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and the war on drugs is no different
the global illicit drug trade is worth
an estimated half a trillion dollars per
year
that's around one percent of all global
trade and no drug is more linked with
money in the popular imagination
than cocaine this particular money is
going through a spanish room there's a
lot of money generated
at street level through call king but
where does that money go
who's spending it and who's making it
the coke business generates extreme
violence at every stage of its
production
and distribution but why why does this
one product seem so uniquely connected
with violence and warfare
in this show we're following the money
how does the cocaine industry actually
work
why does it function in the way it does
and who bears the responsibility
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the three biggest cocaine producing
countries are colombia
peru and bolivia so this is where the
process of making cocaine all starts
these guys come down here to the farms
the crack of dawn before it gets too hot
bind their fingers in fabric and
literally rip the leaves off the trees
this activity is going on at this time
every day
all across this region
nothing so far exactly screams
multi-billion dollar industry the
average cocoa picker can make up to
about 50
a week supporting their families for
daily back-breaking labor
but poverty and rough working conditions
are hardly the only things these farmers
have to worry about
looks like they damaged the landing
strip but they are just using this to
put more explosives
inside and just blow the whole place up
so no wonder what the native community
is not happy about this
the us has poured billions of dollars in
military aid into the war on drugs in
latin america
for 2019 to 2020 congress has approved
418 million dollars in aid to colombia
alone
to suppress coker and maintain peace
efforts with the left-wing rebel
factions who use the drug to finance
their wars
each year militaries across the region
pull up thousands of hectares of coca
fields by hand
but for decades governments would
destroy crops by spraying them with the
herbicide glyphosate
this stopped in 2013 when the colombian
government had to pay ecuador 15 million
dollars in compensation
for the severe health problems the
chemical spraying was causing families
along the border
to make a kilo of cocaine takes about a
ton of coca leaves
prices obviously fluctuate but a ton of
coca leaves off the farm cost roughly
400
from the fields the leaves are
transported to labs hidden deep in the
jungle
where they're converted into cocaine
paste a kilo of raw paste
generally goes for somewhere between 700
to 900
around double the price of the raw
leaves the alkaloid paste is then
transported to another lab
where it's mixed with even more lovely
chemicals turning it into pure
finished cocaine and this is the moment
where everything changes
the moment the product passes from
producer to distributor
and something unbelievable happens that
kilo of pure coke that was worth 900
in the south american jungles becomes
worth roughly twenty thousand dollars by
the time it hits the us
and that's just wholesale by the time
that kilo has been cut by dealers
and broken up into single grams to sell
it can fetch around 150
dollars
four hundred dollars to 150 grand is a
pretty wild markup for any product
and that price jump is pretty much the
key to the whole cocaine business
because the product is illegal those
coca farmers and jungle lab techs can't
sell it straight to consumers
the real profit lies in transporting it
from the fields of south america
to users around the world
since pablo escobar in 1970s colombia
the international cocaine trade has been
run by cartels and since the 1970s
those cartels have been getting more and
more violent
that's his brain hey oh man
really in mexico there were over 34 000
murders in 2019.
in the first half of 2020 there have
already been over 17
000 that's roughly one person being
murdered every 15 minutes
and one of the root causes of this
violence is that when drugs are illegal
gangs will fight to control their supply
what governments have done
by prohibiting drugs is they have
created a perpetually
growing violent market where police
remove one dealer at any level at street
level
cartel level wherever in the world
they're almost
always follows violence to compete for
that market share
so over time this market growth has
meant
a growth in violence how old are you
guys
you've been going this year
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13. i mean do you want to be one of
those people
have to kill people nobody see
mexican drug trafficking to the us is
estimated to be worth between 19 and 29
billion dollars a year
the sinaloa cartel alone turns over more
than 3 billion
and this money doesn't just buy
gold-plated guns and hippos for drug
lords private zoos it's used to pay off
the police
the military and the government many
experts say that in mexico
there isn't a single level of government
from local traffic police to the
president's office
that hasn't been corrupted by narco
money to the point where the state
and the narcos can become almost
indistinguishable
this is so far away from any city do the
police ever come by here
but
who really controls mexico is it the
authorities or is it the cartels
here
when guys with automatic weapons are
sitting on mountain tops telling you
that the government is the real cartel
boss
and taking most of the profits you know
your drug policies are probably not in a
great place
but with that 400 to 150 grand markup
it's sort of inevitable but who's paying
for these 150 grand kilos of coke
we've seen the producers and the
distributors but who's actually
consuming this stuff
there's probably as much misinformation
peddled about the western cocaine market
as about any other aspect of the war on
drugs and that's a crowded field
the idea that so many politicians seem
to have is that this is still some sort
of drug of the elite
only taken by famous actors media types
and the occasional member of parliament
they have their organic food they boast
about buying fair trade and
at the same time they're ordering class
a drugs it's fair to say commissioner
that some of these
middle class dinner parties that send
out for cocaine they've actually got
blood on their hands
i think anybody who is seeking
recreational inverted commerce
uh drugs uh particularly class a drugs
yes i think that is a good way to put it
i do
but that is astonishingly out of touch
based on stale pop culture cliches from
the 1980s the truth is
cocaine is pretty much everywhere we're
working class you know we're not too
comfortable but we do all right you know
we don't ask for much
you know we just go to work you know we
spend time with each other and with a
family and do all the things that
families do and if people realize
just how much coke is in this country
and what corners of it it actually
reaches
then people might just be a little bit
less
judgmental over the people that use it
976
000 people used powder cocaine in
england and wales in 2019.
if cocaine was a british company it
would be bigger than boots or easyjet
in 2016 1.9 million americans reported
using coke in the past month
this goes way beyond wall street bankers
and the hollywood elite
this is everyday people looking to
unwind a bit and willing to take the
health risks involved in using cocaine
to do so
but the money still flows it's easy
money i'm saying it's easy money
customers keep coming back so i don't
see why i
stopped doing it it's money at the end
of the day economics drives
everything about cocaine from the
jungles of south america
to nightclub toilets across the world it
was the war on drugs that created that
price jump from 400
to 150 000 but unfortunately for the
farmers in colombia peru and bolivia
it is exactly that economic reality
which means that destroying their crops
is actually completely useless
the tactic of trying to stop the flow of
drugs by sending the army to eradicate
crops was
at its heart an economic idea imagine if
governments were
so effective at reducing the supply of
coca leaf that they managed to double
its price
you'd be talking about a doubling of the
price of those leaves from four hundred
dollars to
eight hundred dollars but at the other
end you wouldn't be doubling the price
of the finished cocaine you'd be
increasing its price by 400 so it'd be
going up from 150
000 per kilo to 150 400
per kilo think of it like the market for
paintings you could have a painting that
costs millions of dollars
the cost of the paint doesn't have very
much to do with that place where the
value is added
is when the artist takes that paint and
transforms it into something unique
people sometimes make jokes about there
being no such thing as ethical cocaine
or fair trade cocaine and they're
basically right the coke business is
violent
and exploitative and it's those on the
bottom that suffer the most
farmers having their crops destroyed
drug users around the world trapped
without adequate treatment or support
and kids exploited by drug gangs from
latin america to la
to london but if you're looking for
someone to blame for how this all works
it's probably not the random user
picking up a gram for their night out
it's the people who set this whole
market up by making the product illegal
in the first place
the problem is the war on drugs we'd
like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs
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you