Toward an Anti-Capitalist Drug Policy
The war on drugs has utterly failed to reduce drug consumption. But it has served to maintain US military and intelligence apparatuses in Latin America.
As cocaine seizures hit record highs, production has ramped up proportionally to meet demand. In Latin America, prohibition has meant peasant dispossession and paramilitary violence, not the shrinking of the drug trade. (Juan Barreto / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Pablo Castaño
The so-called war on drugs has been an abject failure. This applies as much to the United States, where the Trump administration seeks to ratchet it up, as it does Colombia, the world’s leading producer of cocaine. While the social harms of drug use, the drug trade, and narcotrafficking have been well-documented in the imperialist core, comparatively little attention has been given to cocaine at the point of production in the Global South.
As cocaine seizures hit record highs in Colombia, production has ramped up proportionally to meet demand, drawing more people and more land into the cocaine economy. In Latin America, prohibition has meant peasant dispossession and state and paramilitary violence.
To understand how the war on drugs has fed violence, dispossession, and US imperial domination, all while failing to reduce drug consumption, Jacobin spoke with Estefanía Ciro, one of Latin America’s leading experts on the economics of drugs, at the Drug Policy, Human Rights, and Global Shared Responsibility conference in Barcelona, Spain, organized by Taula per Colombia. A strong advocate of regulation, Ciro is the director of the ALaOrillaDelRío think tank in the Colombian Amazon, which formulates innovative proposals to reduce the enormous violence of the drug trade in Colombia and beyond.
We spoke with Ciro about the current state of drug markets in the United States, Latin America, and Europe; the geopolitics of drugs; the social and political impacts of prohibition; and what an anti-capitalist drug policy would look like.
What are the main health impacts of drug trafficking in the United States today?
The main risk is fentanyl, whose overdose crisis has caused more deaths than the Vietnam War and has deep roots in the pharmaceutical industry.
It also has much to do with the dismantling of the welfare state and deindustrialization, with the destruction of stable jobs for workers. Fentanyl’s a very dangerous drug, very hard to dose. It’s an opioid; you take it and your heart starts beating so slowly it can stop.
Trump has used the fentanyl crisis as an argument in his trade disputes with China. Do the accusations that China tolerates the illegal trafficking of this drug make sense?
Fentanyl is also a legal anesthetic. There is legal production but also illegal production that can be done at home. Some precursor chemicals come from China, but to claim that this is a destabilization strategy or a situation that warrants breaking relations with China or Mexico is baseless.
We are in the midst of a multipolar shift, where China is increasing its power. The fentanyl issue is perfect for Donald Trump to exert geopolitical pressure on China.
Governments like Gustavo Petro’s have challenged prohibitionist drug discourse. Are critical stances against prohibition advancing in Latin America?
Two years ago, there was more hope for change. Petro came to power in 2022 with a promise of change, a very encouraging scenario. Now I think the window of opportunity for real drug policy reform has closed.
I attended the Latin American and Caribbean Drug Policy Conference in September 2023, where all the foreign ministers of Latin America spoke. Only two of them were vehement in their stance of regulating all drugs: the Chilean and Uruguayan foreign ministers.
In Colombia, we have several documents. The 2016 Peace Agreement [with the FARC guerrillas] mentions crop substitution and transformative drug-consumption policies. That wasn’t fulfilled. In 2020, the US Congress introduced the “holistic policy” [a guideline for drug policy in Latin America]. Petro relaunched it in 2022, claiming it as his own: alternative development [of crops to replace coca] and substitution [with legal crops].
It’s the same paradigm. We’re at record levels of cocaine production, record hectares [of coca crops], and record seizures. In other words, the result remains the same. We’re in the same place we were with former president Juan Manuel Santos (2010–18).
If Petro truly wants a new drug policy, he must break with the United States. And what better time than now, with Trump, who says he won’t send more USAID funding?
Drug prohibition is enshrined in UN legislation, and the vast majority of countries enforce it, including US rivals like Russia and China. How do you explain the persistence of the prohibitionist paradigm, despite its failure to reduce drug production or consumption?
Russia and China have always had their own moral stances on substance use. But in 2023, the Vienna [prohibitionist] consensus was broken, and harm-reduction regulation entered [the international legal framework]. Colombia pushed for this. The fentanyl crisis in the United States also played a role: under Joe Biden, the US government needed to implement stronger harm-reduction policies.
Additionally, then secretary of state Anthony Blinken was at the UN Narcotics Commission, negotiating for China to impose controls on precursor chemicals sent to Mexico for fentanyl production.
How does the multipolar transition you mentioned relate to drug prohibition?
Four or five years ago, William Brownfield, former US ambassador to Colombia, said cocaine was their fourth or fifth concern in terms of drugs — it didn’t worry them. But that changed because of the geopolitical moment of Great Power rivalry.
One way for the United States to maintain control over Latin America is to sustain the anti-drug military apparatus, keep training police, and retain intelligence access to the region’s police forces. The entire military-industrial apparatus is sustained by prohibition. More than cocaine, what matters to the United States is maintaining a military apparatus in Latin America.
And what role is Europe playing? Does it follow the American prohibitionist line or take a more open stance?
In recent elections in Europe, far-right fascists haven’t won, but centrist parties are shifting right, and the rightward drift complicates drug policy. For example, Germany legalized marijuana a year ago, but now there’s debate about reinstating prohibition.
Something important is happening in Europe: an anti-drug narrative is being built around the threat of crime. Suddenly there’s a narcotrafficking threat — seizures in Rotterdam and Antwerp and murders. I have been invited lately to several events on this. Two things happen here. First, experts on violence and crime love these scenarios because they get work, research projects, etc. Second, there’s a push to increase military budgets. Suddenly Germany triples its defense budget when before there wasn’t even enough for education. They need this scenario to move budgets and cut citizens’ rights.
But is the drug market really growing?
Cocaine seizures have hit record levels every year since 2014, so we need to study that year. Seizure policies drive increased production to compensate. Seizures have risen by 200 percent, and production by 144 percent. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. It’s very hard to be certain about the increase — it’s like measuring a ghost.
What impact does prohibition have on Latin American peasants?
The lack of regulation promotes armed regulation: a weapons market, a surge in private armies, disputes over labor control and commodity control. It also encourages interference from foreign militaries and agencies on our continent, like the US Southern Command in Ecuador or the Drug Enforcement Administration’s strategic deployment in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador.
There’s a US interest in market control. But in a multipolar geopolitical transition, there’s also a US interest in securing positions in strategic ecosystems like the Amazon, which includes Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Colombia.
How are drug trafficking and the rise of far-right leaders like Nayib Bukele or [Ecuadorian president] Daniel Noboa in Latin America related?
More than drug trafficking, the strategies that consolidate these new right-wing formations in Latin America are prohibitionism and counterinsurgency policy. In Bukele’s case, he represents the latest stage of a US advance in Central America that began with the coup against General [Omar] Torrijos, the demobilization of guerrilla groups, and the chaos from the expansion of gangs, many of which were created in US prisons.
With Noboa, the effect is similar. It occurs in the process of reconfiguring the cocaine market, a central objective of US intelligence agencies, which changed after the reincorporation of the FARC-EP and the capture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in Mexico. Creating chaos within this market through prison control and the expansion of the security-insecurity discourse allowed Ecuador to prop up the internal enemy of drug trafficking, and it facilitated the signing of agreements with the US military and intelligence apparatus to reinforce its influence in the country.
In Latin America, drugs production is often blamed for environmental destruction. How much does coca leaf production contribute to Amazon deforestation?
There’s a myth that coca and illicit crops expand to deforest. The truth is, in Colombia — which produces 60–70 percent of the world’s cocaine — only one deforestation hotspot can be linked to coca crops, in the Putumayo region. The rest is dominated by cattle ranching and large-scale land grabs for speculation. Land is becoming pasture for cattle, not coca fields.
Colombia has 230,000 hectares of coca — very little compared to the whole surface of the Amazon. But the narrative has been established that illicit crops are deforesting the jungle, so we must prohibit them. On the contrary, we need to regulate them.
In 2021, two thousand tons of cocaine were produced, and fourteen hundred were seized. That means only six hundred tons actually reached the market. If it were legal, you would produce those six hundred tons with labor and land for six hundred tons — a third of current land use. In Colombia, we wouldn’t be producing on 230,000 hectares but on a third of that. The current policy is perverse: seizures and production both increase.
Let’s speak about drug regulation. How does the market work in countries where marijuana has been legalized? Is it a model that could be followed to legalize cocaine or other drugs?
In the United States, adult use of marijuana has been legalized in twenty-eight jurisdictions, and in Latin America and Europe, it has been done in Uruguay, Portugal, Malta, Luxembourg, and Germany. The different models form a range that spans from prioritizing the private sector to prioritizing the state.
What we need to do is come up with safeguards, from left-wing movements, so that formerly illegal drug markets don’t end up being taken over by large corporations and pharmaceutical companies.
You say coca crop substitution has not worked in Colombia. What is the alternative to the current illegalization of cocaine? A legal free market?
Cocaine has millions of users who will not disappear overnight. We must discard the idea that suddenly no one will snort a line of coke. The challenge is ensuring that line is fair for producers and less violent.
Cocaine economies run on a capital accumulation model that generates massive profits because it’s illegal. By prohibiting it, the state makes the market far more attractive [for illicit actors].
The central concern in the cocaine market is production, not consumption. That is, it’s a substance that we could say is domesticated; there’s no current overdose crisis or associated disease outbreaks on a mass scale like there is with opioids, specifically fentanyl. [In the United States, around four in five overdose deaths involving cocaine also involve opioids like fentanyl.] For the world, cocaine is not the public health problem, but one of associated violence. So the first question is how to eliminate the violence.
What would a legal cocaine market look like?
The big challenge is designing a mode of regulation that dismantles this accumulation model, ending prohibition and creating rules for fair, safe production and trade.
Production districts would be primarily in the hands of those who have been exploited by this market and been victims of anti-drug policies — peasants, indigenous peoples, and Afro [communities] — ensuring that the value-added chain remains mainly with them.
And in the United States, with a severely deteriorated welfare state, this market could be given to their counterparts on the consumer end, also victims of violence. The profits from the trade in the United States should go to this sector. In this way, a historical debt would be balanced with the victims of prohibitionism: producers and consumers.
Imagine agricultural cooperatives producing cocaine. Right now, peasants are exploited because they sell coca paste [the necessary base to produce cocaine]. What if cocaine production was run by peasants? We could create agro-industrial districts in already deforested areas as cooperatives. People could live off that, not international aid.