Cocaine is about surpass oil as Colombia's top export as revenues near $20B | Hacker News Reader

Cocaine is about surpass oil as Colombia's top export as revenues near $20B

markets.businessinsider.com

58 pointsfreedude17 comments

> Instead of attempting to eradicate coca bush farms, as it did in the past, the Colombian government is instead targeting exporters and laboratories that turn the coca leaf into cocaine. That's led to a surge in crop yields for coca bushes in the past few years, with 230,028 hectares of the plant being cultivated in 2022.

Seems like the policy of targeting exporters/labs is a failure if the higher yield is still making it to the market.

One of the reasons that crop eradication never worked is because erythroxylum coca is an extremely hardy plant with a deep root system that grows back faster and more robust when it's cut down. Crop replacement strategies never worked because farmers who did try for a season (and somehow resisted cartel intimidation) had nowhere to sell their crops + nobody to sell them to. All in all a very foolish endeavor and waste of money on behalf of governments.

Has any anti drug policy been truly effective? The more it gets pushed to the margin, the more profitable it becomes.

People love getting high. Time to accept it and move onto other problems in the world.

They’ve succeeded in eradicating a few specific drugs. Quaalude is probably the most famous one. I wonder if the success of eradicating it had anything to do with studies popping up about it potentially having some cancer fighting effects. Don’t think it was ever well studied. I believe it’s still around in South Africa because it’s prescribed for HIV sometimes.

MXE is also pretty much gone. Pure heroin is pretty much gone. A lot of the original RC psychedelics and stimulants are gone. Pure LSD is very difficult to get, however high purity analogues are still reasonably easy to get.

In most of South America, the coca leaf is completely legal while cocaine is “illegal”. I put that in air quotes because of the following quote: “Nothing is illegal in South America”. I think John McAfee is the one attributed to that quote but I’m not sure. Anyhow, coco leaf products are routinely sold in packaged goods and candies. If you are ever going hike up tall mountains there, you’re advised by all official sources and websites to carry some with you to avoid altitude sickness.

A simplistic philosophical understanding:

1) Different routes of administration cause widely different effects on the body.

2) Nearly all medications are taken orally.

3) Coca leaves can only be chewed and consumed orally.

4) Virtually no medications are approved for snorting or smoking.

5) Cocaine and Crack Cocaine are typically only snorted or smoked.

6) Conclusion: Coca Leaves are approved in part due to a differing route of administration. Analogous to how sugar is bad to snort or smoke but was approved for edible consumption.

> Anyhow, coco leaf products are routinely sold in packaged goods and candies.

Coca cola uses coca leaves as well (even today, in the US), and has the only import license to do so

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Company#Coca_extraction

> Coca-Cola includes a coca leaf extract as an ingredient prepared by a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey.[6] The facility, which had been known as the Maywood Chemical Works, was purchased by Stepan in 1959.[7] The plant is the only commercial entity in the United States authorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration to import coca leaves, which come primarily from Peru via the National Coca Company. Approximately 100 metric tons of dried coca leaf are imported each year. The cocaine-free extract is sold to The Coca-Cola Company for use in soft drinks, while the cocaine is sold to Mallinckrodt, a pharmaceutical firm, for medicinal purposes.[8]

Not in most, just peru, colombia and bolivia allow legal cultivating of the coca plant

Just like how poppy seeds are legal but extracting the opioids out of them isn’t.

Weird: Yesterday I read a story about the collapse of Colombia’s coca market

Fentanyl, cartels or simple market glut: what’s behind collapse of Colombia’s coca market?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/colombian-coca...

From the guardian article you cite:

>About 400,000 households depend on the coca crop to get by, but in departments such as Cauca in central Colombia the price for coca base – the first step in the production of cocaine – has almost halved from £0.60 ($0.75) a gram to about £0.35.

As mentioned in this BusinessInsider article, the Columbian government has moved away from targeting growers and is instead targeting labs and exporters. Seems like a simple supply and demand problem that is hitting the small farmers.

https://archive.is/JUMCB

Labor costs are cheap there. I wonder if they simply export finished oil-based products such as Gasoline or plastics instead of oil.

Labor isn't a huge factor in taking raw oil and converting it to those refined products. That's done in refineries which are highly automated process driven things. It's not like there are guys turning cranks making oil into plastic. It's a complicated process or chemistry and chemical engineering that happens in miles and miles of pipes.

They can't because they have no oil refineries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries

(The US has 125.)

Sounds like a good business opportunity if physical security issues can be mitigated.

As someone once said, cocaine is a hell of a drug.

My favorite type of weed is cocaine

Reply on news.ycombinator.com