The Golden Age of Cocaine

Bloomberg: “While fans of the hit Netflix series Narcos may have the impression that the era of Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel in the 1980s and 1990s was the heyday of the cocaine trade, in fact, a much bigger boom is going on right now.”

Said Toby Muse, the author of the 2020 book Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels: “We’re living in the golden age of cocaine. Cocaine is reaching corners of the planet that have never seen it before, because there is so much of the drug.”

“Underlying that boom is a massive growth in acreage, as well as higher productivity on coca farms — trends driven by shifting political dynamics in the region as well as rising demand. The illicit industry now produces about 2,000 tons of cocaine per year, almost double the amount being made a decade ago… Satellite photos show that the amount of Colombian land planted with coca rose to a record of more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) last year, more than five times what it was when Escobar was gunned down in 1993.”