Via the WSJ: America Loves Cocaine Again—Mexico’s New Drug King Cashes In.
Cocaine sold in the U.S. is cheaper and as pure as ever for retail buyers. Consumption in the western U.S. has increased 154% since 2019 and is up 19% during the same period in the eastern part of the country, according to the drug-testing company Millennium Health. In contrast, fentanyl use in the U.S. began to drop in mid-2023 and has been declining since, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For new users, cocaine doesn’t carry the stigma of fentanyl addiction. Middle-class addicts and the tragic spectacle of homeless crack-cocaine users in the 1990s helped put a lid on America’s last cocaine epidemic.
[…]
Colombia is producing records amounts of cocaine, and the volume of the drug arriving in the U.S. is driving down prices, the people familiar with cartel operations said.
Cocaine prices have fallen by nearly half to around $60 to $75 a gram compared with five years ago, said Morgan Godvin, a researcher with the community organization Drug Checking Los Angeles. “The price of pure cocaine has plummeted,” Godvin said.
This is just another chapter in a very thick book titled The Whack-a-Mole Nature of the Endless Drug War.
I was originally going to just put this story in a tab-clearing post, but in reading it I was so struck, as someone who has been reading news reports about the drug war for going on four decades, how, like so manty such stories over the years, this one just feels like they took one of dozens of such stories and just changed the names and a few other descriptive details, like which specific drug we are talking about this year, or which Latin American country is suffering from lack of state control of some of its territory.
Elements that feel timeless to me include:
- Major Drug Lord Captured! Oops, new drug lords emerge.
- Internecine fighting among the capos!
- Major focus on one drug by the US leads to other drugs surging in the market.
- Record production!
- Better purity!
- Cheaper prices!
- And the main constant in all of this, to repeat a line I said oh-so-many times in class: people like their intoxicants.
Even the maps and graphics, while maybe cooler and more modern from a technical point of view, are deja vu-inducing in me.
I do not have a good and perfect solution to the real problems caused by drug abuse and addiction, but one thing that a career of paying attention to this stuff emphasizes to me over and over and over again is that the drug war approach to it does not work and just costs a lot of money and leads to violence and criminality. The cycle really does feel endless.
And the Trump administration can pretend like blowing up fast boats will solve the problem; they are sorely mistaken.
