s numerous decades-long conflicts and improve life for Colombia’s farmers, many of whom make a living by growing coca, the base crop for cocaine.

“We’re going to give oxygen to…the coca farmers, and asphyxia to the traffickers,” Colombia’s justice minister declared, vowing a new focus on alleviating poverty while prosecuting large criminal networks.

In early 2023, Petro’s administration announced a 60% reduction in forced coca eradication targets, a sharp departure from decades of aggressive eradication. While the US normally pressures Colombia to limit drug production, the Biden Administration quietly suspended satellite monitoring of Colombian coca fields, dropping a longstanding US yardstick of drug war success.

Petro’s administration simultaneously called for negotiations or ceasefires with armed groups, many of whom are heavily involved in the drug trade. These groups, in turn, boosted production. Between them and farmers’ growing coca cultivation, cocaine output has exploded. 

Between 2022 and 2023 alone, Colombia – which produces 60%+ of the world’s cocaine – experienced a 53% jump in cocaine production. This year, the UN estimated that Colombia’s production increased another 20% and is now roughly eight times the level in 2012.

While Petro’s Colombia has been the epicenter of this boom, it is bigger than him and his country: Despite record amounts of eradication under the preceding presidency, cocaine production continued to rise; coca and cocaine production has risen in other countries; and the “War on Drugs” has, at best, only ever had intermittent success at stopping the supply and demand for narcotics. 

Still, South American gangs are currently exporting a record amount of cocaine, flooding Europe with record volumes of it and fighting for the profits around the world. 

Today and tomorrow, we’re looking at how this boom has unleashed a crime wave upon Europe, beginning with one country that says it is buckling under a “white tsunami of cocaine.”

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading and hope you had a nice weekend. We’ll be back tomorrow with part two, which looks at how a successful crackdown in one country did little but shift the trade to another. As always, please send in your takes, thoughts, and concerns. Should countries give up the War on Drugs or double down? Let us know by replying here. 

Missed our past week’s stories? Find them here:

• Will BRICS Beat the Dollar?

• Is There a “White Genocide” in South Africa?

• Trump’s reversal of foreign policy in Saudi Arabia

• Inside Trump’s Crypto Empire

• Trump-themed savings accounts?

See you back here tomorrow.

—Max and Max