Flurries

It was a busy day, and I was pressed for time.

I had to be on campus by 9:00 AM at the latest, it was already half past seven and I still had to stop by Denny’s, where the kitchen staff would be losing altitude imminently after another night of heavy ice accumulation. Without benzos to foam the runaway, they risked a fiery crash landing.

The city was less than half the size it is today, and traffic was accordingly lighter, but the morning rush to the university was no joke even back then. Parking was a nightmare. I had a front-row pass, but there seemed to be more passes than front-row spots, which resulted in cut-throat — almost bumper car-style — competition for spaces past, say, 8:30. If you wanted a good spot, you needed to be there early.

That day, I absolutely had to get a good spot. My academic imperatives — I called them “facade maintenance” — would be over by 11:30 and I needed to be back across town by noon to meet a Jewish friend who, when he wasn’t praying, ran a chop shop masquerading as a used car dealership and trafficked in large-lot psychedelics. He had an idée fixe for punctuality. If you showed up even a couple of minutes late, he’d sit you down across from him at a desk, tell you a borderline anti-Semitic joke (“What do you call a Jew who…”) then send you on your way empty-handed with instructions to come back when his time’s at least as valuable as yours.

Assuming I made it there on schedule, I’d have to drive out to the suburbs to drop off a crate-sized cardboard box of Ball Mason jars to a couple of spaced-out Woodstock veterans whose indiscreet overtures were becoming more difficult to politely evade. (“Yes, I’m sure I can’t stay, and no, I don’t want to come back later and ‘get crazy.'”)

I pulled up in the parking lot of the office supply wholesaler where my “brother” worked nights, and sometimes days too. He wasn’t really my brother. Well, he was in spirit. But certainly not in biology. He was leaning up against his Monte Carlo smoking a Black & Mild. I motioned him into my passenger seat.

“What’s good wit’ you, C?” he effused. With just a few exceptions, he was the friendliest person I’ve ever known, a disposition which belied the decidedly severe consequences of hurting his feelings, which was precariously easy to do. He always greeted me as if we hadn’t seen each other in 45 years — even if it’d been 45 minutes.

“You know me, rippin’ and runnin'” I said. He was suddenly aware of his Black & Mild again. “Aw shit, my bad C, let me go on and put this out ‘for I smell up your car.” “It’s fine.” “You sure?” “Yeah, it’s fine. Look, I gotta get to campus, so…” He switched his cigar to his left hand, reached into his windbreaker with his right and pulled out a tennis ball with a slit cut in the side. “Be careful with this, C. This is your baby. You gotta treat it like it’s your child.” I laughed. “I’m serious!”

“I gotcha man, just put in the glove box.” “Nah, you gotta put it somewhere –” I cut him off. “I’m a white man in a tweed sport coat driving a sedan with a Starbucks caramel macchiato in the cup holder. And it’s eight o’clock in the morning.” He didn’t get it. I tried again: “Do you know what the chances of me being pulled over, let alone searched, are?” That registered. He opened the glove box and placed the tennis ball.

“So what time we linkin’ up later?” “Prolly four at the earliest,” I told him. “I gotta go see the Jew after class and then Tammy and her husband at –” “You talkin’ ’bout the hippies?” “Yeah.” “Aight, so just hit me up when you done.” We engaged in the ceremonial, over-complicated, multi-step handshake and he got out.

I was about to pull away when he knocked on the window. I rolled it down. “Yeah?” “Stop by GNC if you can.” I couldn’t hold back an exasperated sigh: “I thought you were doing that?” “I gotta work a double, C. Then I gotta pick your nephew up from school.” He meant his son.

“Ok, what is it we need again?” “It’s — hang on, I’ma text it to you so you don’t forget.” He tapped a message out on his burner phone. I fished mine out of a book bag, flipped it open and read his text back to him: “Nose-a-tall?” “Yeah. Just get the small bottle.” “I don’t think that’s how you spell–” I stopped. There was no point. “I’ll get it. But seriously, I gotta go. This is a busy-ass day.” He smiled. “You ’bout to be a lot busier, C. Shit’s ’bout to change.”

Supply and demand

Last month, Foreign Affairs executive editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan interviewed Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and a lifelong chronicler of Latin American politics.

The subject was, not surprisingly, Donald Trump, but specifically how Trump’s presidency might “reverse three decades of benign neglect” towards Latin America, where “business leaders, academics and politicians on both the left and the right agree that the United States lack[s] a clear strategy for engagement,” as Winter put it, in a December piece called “Latin America Is About to Become a Priority for US Foreign Policy.”

As Winter emphasized in the article, “laments” for insufficient US engagement in Central and South America aren’t new, but such criticism crescendoed during the Biden administration, which was seen in Latin America as obsessively, if understandably, focused on conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, and also on countering Chinese ambition. His overarching point was that Latin America will be front and center for Trump, because his “top domestic priorities” include curbing illegal immigration and disrupting the fentanyl trade.

When discussing the piece with Kurtz-Phelan, Winter mentioned, somewhat casually, that for all the political attention and press coverage fentanyl gets, cocaine’s still king in Latin America. “The challenges are still there, particularly when it comes to organized crime, which is not a new issue in Latin America, but it’s gotten worse over the last 10 or 15 years primarily because of an expansion in the cocaine trade,” Winter said.

“I want to linger on your point about cocaine,” Kurtz-Phelan responded. “I’m struck that — I think most people would assume fentanyl would be the bigger source of instability and corruption. That’s not the case as you look at the region as a whole?” “Well look, fentanyl’s bad too,” Winter chuckled, grimly. “But cocaine is unparalleled as as revenue producer.”

Today, coca crops in Colombia blanket five times the land they covered when Pablo Escobar was gunned down on a Medellín rooftop in 1993 after a foot chase with the Bloque de Búsqueda, specially-trained police units with a mandate to capture or kill history’s most famous kingpin.

According to the most recent update from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coca bush cultivation rose 10% in Colombia in 2023 to 253,300 hectares. As the chart below shows, that figure was below 45,000 hectares when Escobar died.

What’s behind the increase? The annotations on the chart give you some clues, and I’ll delve into them in due course, but let’s start with the basics.

At a fundamental level, this is just economics. Supply and demand. There’ll always be demand for mind- and mood-altering substances, which is to say drugs, legal or illicit. Hard drugs — as distinct from, say, marijuana or psilocybin — are associated with an economic paradoxic: Supply creates its own demand, and in a helluva hurry. The hard drug trade isn’t the only market were that dynamic’s observable, but it’s an especially poignant example.

In most contexts, simply introducing a new product isn’t sufficient to create a market, let alone a thriving one, and certainly not instantaneously. Hard drugs are different. You don’t need an ad campaign. In fact, you don’t have to say much of anything. All you have to do is hand out a few free samples at a couple of local bars — or, “better” yet, to an existing clientele already inclined to substance abuse — and word of mouth will take care of the rest. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And you can take “pudding” quite literally when it comes to crack. (“Word on the street is you gon’ love how it melt / And I don’t come with a pitch ‘neither, the shit sells itself.”)

Depending on a number of what I’ll call “vulnerability factors,” communities can succumb to hard drugs virtually overnight. Even in contexts where the addiction soil isn’t especially fertile, so to speak, the presence of readily-available, high-quality drugs will create a self-fulfilling prophecy sooner or later as supply creates curiosity, curiosity turns into demand, demand turns into addiction, addiction incentivizes still more supply, which creates more addicts, and so on forever. Note the emphasis: Forever.

Importantly, users aren’t the only addicts in the equation. It isn’t long before dealers are chasing the high too. There’s no adrenaline rush quite like counting illicit cash, and it’s not just the money. In fact, for some dealers, money’s almost — almost — secondary to the lifestyle. When you’re a supplier of hard drugs to addicts, you’re God to them. And they treat you accordingly. Never again will you have to wash your own car, for example. Or mow your own grass. And those are just mundane examples. Dealers, like addicts, are condemned to chase a high — the high of being a veritable deity, which is positively intoxicating even if your congregation’s relatively small.

Realists accept that most hard drug addicts don’t recover. Not really, anyway. The only guaranteed way out for addicts is death or jail. What most people don’t fully appreciate, from the outside looking in, is that the same’s true for traffickers, from the largest kingpins to the smallest street dealers. There are two exits from the hard drug trade: Violent death in the streets, or life in prison.

Beyond physiology, psychology and basic economics, national politics, particularly in Colombia, are a crucial part — the biggest part — of this story. Of any cocaine story.

Most Americans are at least vaguely familiar with the legend that is Escobar’s fraught reign over Colombia. It’s an insane, heinous, tragicomedy the sheer, grandiose scope of which is unparalleled in the history of influential figures who, briefly or not, exercised de facto control over nation states despite never holding the office of the executive.

To retell that story here would be entirely superfluous, and that’s assuming I — or anyone else for that matter — can do it justice in terms of communicating the thoroughgoing outlandishness which defined the Pablo era in the Americas. With the sincerest of apologies to the tens of thousands of people murdered by the Medellín cartel, and the hundreds of thousands who died “downstream” as a result of Escobar’s business, he’s not just a legend, he’s the legend. As many physical tears as this would draw out were you to say it to the many Colombians who view Pablo as an indelible blight on their homeland, Escobar’s still revered as a literal saint in some areas of the country.

But, again, you can get that chronicle from pop culture. You don’t need me to rehash it, and it’s anyway old news. And not just because it’s set four decades ago. The more important story is being written as we speak, in the 2020s. As Bloomberg put it, in a feature article published three years ago, “the golden age of cocaine is happening right now.”

Out of town

“You OK, C?”

I punched a bar straw through too much ice and siphoned the last driblets of a contemptibly under-poured Jack and Coke from the bottom of a cheap, corporate rocks glass. “Yeah.” “You sure?” he pressed.

I wasn’t OK. I was irritable and nauseous and I could feel my fingers sweating as I pinched the bridge of my nose in an otiose attempt to mitigate a dull headache. I let my hand fall from my face. It landed palm down, with a slap on the table. “What’s the deal with this guy?” I motioned towards the bathroom, where our third had excused himself for the fourth time in an hour.

“Man, he good people, C. I promise.” “I’m sure he is, but –” I was talking too loud. I closed my eyes, took a breath and lowered my voice. “The girls are in fucking Paris right now,” I hissed. “And we’re spending our Saturday at a goddamn Chili’s in the middle of — where the fuck are we again?” He reminded me. “Right. My point exactly.”

I eyed “good people” as he strolled back over to the table. On the long drive there, I worried I was about to meet another walking, talking cliché: Sideways baseball hat with the sticker still on the brim, triple extra large white t-shirt and the loudest Jordans Foot Locker had in a size 12. I should’ve been so lucky. Instead, I got a guy who looked like he’d never seen $1,000 in person, let alone the $14,000 we were trusting him with.

Necessity’s the mother of invention, though, and when there’s a drought, you go out of town. That’s part of it. This, at least, wasn’t a total Hail Mary. Haggard as the guy looked, he was inconspicuous, and as my brother kept reminding me, the two of them were loosely related: This apparent fainéant somehow managed to get himself engaged to my brother’s first cousin who, I’d been told more times than I could remember, was a regular Nia Long with a highly successful housecleaning business.

Our ostensible connect could tell I was upset. About the wait. About the surroundings. About the whole thing, really. “My bad y’all,” he said. “My dude’s usually on point. He might be mowing today –” he trailed off. “Mowing?” I enunciated, lifting my eyebrows in a show of incredulity and rekindling, in the process, pangs the alcohol was only beginning to drown out. “Yeah, he got a lawn business too. He be gettin’ the smokers to weed eat and shit,” he told me, with half a giggle. I stared back blankly.

“Would y’all rather go wait at the house?” “Whose house?” I shot back. “My girl’s crib, man. Your brother’s cousin’s place.” “Yeah C, let’s do that. I want you to meet her anyway.”

We paid the check and walked out. He found his way to a Buick, and us to an Acura TSX I bought specifically for these sorts of endeavors: Nice enough not to be embarrassing, but otherwise completely nondescript. As we followed the Buick out of the parking lot, I asked the obvious question. Or started to: “Are we about to end up in some godforsaken –” He stopped me. “C. You my brother. You know I ain’t fin’ to take you to the damn projects.” I nodded, he carried on. “You gon’ love my cousin. She makes muuuuney, C. I’m tellin’ you.”

He was exaggerating, but as it turned out, he wasn’t lying. Before I knew it, the Buick took a right into a semi-upscale neighborhood with a landscaped entrance. We followed, winding our way through rows of decent homes. Objectively decent homes. Four-sides-brick, decorative stamped concrete driveways and nice-sized lots — for a suburb, anyway. The kind of homes that’d run you, say, $625,000 these days.

Her’s was in a cul-de-sac, and sure enough, right there in the driveway were two commercial vans professionally painted with information about her cleaning business. She came out to greet us. A cheek kiss for the fiancé and a running, squealing hug for my brother. “You doin’ good, huh?!” he asked, rhetorically, motioning up the yard at the house. He turned to me: “I told you, C! Didn’t I tell you?” I nodded and smiled.

She walked my way, stopped at arm’s length, put one hand on her hip and stretched the other out towards me. I shook it politely. “So this is the great C—-,” she sassed, using my whole name, a no-no in these contexts, sunny suburb or not. “You know my cousin thinks you God’s own cousin,” she told me. “Dat true?” I was back-footed by her appearance which, I had to admit, was as-advertised. “I don’t know about all that,” I replied. “But I know one thing: You do look like Nia Long.” She let out the kind of deep, earnest laugh that white people can’t muster. “He be tellin’ everybody that!”

Then we waited. First on a snow-white couch in an otherwise empty great room. Then on plastic chairs in a garage, where we watched college football on a haphazardly-hung flatscreen and smoked cigarette, after cigarette, after cigarette. It was nearly dusk by the time our ship finally came in. At that point, I’d dropped any and all pretensions to politeness. “Dear God, please tell me that’s your people,” I blurted out, when the fiancé’s phone rang from his pocket. It was. He went inside, and after a brief back-and-forth with Nia (“Hell no you ain’t takin’ my car for that,” she chided) he poked his head back in the garage and said I needed to move the TSX so he could get the Buick out of the driveway.

He left and after another anxious half-hour or so, called to let us know he was on the way back. We moved the chairs and pushed a folding table with an overflowing ashtray and empty Heineken bottles up against the back wall to make room for the Buick beside her late-model Tahoe in the garage.

He pulled in, got out and, beaming with pride, produced a plastic Kroger sack which he opened to reveal a collection of fist-sized parcels, each wrapped in the torn corners of black Glad kitchen bags.

“And what the actual fuck is this?” I demanded. “Dat right dere’s rat piss!” he declared, referring to the chemical smell. “That right there–” I started. My brother put his hand on my shoulder, which meant “stop” or “be careful,” depending on the situation. “We just didn’t think it was gon’ be broken out like that is all,” he said, calmly. “Well y’all need to buy the whole one next time.” I couldn’t help myself: “Don’t look like your people have whole ones for sale to me.” I got the shoulder hand again. “Every one of ‘dem gon’ jump back, I betchu ‘dat,” the fiancé reassured. “Well, we’re gonna need to see before we go,” I said. “Bet. Do you.”

We stood there for a few seconds. I turned to my brother: “The stove ain’t my department, man.” He nodded and looked at his soon-to-be in law: “Im’a need to use the kitchen for a sec.” He took one of the parcels, walked up the garage stairs and disappeared into the house, where his cousin was cooking something that smelled soulful. “You come to help?” I heard her say, with a wry chuckle. “I just need one eye,” he told her. “Or the microwave’ll work if you usin’ all of ’em.”

I sat back down in one of the plastic chairs and lit another cigarette. The fiancé leaned against the wall. After what seemed like too long, my brother finally reappeared through the garage door. “And?” I pressed. “It came back quiiick, C. We good.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I almost shouted, as I backed the TSX out of the driveway. Nia and the fiancé were still waving to us from the front porch, like we were leaving a cocktail party. My brother waved back. “It’s damn near 9:30,” I fumed, driving too fast out of the neighborhood. “I know, C, I’m sorry. I didn’t thin–” “What time did we get here?” “Shit, ’bout 12 mayb–” “10:15,” I snapped. “We got here at 10:15. Chili’s wasn’t even open yet.” “You right, C. You righ–” “And, AND —” I was ranting by then. “We lose an hour on the way back. Don’t forget about that!”

He started laughing. Laughter’s contagious, especially when you’re tired, so I laughed too. “Seriously, though, I can’t do this again. If it stays dry we gotta figure out something else.” “Like what?” he wondered. “Mexicans,” I said. “What about ’em?” “That’s what.” “I don’t know no Mexicans, C. Do you?” “I know a lot of bartenders. And they know a lot of dishwashers.”

Once we were safely on the highway, I dug my prepaid out of a cluttered console and flipped it open. “How many calls you miss, C?” “37.” I knew what was coming next. The same old joke. It never got old to him, even if it did to me. “Remember what I told you last year?” he said, without missing a beat. “I know. I know.” We said it in unison, like we always did: “Shit’s ’bout to change.”

Golden age

In early 2015, The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the World Health Organization’s cancer group, said glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” In other words, it has the potential to cause cancer.

Monsanto, which has fought for decades to dispense with safety concerns about the world’s most-popular weedkiller, wasn’t amused. WHO’s determination, the company seethed, was “at odds with every credible scientific body that has examined glyphosate safety,” a spokesman said, in a statement charging WHO with “cherry-picking” study data in the service of advancing a hidden “agenda.”

Just months after WHO’s declaration, Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president at the time, supported a decision to stop aerial fumigation of the country’s coca fields, a controversial eradication strategy undertaken in conjunction with the US as part of “Plan Colombia,” a joint counternarcotics program which doubled as a military partnership.

The initiative, conceived in the final years of the Bill Clinton administration and enacted under George W. Bush in 2000, sought to bolster Colombian law enforcement against drug traffickers and equip the Colombian military to degrade the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), hopefully hastening a resolution to one of the world’s most intractable domestic conflicts which, according to some higher estimates, killed nearly half a million people, mostly civilians.

Those two goals — counternarcotics and counterinsurgency — had significant overlap, for obvious reasons. As the Justice Department put it, bluntly, while celebrating a two-decade jail sentence for a senior FARC commander in 2021, “cocaine revenues funded the FARC’s decades-long campaign to overthrow the government of Colombia.”

“Plan Colombia” had a lot of elements, one of which involved spraying vast swaths of arable land with glyphosate. Even if you’re convinced of glyphosate’s safety profile, you might still have questions about the relative wisdom of showering destitute farmers with Roundup, which is what the US and Colombia did for more than 20 years. Notably, Bolivia and Peru — which also grow coca — didn’t employ the tactic. In 2006, the US and Colombia sprayed nearly 165,000 hectares. By the time the program was halted nearly a decade later, that figure was down to 55,000.

There was no consensus then, nor is there now, on whether spraying’s an effective counternarcotics strategy, let alone an efficient way to degrade drug trafficking networks or bankrupt the armed political movements inextricably bound up in Colombia’s cocaine trade. Plainly, poor Colombian farmers aren’t the bad guys, and at the end of the day, they have to feed their families. For some (many), growing coca was traditionally a more reliable means of subsistence than cultivating other crops. As one farmer with a tiny four-hectare plot put it, in remarks to The Wall Street Journal last month, “We’re totally thankful for this plant.”

An American grieving for an addicted family member or friend might chafe at that. But regaling a Colombian farmer in the Micay Canyon — where, to quote a recent piece published by the AFP, life’s “dangerous, poverty pervasive and no one enters or leaves without guerrillas’ say-so” — with a sob story about the dirty tinfoil you found in your teenager’s sock drawer is likely to elicit an incredulous rejoinder: “Gosh, that’s rough. Care to hear a little bit about my day?”

Ultimately, FARC agreed to a peace plan in 2016 after four years of talks. Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Nearly a decade on, The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame, which monitors progress towards full implementation of the multitudinous commitments included in the peace plan, described mixed results. “Significant progress has been made [but] some commitments face challenges and delays,” the latest edition of Kroc’s annual report read, adding that “final accord implementation has not stopped, but changes in implementation levels each year have been limited [as evidenced] by the high number of minimum-level and non-initiated stipulations.”

One problem is that former FARC fighters — not unlike former narcotraffickers and “former” drug addicts — continue to have difficulties reintegrating into polite society, or what counts as polite society in Colombia. As the International Crisis Group explained in 2021, FARC “has turned its back on war but is struggling to find its place in peaceful public life [as] ex-guerrillas contend with economic hardship amid the rise of violent dissident factions.” Long story short, the government was supposed to protect them, and it’s failing.

In a testament to that reality, dozens of people were killed early this year in Catatumbo, a coca-growing region on the border with Venezuela, where violence broke out between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and armed FARC remnants. Despite a shared political ideology, ELN and FARC have a fraught historical relationship. More than eight in 10 FARC members who laid down their weapons and pledged to reintegrate into society “remain committed to the process [but] at least 441 former combatants have been killed,” the Washington Post wrote in February, noting that “some of the attacks [in Catatumbo] appeared to target former FARC combatants,” consistent with an ELN statement which “admitted to killing former FARC fighters who signed the peace deal, accusing them of being collaborators of the active FARC front,” a reference to splinter groups comprised of FARC members who rejected the peace plan.

That violence is indicative of the struggle current president Gustavo Petro — himself a former leftist guerrilla having belonged, as a young man, to M-19, at one point the second-largest guerrilla group in the country behind only FARC itself — faces in trying to negotiate peace with Colombia’s remaining armed political elements. If that process fails, Petro will likely draw the ire of the Trump administration, particularly given the upsurge in coca growing and cocaine production.

Gerson Arias, a researcher at a think tank in Bogotá, told The Guardian in January that, “There is no way now the government can meet the ELN at the negotiation table.” “All the other negotiations were already in crisis too, and this development is only going to make them more complicated,” he added, despairing that Petro’s “Total Peace strategy is dead.” ELN leaders agree. “This total peace that Petro has been talking about, in the end, it is becoming total war,” two of the group’s commanders said, in an interview with AFP conducted in March at a secret mountain location.

The key point to grasp in all this is that the dissolution of FARC as it existed pre-2016 created a kind of Wild West dynamic. As the Post put it, “FARC members who rejected the peace deal splintered and scattered across the countryside [while] other groups swept into the areas once controlled by the FARC result[ing] in a Colombian conflict even more complex than before the peace deal.”

That speaks to what’s become a truism in the geopolitical arena during the era of US-backed regime change abroad: It’s not so much that removing figures like Saddam Hussein from power is a bad idea (no one’s argument against the second Iraq war was based on the notion that Saddam was, at heart, a good guy), it’s that the unintended consequences of creating power vacuums in volatile, dangerous regions very often create even bigger problems even when that seems implausible in advance.

That’s another way of saying hindsight’s 20/20, and it’s an important consideration. Anytime you’re tempted, as an observer of some power structure responsible for horrific outcomes, to suggest dismantling that structure overnight, think twice. Modern history offers precious few examples where such decisions are actually as clear-cut as they seem (the Third Reich being the most obvious).

The Medellín Cartel’s long gone. The Cali Cartel too. FARC’s a shadow of its pre-peace deal self. And yet, according to UNODC, potential cocaine production in Colombia jumped more than 50% in 2023, to 2,664 metric tons. As a UN press release lamented in October, estimates of potential cocaine production in Colombia (the sum of potential cocaine exported and claimed seizures) have risen every single year since 2013. In 2022, Bloomberg estimated more than $18 billion of cocaine export revenue for Colombia, just short of the $19 billion the country made from oil shipments that year.

Simple extrapolation (i.e., dividing claimed seizures by potential production figures) suggests that if things continue along their current trajectory, interdiction efforts will prove increasingly futile, as illustrated by the blue line in the chart above.

Again, part of this — a big part of it — is unintended consequences. As UNODC explained in a 2018 joint publication with Europol, “The end of FARC’s integrated command structure” led to “the emergence of various splinter groups” who carved out their own fiefdoms and “exercis[ed] control over cocaine production therein.” As we’re seeing currently near the border with Venezuela, alliances between those splinter groups and ELN are shaky and can devolve into recriminatory turf wars.

In many cases, cartels, international trafficking organizations — including organized crime syndicates in Europe — and cowboy freelancers, rely on guerrilla groups and armed political movements for access to Colombia’s cocaine business. That used to be fairly straightforward, or as straightforward as such things can be. Now, not so much.

“While cocaine oligopolies tended in the past to supply a limited number of trusted established wholesale traffickers, the removal of centralized control over much of the cocaine supply chain and the opening of the cocaine supply market in Colombia may now be providing an opportunity for smaller international trafficking organizations to gain access to supplies and wholesale quantities of cocaine,” the same linked Europol dispatch noted.

That dynamic’s in part responsible for an enormous upsurge in cocaine shipments to Europe, and it’s also — ironically — ruining some small, family farmers in the interior of the country. Think about it. The further you need to move base (i.e., the precursor produced by mixing gasoline or kerosene with dried coca leaves to make paste), the more organizational capacity you need. In a free-for-all of smaller players, that capacity simply isn’t there, which means if you’re a farmer, proximity to final production (i.e., the labs where a more sophisticated process turns the paste into exportable product) and particularly to sea ports, is critical.

“[FARC] financed its war largely through cocaine and relied on thousands of farmers to provide plant[s] but once the FARC exited the cocaine industry, it was replaced by smaller criminal groups pursuing a new economic model,” the New York Times explained, in a July 2024 article. That model: Buying as much paste as possible from farmers operating near borders, ports and processing labs.

As you can imagine, that’s catastrophic for families in the country’s interior. As the same article noted, “the purchase of paste in more than half of the country’s coca-growing regions has dropped precipitously or disappeared completely, spurring a humanitarian crisis in many remote, impoverished communities.”

Meanwhile, the trade itself is booming, and particularly in Europe, where cocaine seizures quintupled in the decade from 2011 to 2021, according to the UN. Pretty much every story documenting Europe’s struggle to stem the tide leads back to the Albanian mafia, and specifically to one man: 44-year-old Dritan Rexhepi who, until his 2023 capture by Turkish authorities in Istanbul, led Kompania Bello, a consortium of more than a dozen Albanian organized crime outfits who, between them, exercised de facto control over Europe’s cocaine trade by way of Ecuador.

If Rexhepi isn’t immortalized in a Hollywood blockbuster at some point, I’d be surprised. An escape artist in the Houdini tradition, Rexhepi was wanted pretty much everywhere and, amusingly, still is despite being currently incarcerated. (There’s competition to extradite him.) A career criminal of increasingly epic proportions, his big break came during a 10-year prison stint in Ecuador where, according to an incredible account published by the Post, “he befriended leaders of [the country’s] most powerful gang, Los Choneros” who, lucky for Rexhepi, had an existing partnership with the Sinaloas in Mexico.

Rexhepi was arrested in 2014 in Guayaquil, where, as the Post detailed, “he built a sophisticated drug logistics system, buying off port staff and shipping companies that allowed them almost free access to containers heading to Europe.” By the time Rexhepi settled in for what was supposed to be a 13-year prison sentence, Joaquín Guzmán (El Chapo) was just months away from being apprehended in Mexico for the final time, but the Sinaloas remained, on most accounts, the most powerful cartel in the world under the command of Guzmán’s lower-profile co-captain, Ismael Zambada (El Mayo), who wasn’t captured until 2024.

While imprisoned, Rexhepi “turned his cellblock into an executive suite,” as the Post put it, and in 2021, a desperate Italy pleaded for his extradition, insisting through diplomatic channels that very much contrary to the assertions of his attorneys, Rexhepi was one of the most influential drug traffickers on the planet and, despite hard confinement, had access to “infinite quantities of cocaine.”

Rexhepi shipped the drugs over vast oceans via Albanian mafioso who, to quote the Post one more time, “infiltrated Ecuador’s ports, judiciary, prison system and security forces to gain control of key parts of the cocaine supply chain and trigger a deluge of the drug in Europe.” (Rexhepi fell off the radar after securing a medical-need release from an Ecuadorian judge in 2021. He wasn’t seen again until his arrest in Istanbul two years later.)

Early last month, a BBC article underscored the extent to which the Ecuador-Albanian drug trafficker nexus is now a linchpin in the international cocaine trade. The April 9 piece quoted a 36-year-old Latin King, who said he’d been employed by the cartels for more than two decades, which is to say since he was a child. The Latin Kings aren’t exactly famous for timidity, but the man suggested the Albanians exhibit a kind of cold, calculating ruthlessness that leaves exactly no room for debate. “The Albanian mafia would call me and say: ‘We want to send 500kg of drugs,'” the man told the BBC. “If you don’t accept, they kill you.”

The Guardian last year described Ecuador’s ports as the onramp for a “cocaine superhighway” to Antwerp which, along with Rotterdam, Hamburg and Valencia, are now “the European capital[s] of cocaine smuggling.” Here’s an incredible statistic: Ecuador produces none of the drug on its own, but according to president Daniel Noboa, nearly three quarters of the world’s cocaine flows through his country.

Last summer, German investigators said they seized nearly 40 tons of cocaine worth almost $3 billion at ports in Hamburg and Rotterdam. It was, according to local officials, the country’s largest-ever cocaine bust.

Around the same time, the public prosecutor’s office in Aurich said a local man wandering the beach stumbled upon a ton of cocaine washed ashore in “suspicious sacks tied together with a life jacket.” It wasn’t the first such find. As the German press noted, “drugs have repeatedly been washed up and discovered in bags on the East Frisian North Sea coast” over the last five to 10 years. Last month, Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office warned of a “cocaine surge.”

In 2023, Belgium seized a record 116 tonnes of cocaine at the port of Antwerp, which officials were keen to emphasize had become the key European entry point for South American drugs. Cocaine seizures at Antwerp exceeded 100 tonnes for the first time ever the previous year.

As the BBC noted, the Netherlands has likewise seen a huge increase in cocaine seizures tied to “its position as a distribution hub for many parts of Europe, including the UK.” The largest source country for cocaine seized in the Netherlands during 2023 was — you guessed it — Ecuador, where the murder rate’s now the highest in South America.

Reports documenting the scope and pervasiveness of Europe’s problem are endless. You can spend hours upon hours reading account after account, all of which say more or less what Jean-Paul Vermot, mayor of Morlaix, population 15,000 in northwestern France, said when interviewed by the Times for a piece published in January: “We are confronting a tide of cocaine.”

Last summer, a US drug enforcement official speaking anonymously to the Times described the supply situation in Colombia in stark terms. “We’re seeing production at levels that Pablo Escobar dreamed about,” he said.

Whiteout

I chambered a round in a Taurus Millennium which, in hindsight, wasn’t the most reliable choice, but I wasn’t as meticulous back then.

“I thought you said this was safe,” she half-fretted, glancing up from Candide. The sound of clacking metal broke her concentration.

I flicked the thumb safety on, tucked the gun in my waistband by the small of my back, turned and pointed my index finger at the book. “You just worry about making it all the way through this time,” I admonished.

She chafed at the implication. Because she knew it was true. My would-be Francophile, a straight-A undergraduate student at a big state university, was about as French as I was, which is to say not at all, and would’ve been a C-student if I weren’t writing half her papers and heavily editing the other half.

“And it is. Safe.” “Then why are you –” she struggled for the correct terminology. I never carried with a live round chambered, let alone in my waistband. That’s a moronic thing to do, but in this case the alternative seemed dangerously naive. “Because these people are serious and there’s a language barrier,” I said. “You speak Spanish,” she chirped. I winced at the preposterousness of what she was suggesting. “Darlin,’ I’m a little rusty.”

I threw on a vintage corduroy blazer and gave myself a once-over in the full-length mirror my conceit demanded she put in the bedroom when I first started spending weekends at her condo. She walked up behind me: “You look fine.” “I didn’t ask,” I quipped. She punched my shoulder. “Excuse me?” “It’s Jack Nicholson!” I exclaimed. She drew a blank with her eyes. “Batman. 1989.” “I was three,” she said, flatly.

I grabbed a backpack and started down the stairs to the door. “Are you gonna be here when I get back?” I called over my shoulder. “I dunno,” she said, flippantly. “I may go shopping.” I stopped and walked back up to the landing. “Do you have your prepaid?” She was eyes-down rummaging for something unimportant at the bottom of a Neverfull which, at the time, was a new product. If she wasn’t the first person in that city with a Neverfull, she was surely the first person on campus with one.

“Hey!” I snapped my fingers. She looked up. “Focus for me love. Do. You. Have. Your. Prepaid?” “Gawwwwd, yesss,” she groaned, as if she hadn’t forgotten to keep it on her at critical moments a hundred times before. I wasn’t satisfied: “Do you have minutes on it? ‘Cause it’s no good without minu–” She nodded emphatically in the affirmative.

“I’m gonna call you when I’m done and get you to grab a few things while you’re out. I’ll need to come straight back here.” “Ok,” she said. Then: “Be careful.” I frowned, askance. “What’s that about?” I asked. I couldn’t think of a single other time when she’d expressed anything resembling concern for my well-being. “What, I can’t worry?” she wondered. “No. It creeps me out,” I told her, and walked down the stairs and out the door.

An hour later, maybe two, a slight young lady with a ghost-pale complexion and a fire-orange pixie cut swaggered into a mall GNC wearing jean shorts, Chuck Taylors, Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and a t-shirt emblazoned with the Rocky Horror Picture Show lips. Trailed by a disputatious bouquet of Marlboro Reds mixed with N°5, she walked up to the register and hoisted Louis’ latest launch onto the counter.

A proud physique with a name tag and minimum wage probably thought he had a chance: “And what can I do for you today?” She rolled her eyes, but the sunglasses, which she wore indoors like the star she briefly was, spared him the humiliation. “Inositol,” she said, matter-of-factly, pulling out her credit card. “Well, we have a couple of different brands and a few different sizes. Want me to show–” “All of it,” she cut him off. “I want all of it.”

The dream

No matter what she’d tell you now, wherever she is, she believed in the dream. They all did. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say they believed in me.

Alcohol had other plans, though.

They would’ve followed me to hell. But not if I was determined to drive there drunk.

Paradoxically, the liquor that nearly killed me a decade ago might’ve saved my life and, more importantly, theirs, a decade before that. Sober, lucid me could’ve convinced anyone, anywhere of anything. And I would’ve.

I experience nostalgia acutely. Painfully. Preternaturally, even. That, despite being an avowed atheist and thus disinclined to believing in the spectral.

The feeling that they’re out there somewhere, paused in time, the same age, in the same era, waiting on me to come back and press play, is almost tangible on some days. And it’s excruciating.

From what little I know, they lead featureless existences now — jobs, schedules, kids, paycheck-to-fucking-paycheck. My heart breaks for them and their unremarkable lives. But not, I’m sure, as much as theirs break for me, trapped alone in a wistful, absurdist delusion.

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