Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise

by Lina Britto

Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by the US hippie counterculture. How did Colombia become central to the creation of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral history, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, a model of Latin American representative democracy and economic modernization, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost?

 

Genres: History

352 pages, Hardcover

Published March 24, 2020

About the author

Lina Britto is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Reviews

[Daniel Porras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lina Britto does an excellent job on Colombia's first narcotics trafficking boom. She explores how this crop changed the social structure of the Magdalena Grande through a concise and masterfully written analysis of the background, rise and fall of the first business of its kind in Colombia. As a Colombian, I never imagined the extent of the weed trade in my country, which, blessed with natural wealth, is capable of producing, apparently, the best illicitly classified crops in the world. From this book I would like to emphasize four points:

1. The role that the United States played in the whole cycle of the Boom story. From JFK's Peacecorps, the hippies, the traffickers who introduced technification and a whole productive and commercial apparatus around weed to the demonization of weed and the subsequent Colombian bloodbath caused by them.

2. The microclimate potential of the Sierra to create not only one but multiple export varieties of the herb that to this day are valued worldwide.

3. The close relationship of Vallenato with the marimberos and how they helped to consolidate a genre that is an icon and intangible heritage of humanity.

4. The evident commercial potential of this crop that can add not inconsiderable amounts to the public purse. And to find that the proposal is not new, the idea of legalizing hemp in Colombia comes from the 80s and by none other than the ANIF.

All in all, it is a book that makes me travel through lands of magical realism, coffee, vallenato, grass and contraband. And that gives us a different look, closer, more ours, more Colombian to a problem that still afflicts us but that as a country helps us to understand ourselves and our recent history.

[Charles Heath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck yeah weed.
An important recovery of a "lost" history of music, marijuana, and parrandas! Here Britto melds her skills as journalist, anthropologist, and historian, and draws upon oral history and deep archival work and reading to explicate the emergence of an agricultural revolution of weed at the exact moment that the US declared "war on drugs." Eventually, more powerful ideologies of entrepreneurship, commercial and political ties, criminalization and militarization, gave rise to the more well-known cocaine cartels. Meanwhile, however, Britto's story brings to life a time and space of an interconnected Caribbean littoral and networks of smuggling to feed the desire of an American counterculture by which I mean fuck yeah weed.
Great book and great contribution to history of Latin America and the NEW DRUG SCHOLARSHIp.

[Neal Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

By analysing marijuana as both a cash crop, like cotton or coffee, and contraband, like tobacco or coffee again, the scope of this book goes beyond an episode of violent criminality to include development models for Colombia, its national politics, and inter-American diplomacy. There's also a whole chapter on how patronage by “marimberos” turned vallenato musicians into stars throughout Colombia and beyond.

[Andrés Bermúdez-Liévano · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had always thought that Colombia's marijuana boom was one of those historical moments that had become a mystery: no serious historical or journalistic accounts had been written about it. That was until Lina Britto's thoroughly investigated and well-written book appeared this year, going beyond the existing stereotypes of that period and reconstructing it with complexity and nuance.

[Mateo Uribe Castro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has two parts. The first part overviews the conditions that allowed Colombia's Caribbean coast to exploit marihuana exporting business in the 1960s. The second part explores the cultural consequences that the marihuana trade had in the region. As an economic historian I find the first part, though well documented, relatively weak and speculative. However, the second part is the most compelling and well researched. Britto collected hundreds of interviews and first-hand accounts of the period she is studying. Her etnography is impeccable and the way she lays the facts and anecdotes is impressive. Probably one of the most though-provoking books I've read in a while.

[Angelo Cagua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the book does a detailed exploration of the rise, heyday, and decline of Colombia's first marijuana boom on an international, regional, social, cultural, and individual level. I consider it's an essential book for those who are studying the history of the Colombian Caribbean in the 20th century and, more precisely, of the Sierra Nevada and La Guajira.

I really liked the use of vallenato songs to describe and analyze certain key moments of the boom; In the same way, the journalistic style of the work gives it a tone of closeness with the reader.

Felipe Escobar's translation is very well done and I did not find any typing or grammar errors.