The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue: Toby Muse on the golden age of cocaine

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

One might assume, based on the film depictions of famous drug lords like Pablo Escobar and El Chapo, that the heyday of cocaine and its production in Latin America was during the 1980’s and 1990’s. According to journalist and author Toby Muse, those assumptions are dead wrong. South America, he argues, is producing more cocaine than ever before, reaching corners of the earth previously untouched by the deadly drug. Toby joins us for a fascinating discussion about how this dangerous and illegal industry transforms entire towns and surrenders them to criminal organizations on a scale that is unprecedented.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracy. Hello, monk listeners. Redyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our continuing

conversations called the Monk Dialogues. The Monk Dialogues are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's sharpest minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues that are transforming our world and shaping our future. On this installment of the Monk Dialogues, we delve into the cocaine trade with investigative journalist and author Toby Mews. Toby spent 15 years in Colombia embedded with narco traffickers. He's gained unparalleled access as a result to the drug cartels how they operate the scope and scale of the international cocaine trade. Toby, in his conversation with me, explains why we're living in a golden age of cocaine and its profound implications for public health, global peace and security, and the safety and survival of people in the

in some of the world's poorest countries. He joins us now from Washington. Toby, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you very much for the invitation. I'm looking forward to the conversation. As I am too. Let's start big picture. You've surmised in your recent book

and writings in the media that we are right now in the middle of a kind of golden age of cocaine. This runs at least counter Toby to my perceptions. I think many, maybe that of our listeners, that, you know, the golden age of cocaine belongs to the era of Pablo Escobar. It's something in the past. This was a challenge, a threat to public health, to corruption, to democracies in the West and in the developing world that isn't in the here and now. So what have you seen through your reporting and why do you feel that this indeed is the golden age of cocaine?

Well, there's a couple of points there that I think are interesting about what you've said. Let's start with why it's the golden age. It's the golden age because simply the world is producing much more cocaine than ever before in history. People tend to think, as you say, it was the time of Pablo Escobar, that that was the golden age in the 1980s, in the 1990s. No, right now, more cocaine is being produced than ever before. And it's been growing rapidly over the past six, seven years, especially in a country like Colombia, which is the number one producer of cocaine. Colombia is responsible for around 60% of the cocaine produced. And to give people an idea of the amount of cocaine that's being produced, the UN estimates that it's about 2,000 tons of almost 100% pure

cocaine. That's a lot of cocaine. And that's being produced every year at this stage. Now, there's a number of reasons we can get into why the cocaine production has been growing. But I want to jump on what you said about the public perception, which I think is really interesting. Yes, people do not realize that we're in the golden age of cocaine because I think there are not enough people looking at this problem as a global problem. They look at it as a problem in Canada, in Colombia, in the United States. They stop at the borders. Everybody does. That's their nature. If you're a policeman in London, well, you're likely thinking about London. If you're a cop in Colombia, you feel responsible for the cocaine to stop the cocaine until it gets to your border,

then it's someone else's problem. This is a global powerful network that is linked by this international global cocaine trade. And the countries, we are seeing, the countries are registering record seizures of the drug. So Costa Rica will announce a record seizure. Germany will announce a record seizure. the United States in one raid alone, I believe this was in 2019, seized nearly 20 tons of cocaine. But people are not connecting the dots. They're saying, oh, wow, what a huge record amount of cocaine seized. And then they move on to the next story. I think as well, a final point of this, if you look at a country like Colombia, I think it's actually chilling that we're not aware that the country is producing a record amount of cocaine because that means,

cocaine has become co-opted. Cocaine is no longer challenging the state. Pablo Escobar and his organization was a direct challenge to the Colombian government. He literally went to war against Colombia to fight against extradition. Now cocaine wants to be trafficked. Cocaine does not look for problems. It does not want to go to war. It just wants to be trafficked.

So now we're talking about much more endemic corruption that allows these thousands of tons of cocaine to flow out of the Andean region and reach these countries where it's never been seen before. We're seeing rising amounts of cocaine in Asia, in the Middle East, countries that never have this problem, but now cocaine's arriving. And we're also seeing a final point, because of this golden age of cocaine, we're seeing the criminal organizations that live in Canada, the United States, Africa, Europe. They are making more money than ever. They are stronger than ever. So the final point in this first answer is I just do want to impart this is a global problem. It's all connected.

Everything's connected to everything else. And I think rarely do we talk about in those terms. Fascinating, Toby. And let's be sure in this conversation talk a little bit about the political situation right now in Colombia because there has been an election there. There's an attempt by the government supposedly to make a kind of peace deal of sorts with a lot of the former FARC members, but it also sounds like a lot of the criminal gangs that are associated with cocaine production. So I want to get your thoughts on that. But before we go there, Toby,

you've done something that's pretty exceptional. So I'm going to blow your horn if you won't, which is you've spent as an investigative reporter more than a decade, literally embedded in the cocaine industry in Columbia. You've traveled with, you know, Colombian cocaine kingpins. You've gone right down into the fields of coca where, unfortunately, poor and impoverished farmers are attempting to eke out livings, cultivating coca. Just start to walk us through this industry. What does it look like? What did you learn from your, in a sense, your experience of embedding yourself in the cocaine industry in Colombia for over a decade? When we talk about the production of cocaine, really this is in the fields of an abandoned, a forgotten

Columbia. This is where the coca is grown. And I've spent many, many weeks and months of my life hanging out in these places, listening to the farmers, being on the farm as they harvest the coca crop as they turn it into the first step of the cocaine production, which is to turn the leaf into this kind of mass that they call coca pasta. That's the first. stop, the first step, sorry. What you realize there is often is that coca is all there is. So the example of the zone I went to for the research of my book, it's this incredibly beautiful region called Catatumbo. Katatombo is on the border with Venezuela. Now, that's an indigenous word and it means the land of lightning because there are more lightning strikes in

Catatumbo than anywhere else on the planet. So it's this incredibly beautiful region. made up of mountains and savannas, but also every day you are guaranteed the biggest electrical storm of your life. There you would see the people when they would grow coca. And you start to understand why they grow coca because they've been completely abandoned by the Colombian state. The state has not done the bare minimum, which should be to deliver some sort of education, some sort of health, some sort of law and order. And I'll give you an example of just how abandoned they are. They themselves the coca farmers had to pay for the construction of this one-room school. They did that by taxing the people who were passing along this one dirt track. They were often transporting either

smuggled gasoline from Venezuela to make the coca paste or cocaine itself. So cocaine basically ended up subsidizing, not subsidizing, funding the construction of the school. Where was the central government? And that applies to law and order. That applies to health. There is no health clinic there. And the other thing is it's the lack of infrastructure in a country like Columbia, which means it kind of pushes these small farmers to grow coca. Because imagine out there to get to this place, the closest town is a place called Tibu.

Tibu, and the journey from Tibu is we did three hours on a highway, very slow, because there's lots of bomb craters along there because the armed groups just set off bombs along the highway. So you go slow along this highway for three hours. You get off there, you get on a bike that takes you down a dirt track for an hour and a half. Then you get to a river that you have to cross with a ferry. It's not a wide river, but it's, you know, 30 meters, let's say. You get to the other side of this ferry. And by ferry, I mean planks of wood on floating barrels and a guy steering it. Then you get to the other side. patch of motorbike for another hour. It's a six-hour journey. Imagine transporting along that a ton of pineapples. It would be impossible. You would spend all of the money trying to get

your pineapples to market in order to sell them. So the farmer is faced with this choice. He needs to feed his family. Do I plant coca, which I can condense down to one or two kilos, throw them in a backpack, get on a bike, go to town and sell that? Or do I grow... one ton of bananas and I can't sell them. So the farmers end up being pushed towards that. But then once I've seen that, it becomes its own snowball. Because there's an infection, cocaine is like a virus. It gets into the bloodstream of a town. And it's always the same process. What happens is in a town, someone will move to co-cutt. They've done badly with the local crop. Then suddenly they're flashing more money than anyone else has seen. And so other people join them.

other people join them. Then something happens to the town. Then new faces start appearing in the towns. Those new faces will be prostitutes in order to offer their services because every cocaine town has a number of brothels, no matter how small it is. There will be emissaries from the drug cartels and the illegal narco-malicious will smell out the cocaine and they will come and try to take over. At that point, you've made a deal with the devil as a town. And now it's kind of snowballing. and now all of the prices start rising in the town. So even if you've stuck with the coffee in this town, now suddenly you can't afford to pay for the things

that have had this kind of gold rush culture-like. It's very like the gold rush that we saw in, I believe, in Canada and in places in the US, where everybody gets a fever for the gold or in this case the Coke. But imagine this, but it's overseen by men with AK-47s, because they're the hidden power. They're funded by cocaine and they impose the law. And that's the experience you'll see in the countryside. In the cities where the cartels are strongest, and historically it has been the city of Medellin, Kali, Medellin has desperately tried to overthrow this fame. They're very

susceptible to this. They're very sensitive about the issue of linking Pablo Escobar and Medellin. They say, our city is so much more than that. And it is. Medellin is this incredibly viable. innovative city. It's filled with, it's the kind of the business heart of Columbia. Everybody recognizes that. But it also has this history of being the real capital of cocaine in Columbia. There you'll see it's mainly the slums that kind of provide the fodder for the drug wars, where these kids grow up and they feel excluded from society. They feel they don't have any options. And they also fall victim to what Colombians call the culture of easy money, i.e. the culture of easy money is why go to school when you can drop out of school at 15 and start

riding around on a motorbike either stealing or working for the gangs? And there you kind of see the world of cocaine becomes almost like they're Hollywood. They can make it. They can be somebody in a society they feel excluded from. And those are the kind of pressures you see mainly on the young men. But the cocaine world is this vortex that sucks so many people into it. So the women fall into it as well. They become usually their roles are kind of as lovers of the drug traffickers, of the contract killers. But it is this kind of vortex that can be hard to kind of pull yourself out, especially again with this state that has historically been absent in these places. Hey, Monk podcast listeners, I wanted to let you know about our other weekly audio program.

It's called Friday Focus. And hey, guess what? It comes out each and every Friday. It's half an hour long, and it provides you with a masterclass on international events, all the big issues and ideas shaping our world. We've got that for you each and every Friday here at the Monk Debates. Simply access via our website, triplew monkdebates.com. Click on Friday Focus in the top right navigation. You'll get all the details or check out a sample of the program in the same podcast feed as the main monk debates podcast. I hope you'll join us for the next edition of the Friday Focus podcast. Now back to our program.

Let's talk about the violence. You know, we've all watched the Netflix series. We, you know, have a, you know, a simulacra of understanding of the inherent violence that is around this trade. You were there upfront. You spent time with, you know, narco hitman with the enforcers that, as you say, are praying on these villages and living out in the jungles, defending, you know, the coca labs, the refineries. What is this? Is this, is it part of the character of the country, the people? I don't want to, you know, necessarily as described that it's inherent to their own.

way of life, but where does this come from? And why has it just remains such a violent and horrible kind of conflict in Colombia and in countries that, as you say, become infected with this virus of cocaine? I think in the case of Colombia, Colombia has historically been a very, very violent country. And I think it comes from two impulses that this long predates cocaine. I think it comes from, again, this weak central government that has never been able to control all of its territory. Columbia is too much. There's always one more mountain that you'll never be able to control. There's always another jungle where people can go to escape the law. So you have essentially a kind of much of the country being lawless, but also you've had this

political elite that has frequently used violence as any response to any kind of call from below to change for change. Columbia is an incredible. unequal country when it comes to wealth, when it comes to political power. Columbia is a, I'll give you an example. It's a, it's a beautiful, but very strange country. If you go to any square plaza in any village in Colombia and sit there and just have a coffee, coffee and ask the people around you and say, hey, who are the powerful families here? Who run this town? The people will list off the families. I'll say, oh, it's that family, that family, that family. That just doesn't happen if you take a coffee in a small village in America. People just

don't have that. There's not that idea that, oh, of course the families run this town. It's power is incredibly concentrated. And again, they've often used violence to stop any change, any reform. Back to Colombia, back to the cocaine trade, violence is so inherent in the business is because it's the way that they themselves keep order. So what you actually actually end up coming to see is that the hitmen, the so-called Sicarios, the contract killers, are the response to a problem. If two drug traffickers have an issue, they can't go to court. They can't go ahead in front of a judge. What they do is they resolve that problem through violence. That's the way business disputes get handled. Now, that's on normal day-to-day business. But there's

also what happens is there's often drug wars when a cartel will try to take over another business. So you take a city like Medellin, you've got this very uneasy alliance between about three cocaine cartels that are currently controlling, or at least have presence and have control in that city. They've been living side to side for a number of years now. But a lot of people think that in the future there could be another drug war as they try to kick out the other one. But it's their way of establishing order. As part of my research into this book, I ended up hanging out with a number of these contract killers. And these are men and occasionally women. You see what happens when these people lead these lives of violence. They become absolutely, they lose their mind. The violence

just drives them mad. And they invent these ever stranger rituals. They invent these ever stranger justification. So I went with one contract killer as he would go to the virgin of the assassins. This is a statue of the Virgin Mary. It's next to a road in Medellin. And this is where he would pray. He would pray for success in his next job. And I would ask him and I would say, how can you pray to the Virgin Mary in order to have success in going to kill someone for money? And it was a kind of a sign of the insanity of the whole drug war of the whole world of cocaine. His answer, he would say, well, If God doesn't want me to be successful, if they won't let me kill this person. But if I'm successful when I go and get on a motorbike and shoot this person at close range in the center of the city, if I'm successful, that means God wanted me to be successful. God wanted that person to die. And you sort of see this kind of levels of insanity that everybody, we're all living in this kind of whirlwind of blood and violence. And I think that's the big argument about why the drug war needs to end. We've created this black market where all of these things come to seem normal. And I would say another thing about Colombia is that there's been a mainstreaming. This has been the venom again of cocaine in Colombian society. There's been a mainstreaming of contract killing. So now every major city in Colombia will have what's called an office. An office.

is a place where you go if you want someone killed. There will be an office in Katahena, an office in Medellin and various offices in Bogota and you will go and you will negotiate a rate to have someone killed. And what you'll see is, so when you'll open up the local newspaper, you'll see all of these cases of assassinations, men on bikes who have turned up to someone's house and killed them as they're walking out of their house. And it's not always drug-related. it's if there's a dispute between two legal business partners, one person may say, you know what, I'm just going to hire an assassin. There's cases where there's infidelities.

The woman or the man will hire an assassin to kill their cheating partner. So I think that's one other sign of what the drug war is doing to a country like Columbia. Thanks, Toby. Again, fascinating kind of on the ground color there. Much appreciated. Let's go back to the big picture and this idea that there was something called the war, on drugs that we supposedly fought through the 90s into the 2000s. While many would say arguably there was no winning the war,

there's still, I think, a perception and assumption that that war has suppressed the trade and trafficking of cocaine and that it has achieved some, albeit not outsized, but nonetheless some public health outcomes back here in Canada, in the United States, in the Western world. Are those assumptions right? No, I think they're wrong. I think we've been fighting the war on drugs for the last 50 years, and I think what's clear is that not to be facetious, but the drugs are winning. The war on drugs was announced by Richard Nixon back in the 70s,

and we now have, as a result of 50 years, more cocaine than ever before in history. And if we look at cocaine again, there was a U.S. with European participation plan to destroy the cocaine industry in Colombia, something called Plan Colombia, this bipartisan effort for the past two decades. It was launched under, it was devised under Bill Clinton, really enacted under the first years of the presidency of George W. Bush. And their goal that really begins in around the year 2000, they said our goal is to have cut coca production by 50% after 5 years. 20 years later, the president in charge, Ivan Duker, the previous president of Colombia, Ivan Duker said, our new goal is to cut production by 50%.

And the result has been more cocaine than ever, more coca than ever grown in Colombia. This is after we've invested billions and billions of dollars in that country. This has been a plan that has had the help of the CIA, the DEA. there's been very little that has been held back in trying to fight the war on drugs. And you know the answer that always comes from these agencies when they're actually rarely questioned because I don't think enough people are questioning the effectiveness of the war on drugs. But every time one of these agencies is questioned and said, well, let's look at the results. They say, yes, we may not be winning now, but effectively give us more money and we can do this.

So effectively, the answer to the failure of the war on drugs is always, give us a little more war on drugs. And I think at some point, I'm amazed that there's not more people out there demanding accountability. Because I think it can be a bipartisan issue. I think conservatives can say, what are we doing with this tax money? This is public money that is not producing a particularly good effect for all of the investment we've seen. And we can look at the effect of what the war on drugs has. done to many communities in America in Europe. It's devastated certain communities, the war on drugs. And I think it is time for a rethink of this war on drugs. Now we see with this new president in

Colombia, Gustavo Petrol, there's an old thing that the Colombians say, they say, no one has suffered as much for the war on drugs as Colombia. And that's true because the war on drugs in America and Canada in Europe. Well, it's an idea. Oh, the war on drugs. Okay, got it. Well, the war on drugs is in Colombia is fought with heavy artillery, attack jets, attack helicopters, thousands of illegal, thousands of men in these illegal armed militias, heavily armed with AK-47s, real war. That's the result of this war on drugs. And I think we're learning the lessons, again, that we learned with prohibition. We created this black market. We take something that in itself is not particularly valuable. One kilo of cocaine in Colombia is probably around, let's call it between

$1,500 and $2,000 of 100% pure cocaine, or as close as you can get to pure cocaine. $2,000, let's call it. You get that kilo to Australia, that is worth close to $300,000. That is all because we have imposed this black market. So the more we squeeze production, the more valuable, the thing becomes. So it becomes more tempting for people to get involved, just like we saw with Prohibition in the US 100 years ago. We're relearning those lessons. And I want to make a point, again, about this, because I think Columbia does have to answer for why there is more cocaine than ever before. Again, it's a joint thing the American agencies involved in this plan, Columbia, trying to eradicate. I think they all have to answer, why is there more cocaine than ever

before? But I also believe Colombia can ask the world, what are you doing to reduce consumption? I don't know of any major successful program in England or America where they're seeing incredible results in steering people away from drugs. I think we've just even given up trying to understand why do people consume drugs? Why do certain societies consume more drugs than others? Why is London one of the absolute cocaine hotspots on the planet? What separates it from another major city? We've given up even asking those questions and I can understand the frustration from the Colombians because this is consumer driven. This is the laws of economic supply here. It's supply and demand. A poorer country produces this substance.

because richer countries consume it. Now, a final thing on that, I don't want to overly put the blame on the consumer. They are the motor of this industry. But again, it's because of this black market. We're all operating in this black market that has been imposed here. And I'll give another example.

When I think back on prohibition in America, that effort to outlaw alcohol back in the 20s, I don't think the real villain of that era was the working man, the working woman after a long day's work wants to go get themselves a cold beer. I don't think they're responsible for Al Capone. I don't think they're responsible for the massive mafias that made millions billions of illegal alcohol. No, I think it was a system that created the black market that took unexceptional men like Al Capone and made them millionaires. Well, the same is happening

today. I don't think Pablo Escobar was particularly impressive. I don't think Chapo is some genius. I think they're violent, ruthless men who excel in a black market. So what's the solution? Maybe it's to start looking at that black market and all of the damage that black market does. Toby, is it legalization? I mean, we are seeing, unfortunately, a rise in deaths fentanyl. Now that's different. It's a synthetic drug. So we still have a big public policy challenge here. I guess cocaine is not associated to the same extent with you know, addict deaths in the way that, you know, fentanyl has sweeped across, certainly North America, less so Europe. But what do we do here? Is it, you know, should we be thinking about cocaine

like we've now, at least here in Canada, thought about marijuana, which we've legalized, with albeit kind of mixed results in terms of our ability to squash the black market. Seems the black market can continue to produce marijuana more cheaply than now the regulated state sellers. But who knows? Maybe that's a problem we can solve in the future. I don't know. I kind of step back from prescribing solutions. In my blood, I'm a reporter.

I'm not a policy person. So all I can do is I go to these places and come back and say, hey, this is what we're looking through, living through now. I think we need to rectify this. And I'll leave that other up to other people, smarter people to come up with a solution. But in terms of legalization, I think it's hard to understand what that would look like. I think we do need a rethink about the use of cocaine. I think there are 21, according to the United Nations, there are 21 million people who are. who used cocaine or who used cocaine in the last year or so.

The vast majority of people have no problem with cocaine. I think that needs to be said at the outset. I think we just know that because the deaths are not there. We're not seeing that the rehab clinics filled up with these 21 million. I think it's most people use cocaine for a short amount of time and it can be from three months to two years and then they simply grow tired of the drug and it was a phase of their life and they never returned to. There is a minority who will react very badly to it though.

They will fall into some sort of addiction. There are overdoses. But as you say, the overdoses compared to fentanyl or even heroin, I just, I mean, it's not comparable. And even now it's even more difficult because so many people are, to even understand the danger of cocaine because fentanyl, as you say, is so often present. So what we're seeing is we're seeing these autopsies, these overdose reports, and they're reporting, well, there's the presence of cocaine in the bloodstream, but also fentanyl. So it makes it very difficult to understand. And I think there are interesting people who are trying to rethink this idea of our relationship about how we view drug consumption. Do we always see it as a plague, as something to be absolutely stamped out? Or there's a professor in New York, Dr. Carl Hart, I believe his name is. who wrote a book about how he's a recreational drug user.

He says, I enjoy it. This brings me good things. It may not be for everybody. So I do think there needs to be another level about a kind of to move on beyond this idea of a taboo understanding. Not everybody who consumes cocaine will be prostituting themselves in six months in order to get their next hit. That's just not the way most of it goes. In terms of policy, we have to stop this drug war. the way it's being fought. Too many Colombians have died in this just to speak about Colombia. The

previous former president of Colombia described fighting the drug war. This is Juan Manuel Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his peace process with the FARC guerrillas. He described fighting the drug war as getting on an exercise bike in the gym. You pedal, pedal, pedal for 30 minutes. You sweat, you sweat, you sweat, you get off and you realize you haven't moved forward one millimeter. That's what fighting the war on drugs is. And he said that when he was in office. The new president, Gustavo Petrol, in his inauguration speech, said, we need to end the war on drugs. It's done too much damage to Colombia. The problem is that Colombia cannot do this alone.

It just simply cannot do it. Whatever this major change that needs to happen, Colombia understands that if it goes too far, it could immediately become a pariah state. So it's basically what are the countries like that? the US, Canada and the European Union going to do to help ferment this new stage, this next step in how we combat drug use. Because Colombians cannot be expected to do it alone. They cannot bear the slander of, oh, you're a cocaine-producing country. Now you've even legalized it. What are you, a country of drug traffickers or something? Why should Colombians have to endure that?

No, this is a global problem. Now, the Colombians are talking about possibly decriminalizing in certain instances the production of the coca leaf, but that quickly opens up to a legal market in coca leaf where the cartels would be buying coca leaf. That's not going to fly. So it's hard to know exactly what the next step is. They talk about, well, we're going to legalize marijuana. That seems to me a relatively simple step for a, but cocaine is a much, much more intractable problem, especially if the most powerful countries in the world just remain silent. I go back to that, President Juan Manuel Santos. I can think of at least two instances where he tried to start a global conversation. He gave a big interview knowing it would be the front page news

of one of England's biggest newspapers. And he thought, let's try and get this conversation started. And to the shame of all of those other countries, they just didn't engage. They didn't respond to it. They just kept silent. So the drug war drags on. In terms of legalization, a final thing I'll say, there are this movement of drug legalizers. And they say, and I think that they're, they contain within them. They're not doing the political work, I would say.

They seem to think, well, of course, the drug war is failing. So inevitable, it will be legalization. But I would say to them, I have this kind of experiment where over a Sunday lunch, turn to your uncle or your aunt and say, you know what? I think cocaine ought to be legalized. Look at their reaction. Most times it's going to be in horror. They're going to say, what are you talking about?

Of course we're not ready for legalizing drugs. That's because the legalization movement hasn't done the work. If you think about what it took to get us to this stage of legalizing marijuana in different countries, that was a half-century fight. these men and women put in. First, they went through the idea of, you know, they would stand up and like there would be a folk singer like Willie Nelson in the 1980s. He would stand up and say, well, you know, I like, I enjoy marijuana. I think more people should have the choice if they want. He was ridiculed. Oh, you're a smelly old hippie. But he stuck by his principles. That was what it was

like in the 1980s to be vilified, ridiculed. Then they went into medical marijuana. They started working at the grassroots level, trying to legalize marijuana. It was 50 years. The drug legalizers who say, oh, well, cocaine needs to be legalized. They are not doing that work. They are not starting that conversation. Where's the Hollywood actor who's out there saying, hey, you know what? The drug was a dud. I believe we ought to legalize drugs. Where's that in the popular culture? It's nowhere to be seen. So they have such a long journey ahead of them to convince people. Because most people will be terrified by the, well, I don't know if most people, but many people will be terrified by the idea of hard drugs, class A drugs, as we call them in England, heroin and cocaine, available for purchase legally. There's a political work that needs to be done there, and it's just not being done yet.

That's a great point, Toby. And again, thank you for such a far-ranging conversation. We did exactly what I hope we do, which was look at the big picture, the dynamics of play, but also get down into the jungles, onto the streets. of Columbia from your firsthand reporting to understand what's happening there. So congratulations again on your recent book, Kilo, inside the deadliest cocaine cartels from the jungles to the streets. This has been a real pleasure, Toby. Let's do it again soon. Thank you so much. I enjoyed the conversation. It was great. Well, that wraps up today's dialogue. I want to thank our guest, Toby Mews. He certainly gave us a lot to think about. If you have any feedback or reflections on what you've

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