Skip to content

COCAÍNA: Anatomía de un mercado prohibido

The book

COCAÍNA: Anatomía de un mercado prohibido is my first book. The manuscript is finished — an introduction and fifteen chapters — and is now with the publisher. Publication details will appear on this page as they are confirmed.

The book follows the life of a gram of cocaine, from a coca leaf on an Andean hillside to a line of powder in a European bar, and from a street-corner sale to the bank transfer that launders the proceeds. More cocaine is produced and consumed today than at any time since systematic records began. United Nations estimates put production at 2,757 tons of pure cocaine in 2022 and 3,708 tons in 2023, with around 25 million consumers worldwide. Most of those consumers live in North America, Europe, and a few large South American cities. The heaviest costs fall elsewhere. Latin America and the Caribbean hold about 8 percent of the world's population and concentrate close to a third of its homicides, and much of that violence is tied to the drug trade.

What the book argues

Prohibition sets the rules of the game, and those rules make brutal strategies profitable. No participant in the cocaine trade can enforce a contract in court, insure a shipment, or borrow from a bank. Violence takes the place of contracts. Corruption takes the place of regulation. The industry fragments into loosely connected links — growers, processors, transporters, wholesalers, retailers — because integration would expose any organization to catastrophic risk.

At each link, the price builds in a premium for the risk of losing the merchandise, going to prison, or dying. A gram that costs cents in raw materials sells for 50 to 100 euros in European retail markets, and producer countries capture roughly 8 percent of the chain's total rent while bearing most of its violence. Heavy users respond little to price. When enforcement raises risk, prices rise and consumption barely falls, so total revenue in the business can grow. The organizations that survive each crackdown inherit the market shares of those that fell. Each crackdown selects for the actors most capable of exercising violence and buying off authorities, and hands them the resources to operate at larger scale.

The book develops this argument link by link. It examines the rural economy of coca, the chemistry and logistics of processing, the trafficking routes and the corruption that keeps them open, retail markets and criminal governance in the cities, the public health and neuroscience of demand, and the political economy that holds prohibition in place. Medellín appears as a recurring case. I have worked there for over a decade with research teams, local authorities, and community organizations, in neighborhoods where armed groups decide who pays extortion and how disputes get resolved.

Contents

The book opens with an introduction and develops the argument across fifteen chapters.

  1. The costs of the cocaine market
  2. The cocaine value chain
  3. The farmer's decision: why coca is grown
  4. Mobile laboratories: how cocaine is processed
  5. Corridors: the logistics of international trafficking
  6. Cartels, gangs, and criminal governance
  7. What the consumer pays: risk, prohibition, and price
  8. Retail markets in consumer countries
  9. The demand for cocaine: consumption, addiction, and treatment
  10. The political economy of prohibition
  11. Displacement, substitution, and fragmentation
  12. Producer countries: eradication, substitution, and state-building
  13. Transit countries: Mexico, Central America, Brazil, and the Caribbean
  14. Consumer countries: police, courts, prisons, and financial regulation
  15. Legalization, regulation, and reform

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.