The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How to Solve the Cocaine Problem || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

It would appear that my suggestion for everyone to stop doing cocaine hasn't solved the problem, so let's look at some of the solutions others have proposed. Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan Full Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3Td4mIj

Peter Zine here, coming from Colorado. Today we are taking a question from the Patreon page, and he says, you keep telling people to not use cocaine. True. But people are going to keep using it. Probably true. So, wouldn't it be better for us to just domesticate it and take advantage of the addiction? Like, oh, wow, that's dark. Let's start about the practical restrictions on having a cocaine trade in the United States. And we'll talk about why it's a bad idea in general. Okay, cocaine is an incredibly, finicky plant. It demands subtropical to tropical temperatures year round as one of the least frost tolerant plants on the planet. Even a light frost will kill the entire plant completely, won't come back. It also needs water, lots of water, at least a meter, preferably two meters of water a year and it can't

have a dry season. So tropical rain year round. But it also hates being wet. So you have to have acidic soils that are very, very well drained. You put those combinations together and you basically have two options. Number one, the Andes, where the mountains prevent the water from sticking around, but at a relatively low elevation, typically about 3,000 feet maybe. So you get the water to drain itself, but you're low enough that you never have to worry about frost. Now, if you industrialize this production, you could put it in other tropical zones that are lower altitude, that are flatter, but then you have to basically engineer your fields so that they drain. But again, can't be tropical dry season like, say, a lot of Brazil.

It has to be fully tropical all year long, no dry season, and that means you're basically looking at the Andean crest, or if you want to industrialize maybe places like Southeast Asia, specifically maybe Indonesia. The United States has nothing like that. Even in Florida, we get frost from time to time, and so the entire crop would die anywhere further north, just would not work.

there's just not enough water, not enough reliability. Okay, so from a technical point of view, wouldn't work. From an other point of view, every study I've ever seen has always shown that whatever gains we might get by legalizing cocaine in terms of lower costs of law enforcement and maybe higher income from taxes is going to be wiped out from higher health care costs and higher worker absentee rates. So economically, there's no case. Environmentally, there's no case.

The simplest answer is just not do cocaine. If you're looking for a horribly destructive drug that we can domesticate production of, your answer is fentanyl. It is made from precursor materials that come out of almost any possible chemical company in the United States is the world's largest chemical producer, and you can make it in a garage. So if your goal is to have something that destroys your body and mind, and you want to grow it domestically, fentanyl's your answer. But just in case it was not clear.

Don't do fentanyl either.