In order for cocaine to make it to the bars, nightclubs and dinner parties of the wealthy world it must be first born in the poverty, wars and environmental destruction of the poor.
Mexico and Colombia have been devastated by the appetites of drug users in Britain, Europe and America, even though in many cases those same users are oblivious to the human cost of their addiction.
In the 1990s, when the cocaine cartels of Medellin and Cali in Columbia were destroyed by the US and Colombian governments, the focus of the drug war shifted northwards to Mexico.
In the past two decades nearly a quarter of a million Mexicans have died as a result of the drug wars in that country; ninety percent of those who have been killed have been civilians, bystanders and simply ordinary Mexicans living their lives in the crossfire.
Mexico is a transit country for cocaine from Colombia, but it has a long history of supplying its northern neighbour with illegal drugs and even alcohol during the prohibition era.
Mexico has the right climate for industrial cannabis cultivation and more importantly, a large impoverished rural labour force to harvest the crop and endemic corruption which makes it easier for cartels to proliferate.
By the mid 1990s, the Mexican cartels ceased being paid for their smuggling activities (flying and driving cocaine over the US border) in cash and instead took a cut of the product.
This placed the Mexican cartels firmly in the cocaine business and intensified the violence between them and eventually between the cartels and the state.
As previously mentioned, poverty is one of the main drivers of the cocaine business in Mexico. Young people, mainly men, in the rural interior of the country, or on the streets of cities like Guadalajara often feel that there is little other way of earning a living or (equally as important), having some sense of pride and self respect.
They join the ranks of the gangs that serve the major traffickers and contribute to the violence. The livelihoods of over three million people in Mexico are directly connected to the drugs trade, making it one of the country’s largest industries; placed in this context it seems almost futile to be waging a paramilitary war against such a widespread social phenomenon.
Instead, the question of how a society is organised in order to result in such widespread poverty and desperation seems to be more relevant.
In addition to the poverty that exists in Mexico, where the poorest third of society has seen its share of GDP actually shrink in the past decade, is a lack of basic educational rights.
Throughout the cartel era, the provision of education has steadily improved, but in the mid 1960s, when major trafficking of cannabis from Mexico began, only five percent of Mexicans had an education beyond that of primary schooling.
The ongoing sporadic violence between the cartels and the state exploded into a low level civil war in 2006 when President Calderon of Mexico dispatched thousands of troops to Michoacán to break the cycle of drug violence in the province.
The violence in the province grew dramatically over the next four years and the overall murder rate in Mexico increased from 2,773 in 2007 to 12,658 three years later.
It is difficult to separate the drug related violence away from conventional criminal violence, because the drug industry is so pervasive in the illegal and the legal economy of Mexico.
However, there are clear geographical boundaries to the violence, a drug war is something that is contained in the transit country of Mexico and doesn’t affect the end users of the drug in the UK.
In America, where gun crime is a far more significant problem, parts of American cities such as Miami saw dramatic escalations of violence in the mid 1980s, but nothing the cocaine consuming countries have experienced is in any way directly comparable to the levels of violence endured in Mexico.
In order for British cocaine users to enjoy their drug of choice, a quarter of a million people have lost their lives. Poverty, corruption and exploitation have become endemic in Mexico and that country’s poor have paid the price of Britain’s intoxication.
Put simply a form of colonial relationship exists between Britain’s cocaine users and the victims of the Mexican drug wars, narcolonialism, if you will. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, sugar and tobacco were the vices for which there was an almost insatiable demand in Britain and the result was the Atlantic slave trade.
The illicit trade in cocaine has led to a different type of exploitation and suffering, but the key similarity that unites both is the disconnection between the consumer of the drug and the long and bloody history of the substance in question.