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The cocaine industry

A book in progress

Cocaine generates an estimated $100 billion or more in annual revenue. It finances armed groups, shapes elections, drives mass incarceration, and sustains supply chains that span continents. Governments have spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to suppress it.

Yet most of what the public knows about the cocaine industry comes from journalism, memoir, and television. The academic literature is scattered across disciplines, buried in technical journals, and rarely assembled into a single coherent account. The policy debates — eradication vs. legalization, enforcement vs. treatment, interdiction vs. regulation — proceed largely without reference to the accumulated evidence on how the industry actually works.

This book attempts to fill that gap. It traces the cocaine industry from coca cultivation through chemical processing, wholesale trafficking, and retail distribution, and examines the policy interventions that governments deploy at each stage. Every claim rests on published evidence, original data, or fieldwork. Where the evidence is thin or contested, the book says so.

What the book argues

The cocaine industry is not a single enterprise. It is a sequence of distinct markets, each with its own actors, cost structures, risks, and institutional environments. A coca farmer in Putumayo faces different incentives than a paste buyer in Nariño, a trafficking organization moving product through Central America, or a retail distributor in a European city. Policies designed for one stage often fail because they assume the logic of another.

The book also argues that the conventional framing — supply vs. demand, prohibition vs. legalization — obscures more than it reveals. The relevant questions are more specific. What determines where coca is grown? Why do some trafficking routes persist while others collapse? Under what conditions does enforcement reduce violence, and under what conditions does it increase it? What happens to retail markets when a major supplier is removed?

Why this book, and why now

Three developments make this book possible and timely. First, the empirical evidence has expanded dramatically in the past fifteen years. Researchers now have access to satellite imagery of coca fields, administrative data on drug seizures, experimental evaluations of enforcement strategies, and detailed surveys of populations living under criminal governance. Much of this evidence has never been synthesized for a general audience.

Second, the policy environment is shifting. Colombia, the world's largest cocaine producer, is negotiating with armed groups that depend on drug revenue. Several countries are experimenting with decriminalization or regulated markets. These policy decisions will be made whether or not the evidence is assembled — the question is whether decision-makers have access to it.

Third, I have spent over a decade studying the institutional structures that sustain violence and criminal governance in Colombian cities. My co-authors and I have mapped how criminal organizations govern neighborhoods in Medellín, measured the effects of policing experiments in Bogotá, and evaluated prison conditions across the country. This book draws on that body of work — and on the broader literature — to construct an account that is grounded in evidence rather than narrative.

Several of my published papers address topics covered in the book:

Contact

If you are a publisher, journalist, or researcher interested in this project, write to stobonz@eafit.edu.co.