Reported by The Economist

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report, go to: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/10/16/the-traffickers-are-winning-the-war-on-drugs)

Global production, seizures and consumption of cocaine are all at record highs, despite 50 years of the war on drugs—a fight that President Donald Trump is now intensifying by bombing alleged Venezuelan smuggling-boats in the Caribbean. This is in part because prohibition makes a cheap commodity, cocaine, enormously lucrative. When it can fetch on the street in Europe 125 times what it does at the laboratory door in Latin America, someone will always be willing to fight to sell it, often literally.

Over the past 15 years the business has evolved rapidly. Whereas drug gangs used to be vertically integrated, with a single kingpin supervising production, transport and distribution, they now rely heavily on outsourcing. This more fragmented, distributed system, in turn, has fuelled specialisation and innovation. Traffickers no longer focus almost exclusively on the United States: smuggling has gone global. The result is a system that is more dangerous to the world and more difficult to disrupt.

Estimating global cocaine sales is, naturally, extremely hard. Global Financial Integrity, a think-tank, valued the market at between $84bn and $143bn in 2014, making it a bigger business than chocolate. Whatever the true figure in 2014, it is now higher: cocaine production (which is easier to track) has more than tripled since.

Painful blow

That partly reflects cocaine’s spread. Demand in America remains high, but has stagnated with the rise of fentanyl and other drugs. Cocaine consumption in Europe, however, is thought to have risen by 60% in the decade to 2022. In 2023, for the seventh year in a row, seizures in Europe hit a record. It is probably a bigger market now than the United States.

Australia seems to consume more cocaine per person than any other country. Snorting is also on the rise in Asia, where seizures grew five-fold between 2013 and 2023. Consumption has soared in Latin America, too: Brazil may be the second-biggest single-country market (see map).

This globalisation has been driven by traffickers chasing high prices. In America a kilo of wholesale cocaine is worth about $30,000 but in western Europe it fetches between $39,000 and $45,000. (Retail prices are more exorbitant still.) Even higher prices are now prompting traffickers to target Asia and Australia. In Hong Kong a kilo goes for $65,000 and in Australia it can reach over $250,000.

As it has globalised, the industry has been transformed. Whereas Colombian and Mexican kingpins used to try to monopolise every facet of the business, from the coca farm to the nightclub bathroom, even today’s biggest gangs, such as the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels in Mexico, First Capital Command (PCC) in Brazil and the ’Ndrangheta, an Italian mafia, often directly operate only one part of the supply chain. Drug trafficking is instead a fluid network of subcontractors and service-providers, including chemists, hitmen and money-launderers. Each service-provider charges a fee. Sometimes big outfits, such as the PCC, try to integrate more tightly, pushing service-providers into semi-permanent alliances. Yet often these freelancers work simultaneously for several gangs or for white-collar investors, known as “invisible narcos”, who finance and orchestrate drug shipments.

For the traffickers the new way of doing things has big benefits. It makes the supply chain far more resilient than in the command-and-control model. If a shipment is captured, tracing the owners is fiendishly difficult.