The return of cocaine

The Trump administration has been telling Americans that fentanyl is so widespread, it’s a “weapon of mass destruction.“ But according to the Washington Post’s Mexico City bureau chief Samantha Schmidt, fentanyl isn’t the drug the administration should be paying attention to — it’s cocaine. 

Globally, supply and demand for the drug are surging, according to Schmidt. And that’s happening amid a changed cocaine landscape, one that’s evolved from the kingpin-run trade of the ’80s. The drug might conjure images of Pablo Escobar and Al Pacino’s Scarface, but today’s reality is less the big bad coke boss and more like a proliferation of smaller outfits trafficking in cocaine. 

As Schmidt told Today, Explained cohost Jonquilyn Hill, “It is a much more globalized business than before, and it works in an entirely new way that makes it much more difficult to combat.”

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How big is the global cocaine trade right now?

Year after year it is breaking records. The land in Colombia that is used to cultivate cocaine is about more than five times the size than during the Pablo Escobar years. Today it is so much bigger, and we see both demand and supply surging in many parts of the world. 

Seizures in Europe [are] growing to levels that now rival the United States as a main destination point. Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, so up until that point, that was when the United States was really focused on cocaine and trying to tackle the cocaine trade and the cartels moving it. 

But that was a very different era. Now it is globalized. We are talking about a proliferation of smaller, much more nimble, very strategic drug trafficking organizations across South America. 

What’s driving that growth?

We are seeing demand soaring in countries that previously were not considered main markets. Europe now is a top destination alongside the United States. 

Some of it is also supply-side. We are seeing within Colombia just the amount of land with cocaine, and the productivity of that land, is so much higher than before. And when you talk to experts, some of that is explained by the way that they’ve created these cocaine enclaves where they not only have much more productive land, they grow a lot more of the crop (the base plant is called coca). It’s way more productive, and they’ve managed to concentrate these enclaves near the borders and near the coasts so they can quickly move it out. 

And before, we had one or two main armed groups that controlled the trade in Colombia. Now because of the peace negotiations in 2016 and the collapse of those peace negotiations and the aftermath of that, it’s also sort of opened up the country to criminal networks from around the world.

We’re talking about how the trade has expanded via cultivation methods and diversified markets and logistics. It feels like we’re talking about any other kind of business.

Absolutely. Much of this is happening on legal container ships. Sometimes you do see these crazy stories about these submarines ending up in Australia, and these go-fast boats in the Caribbean, but a lot of times it’s legal container ships that are leaving through legal ports. 

A lot of what has also allowed this explosion in the cocaine trade is corruption. It’s buying off people in the ports, in the police, in the courts. So it’s going to be a lot harder to get rid of this when it has infiltrated every level of the state.

How is law enforcement dealing with this new era of the cocaine trade?

So the answer to that depends on whether you’re talking about last year or this year under the Trump administration. 

Last year I think the focus was on trying to dismantle the criminal structures from the top. Fast-forward to this year, and in the current moment we’re in, the Trump administration has taken a vastly different approach. They have had this massive buildup of the military in particular, the Navy in the Caribbean, and in many parts of the waters in Latin America, and have been bombing drug boats at sea that they allege are drug traffickers moving drugs to the United States. 

The Trump administration is saying that this is a threat, that these are “narco terrorists” flooding the United States with drugs, and they talk about it in a way that implies that fentanyl is moving on these boats when we know that it is predominantly cocaine. 

We don’t really hear the Trump administration talking about cocaine and the specifics of that trade as much as we hear them talk about the fentanyl crisis. So we’re kind of conflating two things here.