The cocaine comeback
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Let President Trump tell it, and America has a problem. A drug problem, to be specific.
were formerly classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
The administration thinks fentanyl is so widespread that they're calling it a WMD and bombing boats in the Caribbean. But for all the press it gets, fentanyl isn't the fastest growing illegal drug around the world. That would be cocaine.
Cocaine. Oh, I would just do cocaine. That was really, yeah. So not just, yeah.
That's down and dirty, right?
The down and dirty might make you think of discos in the 70s or 1980s penthouse parties, but this resurgence is rooted in modernity. The coke game's changed. I'm Jonquan Hill, in for the usual suspects, and up next on Today Explained, where the cocaine comeback came from.
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This is Today Explained. I'm Samantha Schmidt, and I'm The Washington Post's Mexico City Bureau Chief. Okay, I want to start by getting a rough sense of scale. How big is the global cocaine trade right now? It basically year after year is breaking records. We are seeing from the origin, the land in Colombia that is used to cultivate cocaine is about more than five times the size 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. And particularly, we see seizures in Europe 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, you know, that was when the United States was really focused on cocaine and trying to, you know, tackle the cocaine trade and the cartels moving it.
Cocaine.
In the United States, a multi-billion dollar high for the corrupt and the rich. Despite our best efforts, illegal cocaine is coming into our country at alarming levels, and four to five million people regularly use it.
The experts apparently disagree on whether or not the government is doing enough about the increasing use of cocaine. But one thing they do agree on, cocaine is not a harmless and frivolous plaything.
But that was a very different era. At that point, we were talking about mostly the United States as a destination point, mostly... Colombia, Mexico, and the United States when we talked about the trade. Now it is globalized. We are talking about a proliferation of smaller, much more nimble, very strategic drug trafficking organizations across South America. Many people say Ecuador is now the world's cocaine superhighway. the pacific coast of peru just above the capital lima sits el callao the country's main shipping port it's also one of the world's primary distribution points for cocaine even within colombia of proliferation of these smaller armed groups that have mastered the cultivation process and the production process to more quickly easily move it out of the country and we see
all these new different transit points and routes that are capable of moving the drugs in much larger quantities around the world to destinations that previously were pretty irrelevant in terms of the cocaine trade.
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