Inside Colombia’s (New) Cocaine Explosion
By Jeremy Kryt for The Daily Beast. TORIBÍO, Colombia — Steep hills rise out of the morning mist like a junky’s dream of paradise: the slopes teeming with lush, illicit vegetation. Palm and banana trees only half conceal the towering coca bushes. Coffee plants can’t entirely camouflage rows of marijuana shrubs the size of prize hydrangeas.
Over the last couple of years, Colombia has replaced Peru as the world’s top exporter of cocaine. Nose-candy production levels shot up by more than 32 percent in 2014. The Andean nation now grows more leaves than the next two coca-producing nations combined. And the number of acres used to farm coca is expected to go up again this year.
All this after years of the U.S. State Department bragging up Plan Colombia, a controversial program that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $10 billion since 2000—and was often praised as flag-ship policy in the war on drugs, because it had, for a while, curbed coca cultivation.
Drug Policy Debate Radar 