The super Drug Trade in this century

Drug trafficking, beyond being a crime, is a multibillion-dollar transnational enterprise that buys countries, corrupts their identity, and undermines their institutions.

At the end of the last century, when the world was astonished by Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels, I demanded, as a member of Parliament, the creation of the Permanent Anti-Drug Commission of the Congress of the Republic of Venezuela, which I chaired for a decade. I also introduced and co-authored the first Law Against Drug Trafficking Crimes in Venezuela. From the National Assembly, I revealed that some congressmen were using their official vehicles to traffic drugs; we managed to expose several of them, and some ended up in prison. I also demanded that President Carlos Andrés Pérez’s government expel the Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra from the country, an action that was successfully carried out.

Since the 1980s, I had warned that Venezuela had to prevent the expansion of drug trafficking within its borders, emphasizing that Colombian cartels could turn our territory into “the largest storage hub of Colombian drugs bound for the United States and Europe.”

In 1987, during the government of President Jaime Lusinchi, I also denounced that high-ranking generals at the time were involved in drug trafficking. It was then that I coined for the first time the term “Cartel de los Soles” (Cartel of the Suns). It is called that because Venezuelan generals, unlike their U.S. counterparts who wear stars on their epaulettes, wear suns as insignia on theirs. to describe that emerging structure within the Venezuelan armed forces. That denunciation —made in a supposedly democratic state— led to an illegal judicial and military persecution against me. Though I was a civilian and a member of Congress with parliamentary immunity, the Military Court Martial charged me with “defamation of the Armed Forces” and sought to prosecute me. I could not trust that court, since the president of the same Court Martial, a general, had been tried for drug trafficking after being arrested near Coro, Venezuela, in 1985 with 453 kilograms of cocaine. As a result, I had to seek asylum in the Embassy of Panama in Caracas. The next day, I left the country under the protection of Panamanian Ambassador Marcel Salamín, a fact reported internationally by El País (Spain) and news agencies such as AP.

By that time, as reported by El Tiempo (Bogotá), I had already warned that Mexico’s drug cartels were earning more than that country’s oil revenues, and that Colombia’s economy heavily depended on cocaine money. I also cautioned that with the tens of billions of dollars flowing into Colombian and Mexican cartels, they could eventually seize or control power in their own countries —or even in others across the region— thus creating a genuine “State within the State.”

Today, more than three decades later, drug trafficking has expanded across much of Central and South America. The warnings I issued back then have become an undeniable reality: the narcotics trade has acquired unprecedented social, economic, political, and military power.

Let us now analyze how far the production, trafficking, and consumption of illicit drugs have grown, and how this has become not only a political and security challenge, but also a psychological and generational crisis that endangers humanity as a whole.

Cocaine

When we speak of the cocaine business, we must first understand its criminal geography. The coca leaf is grown primarily in three Andean countries—Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. There, in the same rural zones where it is cultivated, the first stage of processing takes place: the pasta básica (also called “pasta de coca” or coca sulfate). The next phase is conversion into cocaine hydrochloride, the white powder that dominates global markets. Traditionally, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia have been the principal sites of crystallization, but in recent years that geography has expanded. Laboratories that convert base into final product have been uncovered as far afield as the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and even Brazil, where imported base or precursor chemicals are used to transform the sulfate into cocaine hydrochloride ready for consumption.

In other words, the circuit begins in the Andes with the ancestral leaf, becomes paste and then powder, and may ultimately be refined in Europe or in South American border zones, poised to flood the world. This chain shows that it is no longer a local trade but an industrial network with diversified production centers and a global capacity to adapt. The peasants who cultivate the coca leaf receive little, yet they earn more than double what they would from any food crop. When that paste is moved to the crude jungle laboratories where it is processed into “base” or “pasta,” the price rises. It typically ranges between $600 and $900 per kilo. But the real transformation occurs in the crystallization labs where the paste becomes the white powder exported worldwide. At that point, still in the producing country, a kilo can already cost between $4,000 and $6,000, and sometimes $10,000.

The criminal arithmetic is obvious: a commodity worth a few hundred dollars at origin multiplies tenfold when refined, and when it crosses oceans toward the United States, Europe, or Australia the same kilo can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the United States the street price is estimated at $80,000 per kilo, and even higher in Europe and Asia, reaching up to $120,000 per kilo. It is precisely that abyssal price differential that sustains the narcotrafficking machinery. An illicit economy that finances private armies and gangs, penetrates institutions, and turns trafficking organizations into genuine “states within the state.”

According to the World Drug Report 2025, nearly 4,000 tons of cocaine must be produced annually; in fact, in 2023 production was 3,078 tons. Now, if we take those 4 million kilos at an average wholesale price of $80,000 per kilo, the global cocaine market would amount to —pay attention— $320 billion, sold at wholesale. Whoever buys at that price then doubles or triples the product by adding cutting agents such as talc, turning 1,000 grams into 2,500–3,000 grams. Retailers sell each gram for roughly $60 to $80. Thus, the kilo that cost $80,000 at wholesale, if cut into 3,000 doses, can be retailed for up to $240,000… tripling its cost.

Venezuela

Venezuela does not cultivate coca leaf on a large scale, but since the 1980s the country has become a key transit territory and, in some border regions, a site for processing coca paste originating from Colombia. As early as the 1990s, I denounced that Venezuelan border states such as Zulia and Apure were being used for storage and refining. This means that although coca was not grown in Venezuela, shipments of coca paste and base arrived from Colombia to continue the process of conversion into cocaine hydrochloride.

During the 1990s, both official reports and seizures revealed that ports like Puerto Cabello and La Guaira were being used to consolidate shipments bound for Europe and North America. Venezuela, therefore —though not a leaf producer— became a logistical and refining platform, an indispensable link in the global cocaine chain.

According to the DEA (2024), Venezuela remains an important drug-transit country and a preferred route in the Western Hemisphere for trafficking illicit substances, primarily cocaine. It is estimated that between 200 and 250 tons of cocaine pass through Venezuelan territory each year. This would represent revenues of $6.5 to $12 billion, particularly when associated with distributors in Europe and the United States, clearly competing with Venezuela’s oil income.

The Venezuelan government has denied U.S. accusations of links to narcotrafficking, claiming instead that most Colombian drugs do not pass through its territory.

Colombia

In the 1970s, the valleys of Medellín and Cali witnessed the rise of a new economic and paramilitary empire. Escobar, the Ochoa brothers, the Rodríguez Orejuela family, and other groups turned cocaine into a business more profitable than coffee or oil (Bowden, 2001; Kenney, 2007). The state —corroded by corruption and fear— was largely incapable of stopping them (Molano, 2000). Thus, drug trafficking became a mirror reflecting the inequality and frustration of a society that had lost faith in its institutions (Waldmann, 2007). The most devastating consequence was not only the assassinations of judges, candidates, and journalists, but also the collective fear. Colombia developed a social trauma (Herman, 1992; Martín-Baró, 1990),  a permanent emotional state in which danger was internalized and violence became part of the landscape. Illegality was normalized because legality offered no alternatives. Drug trafficking emerged as a culture of survival, a distorted attempt to find meaning and prosperity where the state had failed (Arendt, 1958).

With the internationalization of crime in the 1990s, military offensives dismantled the major cartels but not the business itself. Narcotrafficking, like any adaptive structure, decentralized, giving rise to cartelitos, autodefensas, and later bacrim (criminal bands), where drugs, paramilitarism, and politics became intertwined (Semana, 2008; Sarmiento, 2019). Mexico entered the game, and cocaine continued its global journey with new intermediaries (Astorga, 2012; UNODC, 2022). The business did not die; it became transnational. Eradication strategies —fumigations, military operations, and international cooperation— failed repeatedly (Youngers & Rosin, 2005; Mejía & Restrepo, 2016). Each time one growing zone was destroyed, another appeared. Anti-drug policies forgot that drug trafficking is, above all, a social and economic phenomenon. Eradicating coca without replacing it with something productive only sows frustration. Peasants grow coca because it feeds their families and sustains their lives (UNDP, 2013).

Today, Colombia has changed, but the wounds remain open. Illicit money circulates disguised within legal businesses and political campaigns (Transparency International, 2020). Yet the ethical dilemma persists: Can a society build justice when part of its economy depends on illegality? Can there be peace without development or real alternatives? (ECLAC, 2021).

The history of narcotrafficking in Colombia is the history of a people unable to reconcile morality with hunger. The day Latin America invests more in consciousness than in repression, the drug trade will lose its market. No army can defeat what is born of deprivation, and no state will achieve peace unless it offers something more powerful than cocaine, such as daily sustenance and opportunity.

The production and trafficking of cocaine have a profound social and economic impact. Although Colombia’s formal sectors contribute much more to its GDP, narcotrafficking operates as a parallel economy that compromises legality, distorts markets, erodes institutions, and inflicts deep social damage. Even if it does not dominate the formal economy, it influences it, since the sheer magnitude of illicit funds creates multiplier effects: corruption, money laundering, and violence. The cocaine economy generates resources that escape official statistics and fiscal control, meaning its real impact is likely underestimated. It remains the main source of income for paramilitary armies and for dissident guerrilla groups from the FARC and ELN.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in 2023 Colombia recorded a 53% increase in potential cocaine production, reaching approximately 2,664 metric tons, with 253,000 hectares cultivated with coca leaf. Another source estimates that the cocaine market brings $10 billion per year into the country. Undoubtedly, cocaine production in Colombia has reached record levels, signaling an illicit economy of vast magnitude. Its true weight is also qualitative, manifested in institutional corruption, regional control, the erosion of the judiciary and armed forces, the maintenance of parallel military organizations and guerrillas, the expansion of criminal networks, and the decay of public morality.

Mexico

When we speak about Mexico and drug trafficking, we must understand that this country is no longer merely a transit point—it has become both an industrial plant for synthetic drugs and a command center for routes leading to the United States and other global markets. According to the DEA, the transformations of the past decade have redrawn the map: it is no longer just about moving cocaine from South America, but about manufacturing the most lethal product of the modern era —fentanyl— and diversifying the portfolio to dominate the continental market.

What Drugs Do the Mexican Cartels Produce?

The main development is that Mexican cartels have acquired industrial-scale capacity to produce fentanyl —in pills or powder— using imported precursors and machinery. Today, a large portion of the fentanyl that reaches the U.S. market in pill form originates from laboratories in Mexico, as indicated by the DEA.

As for methamphetamine, it is now produced massively in industrial plants (both pills and crystal form), with greater sophistication and volume than in previous decades. According to the U.S. Department of State, this growth is largely due to Mexican factories using precursor chemicals imported from Asia.

When it comes to heroin, which still retains high value in specific markets, Mexico remains an important source of this narcotic bound for the United States. However, in terms of public health impact, fentanyl has now surpassed heroin as the leading cause of overdose deaths.

Cocaine is not produced on a large scale in Mexico, but it is imported from Andean countries, and Mexican organizations control the routes, store shipments, and sometimes refine batches, particularly for the U.S. market. Although no precise public percentage divides the global trade by transit country, agencies monitoring the phenomenon agree on one essential fact: most of the cocaine that reaches the United States passes through routes controlled by Mexican organizations. Moreover, these groups have extended their logistical influence toward Europe and Africa through partnerships with local transit networks. This position allows them to capture substantial margins of profit at every stage: storage, transshipment, transportation, and occasionally refinement.

Major Cartels and Their Reach

At the strategic level, two conglomerates currently dominate both the national and international landscape: The Sinaloa Cartel, historically the dominant player in routes to the U.S., remains a central actor, though now fragmented by internal disputes. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has become the most economically powerful and rapidly expanding narcotrafficking organization of the past decade, with strong territorial control, paramilitary capabilities, and market diversification, including fentanyl production and distribution.

Alongside them operate other groups of varying strength and regional presence, such as the Gulf Cartel, Juárez Cartel, Tijuana/Arellano Félix Cartel, and remnants of Los Zetas (now splintered and restructured), as well as the weakened Beltrán-Leyva Organization, and dozens of smaller local gangs and satellite cells acting as intermediaries. If alliances and subcontracted networks are included, the number of active “organizations” may reach several dozen.

A Parallel Economy

In Mexico, the cartels function as parallel private corporations, with an economic accumulation capacity rivaling that of formal economic sectors. Reliable estimates suggest that drug trafficking generates between $25 billion and $35 billion annually in gross revenue from drug exports to the United States alone. Some estimates push that figure to $40 billion when methamphetamine, fentanyl, and cocaine are included.

There does not appear to be a unified mega-cartel operating jointly between Mexico and Venezuela. What exists are temporary collaborations, transit contracts, mutual protection pacts, or transportation subcontracts between cross-border networks. For Mexican cartels, alliances with Venezuelan networks ensure secure routes through the Caribbean corridor, Venezuelan ports, and air transfer points. For Venezuelan groups, partnerships with Mexican cartels provide direct access to the U.S. market, greater distribution capacity, and logistical cooperation in both land and maritime transport.

By 2024 and 2025, journalistic and intelligence reports consistently affirm that the majority of the cocaine entering the United States continues to do so via Mexico.

United States: The Largest Illicit Drug Market on the Planet

It is in the United States where the entire chain converges domestic production, market manipulation, distribution gangs, and a segment of the financial system that absorbs and conceals billions of dollars in drug-trafficking profits. When we speak of narcotrafficking, we often point the finger at countries that produce coca, opium, or fentanyl, but rarely do we emphasize that the epicenter of the problem lies in mass consumption within the United States.

There not only exists a demand that fuels foreign cartels, but also significant domestic production of methamphetamines and synthetic opioids. A RAND study estimated that U.S. consumers spend around $100 billion annually on illicit drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Another report from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) placed consumer spending on illicit drugs at $153 billion in 2017. These figures make the U.S. drug market one of the most lucrative in the world.

While major international mafias supply the raw material, it is on U.S. soil where the market is manipulated. The FBI reports that more than 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle clubs, and prison gangs are criminally active in the United States. Many are sophisticated and well organized, and all use violence to control neighborhoods and expand their illegal operations ranging from robbery, drug and arms trafficking, and prostitution to human trafficking and fraud. Many gang members continue committing crimes even after incarceration. These gangs are responsible for the distribution of drugs in neighborhoods, schools, and nightclubs across the country.

But the business doesn’t end on the street. The billions of dollars generated by those illicit sales are laundered through U.S. banks, the real estate market, shell corporations, the stock exchange, and even cryptocurrencies. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that drug trafficking and related crimes generate over $800 billion globally each year, in laundered money and a substantial portion circulates and is reinvested within the U.S. economy.

This is not speculation: some of America’s most recognized banks have admitted to laundering more than $378 billion linked to Mexican cartels.

In 2012, another major financial institution agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine for facilitating narcotrafficking-related transactions.

These cases demonstrate that the problem does not end in the streets because the international financial system, headquartered in Wall Street and London, is also part of the machinery. That is why I maintain that, while the criminal actions of cartels in poorer countries are devastating, so too is the role of the American consumer, whose demand perpetuates the wheel of narcotrafficking and allows dirty money to find refuge within the most powerful economy on Earth.

The Poppy

During the twenty years of U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, between 2001 and 2021, the world witnessed one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history. While Washington waged its so-called “war on terror” and “war on drugs,” Afghan opium production reached unprecedented levels. When U.S. and coalition forces entered Afghanistan in 2001 and overthrew the Taliban regime, opium flourished again like a resilient weed growing amid the rubble of war. According to the RAND Corporation, “the international intervention opened a new and unprecedented cycle of production.”

In the first years of occupation, the promises of development and state control never reached the rural areas where opium was the only means of survival. The UNODC Report of 2006 stated that cultivated land had reached 165,000 hectares, a 59% increase from the previous year. By 2007, studies estimated that Afghanistan accounted for 90% of the world’s illicit opium production. Over the following decade, that proportion barely changed. The Modern War Institute at West Point recorded that in 2019 and 2020 the country was still producing around 85% of global illicit opium, while U.S. eradication programs consumed billions of dollars, ironically strengthening the Taliban rather than weakening them.

In 2022, following the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power, the UNODC reported a record 233,000 hectares under cultivation. Although this figure came after the U.S. exit, it showed that the expansionary trend had never truly been contained. Psychologically and politically, the paradox is telling: the greater the foreign intervention, the stronger the opium economy became. The Afghan state, fragmented and dependent, relied on traditional agriculture, and for millions of farmers the poppy represented not only income but survival.

Both the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the U.S. Department of State agree that substitution programs failed because alternative crops were less profitable and more vulnerable to drought and violence. Afghanistan demonstrates that in countries at war —or where central governments are weak— drug production and trafficking thrive precisely because the state is absent, even when the intervening force is the largest and most technologically advanced military in the world. Trafficking networks often take root in conflict zones, where violent actors consolidate power through economic, political, and social influence.

Thus, in Afghanistan, opium became a systemic drug. It fed entire communities, financed militias, sustained corruption networks, and turned the war into a self-perpetuating enterprise. For farmers, poppy cultivation provided what neither the state nor the occupying forces could guarantee: a sense of control over their destiny. In the face of fear, poverty, and foreign occupation, the poppy offered the illusion of autonomy. Politically, however, it meant something else: it was the financial backbone of the insurgency.

Numerous studies from the RAND Corporation and the U.S. Institute of Peace have shown that narcotrafficking revenues financed the Taliban, turning opium into both a tool of resistance and an indirect source of war funding. In 2024, Afghanistan produced around 433 tons of opium, representing roughly 30% of the country’s total income.

Today, opium production leadership has expanded to Myanmar, in the heart of the Golden Triangle, which in 2023 even surpassed Afghanistan in some reports, with over 45,000 hectares cultivated. Together with Laos and Thailand, these nations remain a global epicenter of heroin bound for Asia, Europe, and North America.

The total cost of the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan exceeded $2.3 trillion, according to the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. That figure includes direct military spending, reconstruction efforts, veterans’ care, and accumulated debt. To put it in perspective, with just one-tenth of that amount —10%— Afghanistan could have rebuilt its basic infrastructure, created a modern national education system, and financed sustainable projects in solar energy, agriculture, and cultural tourism. Reports from the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank note the country’s vast tourism and historical potential, from the valleys of Bamiyan to the Greco-Buddhist ruins of Ai-Khanoum, and the ancient trade routes of Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Investing in the restoration of that heritage, in modern irrigation, and in local industries would have produced an infinitely greater human and social impact than two decades of war. Symbolically and morally, the United States could have replaced poppies with schools —and opium fields with an economy of hope and dignity— while saving 90% of what it ultimately spent on war.

Fentanyl

But the real epochal change lies in synthetic opioids. We are no longer speaking only of heroin, but of fentanyl, far more potent and lethal. Here China and India enter the picture as the principal producers of the chemical precursors that, disguised as legal industrial inputs, travel to Mexico. There the cartels have erected industrial laboratories capable of producing multibillion-pill batches.

The figures are chilling. The DEA reported seizing 13,176 kg of fentanyl (powder) in 2023 and 9,950 kg in 2024. One kilogram of fentanyl can fetch roughly $1.6 million on the black market, which means that the seizures alone represent no less than $19.2 billion. Looking at the market as a whole, even the most conservative estimates indicate that the illegal trade in synthetic opioids not seized in the U.S. could reach $307 billion annually, a sum comparable to what heroin once generated. The economic burden in hospitals and treatment for opioid use disorder in the United States is estimated at $471 billion, while fatal opioid overdoses carry an economic toll of $550 billion per year.

What we face is a lethal supply chain: Afghanistan and Myanmar produce opium and heroin; China and India export the precursor chemicals; Mexico converts them into fentanyl; and the United States endures the largest overdose epidemic in its history. This is a business that moves hundreds of billions of dollars, and unlike cocaine it travels in minuscule volumes while inflicting an exponentially greater capacity for social destruction.

A Lesson for the Psychology of Power

From the perspective of social psychology, this cycle reveals a recurring pattern: policies based on repression generate creative adaptations within the systems they seek to control. Every attempt to eradicate the poppy resulted in new routes, new alliances, and new methods of production. The human mind —whether individual or collective— always finds ways to preserve what it depends on for survival. Thus, while the rhetoric spoke of reconstruction and democracy, in the Afghan valleys a parallel economy blossomed, sustaining the daily lives of millions.

In essence, opium became the mirror of a moral failure. The failure to impose order without justice, to build peace without real economic and social alternatives, and to replace an economic addiction with social hope. One question inevitably arises: if under full U.S. control in Afghanistan it was impossible to eliminate the production of opiates and their derivatives such as heroin or fentanyl, how can we assume that the so-called “War on Terror and Narcotrafficking” will succeed in Latin America, under far weaker state institutions and even greater social inequalities?

Nearly 800,000 Americans —soldiers, marines, and support personnel— participated in the longest war in U.S. history, which peaked in 2011 with about 100,000 troops deployed simultaneously. By contrast, today’s military force stationed in the Caribbean Sea comprises fewer than 10,000 marines or special forces.

In the case of Latin America, in most countries the drug cartels surpass governments and the state itself in revenue and firepower. This means they possess more offensive and defensive capacity than the official armed forces. Moreover, they have the financial means to intimidate or buy police officers, judges, legislators, ministers, and even presidents, placing them in their service.

The most dangerous factor, however, is that these networks operate within the clandestine world, where the greater the conflict or instability, the more favorable the terrain becomes. Guerrilla movements, heavily armed gangs, and urban militias occupy entire neighborhoods, forming criminal enclaves that challenge state sovereignty. In such a landscape, the so-called “wars on drugs” risk becoming endless cycles of violence. Not wars against crime, but wars that perpetuate it.

Narco-Destruction

I observe that in Colombia, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Venezuela —just as I warned more than three decades ago— narcotrafficking has penetrated institutions. The pattern repeats itself: poverty, corruption, weakened states, and the presence of parallel armies, paramilitaries and guerrillas. Drug trafficking destroys societies from within; it devours the foundations of legality and turns the State into either a complicit actor or a hostage. Instead of being a motor of development, it is a cancer that consumes every possibility of progress.

Narco-Power

No individual or institution is immune to the temptation of power and money. The narcotics trade moves such staggering sums that it breaks the moral resistance even of those who once swore loyalty to the State. Thus, judges, police officers, officials, and soldiers often end up protecting shipments once they perceive that the State has abandoned them. Politicians justify their silence with the excuse that “this is how balance is maintained.”

The narcopower does not only buy consciences, it reprograms them psychologically. It alters moral hierarchies, normalizes the illicit, and turns crime into a daily routine. That internal corrosion is far more devastating than bullets or bombs because it hollows out institutions from within, leaving behind empty shells.

That is why I affirm that narcotrafficking is not merely an economic or criminal phenomenon, it is a psychological and social virus that exploits human vulnerability, ambition, and fear. Therein lies its power. And until we understand it in that dimension —as a human, cultural, and ethical problem, not just a criminal or security issue— we will continue to watch our institutions collapse under the weight of the darkest economy on Earth.

A Possible Way Out of the Narcotrafficking Labyrinth

After more than three decades studying and denouncing the narcotrafficking phenomenon, I am convinced of something many still do not want to hear. The truth is that the war on drugs, as it has been waged, has been lost again and again. We have witnessed successive governments, programs, and anti-drug crusades come and go while the illicit trade prospered. Not for lack of will or sacrifice, but because the global strategy was flawed from the start. As long as there exists a voracious market of consumers, clandestine production will persist alongside it.

History is clear. During Prohibition in the United States (1920–1933), the attempt to ban alcohol did not eliminate demand; rather, it created mafias, criminal gangs, and an underground economy that corrupted police, judges, and politicians (Miron & Zwiebel, 1995; Thornton, 1991). In the end, the only viable exit was regulation and legalization of consumption, which deflated the mafias and landed Al Capone in prison.

Today we see a parallel with marijuana. In 2013 Uruguay became the first country in the Americas to legalize its production and sale under state control. The State sets the price, limits dosages, and regulates distribution through pharmacies. It is not a perfect model, but so far it has prevented an explosive rise in consumption and reduced the weight of the illegal market (Pardo, 2014; Walsh & Ramsey, 2016). In the Netherlands, with its coffeeshop policy, the controlled sale of cannabis is tolerated, effectively separating the soft-drug market from the market for hard drugs. There, consumption is not significantly higher than in the rest of Europe, and substance-abuse harms are among the lowest on the continent (EMCDDA, 2023). Both cases demonstrate that intelligent regulation does not destroy societies; it reduces violence and collateral damage.

Therefore, I believe the only real solution to narcotrafficking is to attack consumption and production simultaneously, under a coordinated global plan. We cannot keep risking the lives of our marines and soldiers, spilling blood over plantations and trafficking routes, while consumer markets remain intact. The global strategy must change. No more “wars on drugs,” as Ronald Reagan proclaimed in the 1980s and others have copied, because that war was an expensive illusion with no results. After decades of failure, it is clear that you cannot extirpate this social ill with cannon fire nor cure an addiction with prison. The time has come to replace the logic of war with the intelligence of prevention: education, mental health, and development.

The new strategy must be dual, humane, and global. It must reduce consumption and production at the same time offering economic opportunities where illicit crops now flourish, and psychological hope where dependency and addiction reign.

I Propose a Ten-Year Global Plan with Clear and Measurable Goals

First, to reduce consumption by 10% per year in the countries with the highest demand —the United States, Europe, and Asia— through massive programs of prevention, rehabilitation, and education.

On the other hand, to reduce production and trafficking by 10% per year in the producing and transit countries —Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Myanmar— by promoting crop substitution, rural development, institutional strengthening, and a direct fight against organized crime (UNODC, 2023).

If both processes advance simultaneously, and even if only 50% of the target is achieved, within a decade we could cut global consumption and production in half. This is not a utopia, it is the only strategy that truly attacks the roots of the phenomenon. As the market shrinks, the volume of money laundering and related criminal activity will also diminish.

This is not about naivety, but about recognizing that absolute prohibition multiplies crime. We saw it with alcohol, and we have confirmed it with marijuana. Regulation, prevention, and education are far more effective than repression or endless wars (Nadelmann, 1989; Reuter & Pollack, 2012).

It is time for a global pact against drugs, with the same political will that once made possible the Marshall Plan, the founding of the United Nations, or nuclear disarmament treaties. This is about achieving peace against narcotrafficking.

The solution exists and it depends, inexorably, on reducing both consumption and production together, until what is today a global criminal enterprise becomes a public health issue under state control. That is the true peace against narcotrafficking, one that will not be won with rifles, but with education, regulation, prevention, and political courage.

The presidents of the countries with the highest levels of consumption and production must jointly promote a United Nations Convention on the Consumption and Illicit Trafficking of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, establishing these parameters. The previous convention, held in Vienna in 1988, which I attended, merely tightened punitive measures against drug trafficking, money laundering, and illicit production—without addressing consumption.

Will the cartels disappear?

Many ask me, “Will that policy eliminate the cartels?” My answer is clear: Yes, but progressively. Cartels do not exist because cocaine, heroin, or fentanyl exist; they exist because there is a gigantic market that consumes these drugs and because mafias have monopolized their production and distribution. As long as that market remains intact, there will always be somebody to produce and traffic. But if, in ten years, we cut consumption in rich countries and production in poor countries by half, we would drain the business.

Cartels are like any corporation: they live off profit. If their revenues fall from hundreds of billions to half, they lose power, lose their capacity to corrupt, and cease to be private armies that challenge the State. History shows this: when Prohibition ended in the U.S., the alcohol mafias lost their most profitable business. Some reinvented themselves, others vanished, but none retained the power they held during Prohibition. The same will happen with the cartels if the market shrinks and some consumption moves to regulated, health-oriented channels: their economic empire will collapse.

Cartels can be eliminated not with more bullets or prisons, but by attacking their true engine: money and profit. That money is weakened only when consumption and production decline together, under a global pact that combines prevention, regulation, and development.

Individual Responsibility

At the individual level, not using drugs is not merely a private decision or a matter of personal conscience, it is a political and moral act. Every dose a person buys feeds a criminal machine without borders or scruples. It is money that buys weapons, corrupts judges, weakens hospitals, and turns entire towns into scenes of misery and fear and, ultimately, it kills people.

To abstain from drug use is to break one strand of that criminal web. If we truly want to defeat narcotrafficking, we must begin by acknowledging that the first battle is fought within the conscience—within the personal decision not to feed the criminal business.

Thank you… If you wish to share your opinion or contact us, you can do so at psicologosgessen@hotmail.com. May the Divine Universal Providence guide us all.

Vladimir Gessen, Psychologist

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