The economics of cocaine

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The cocaine trade generates billions of dollars for criminal gangs right around the world but most of the supply of the drug comes from Colombia. Some the money made in this illegal economy does filter into the legal one and by some estimates the cocaine business now accounts for 4% of Colombian gross domestic product.

How does the cocaine business generate so much money and for who? We also ask what would happen in places like Colombia if the world legalised the cocaine trade, if it could be taxed and revenue earned by Governments much in the same way as products like tobacco and alcohol. We hear from a former Colombian president and Nobel Prize winner who says it should.

Presenter/producer: Gideon Long

(Image: Coca plants. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan was struck by a tsunami.
0:07.5	It triggered the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
0:11.3	We are in a nuclear emergency.
0:14.0	Fukushima, a new audio drama series from the BBC World Service, tells the story of how the disaster unfolded and of those living with its aftermath.
0:23.1	The radiation is here.
0:24.7	It's everywhere.
0:25.9	Search for Fukushima wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:31.5	Hello, I'm Gideon Long.
0:33.3	Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.
0:36.0	Today we're looking at the economics of cocaine.
0:39.4	It's big business and getting bigger all the time.
0:42.8	So there has been a production of about 2,000 tonnes of pure cocaine.
0:48.2	The size of the cocaine market globally is at the highest level ever measured before.
0:54.3	Over half of the cocaine in the world comes from just one country, Colombia,
0:59.1	where drug cartels have killed thousands of people in their turf wars to control the trade.
1:04.4	But what if the world legalized cocaine, taxed it and earned revenue from it?
1:09.8	We speak to one former Colombian president who thinks it should.
1:13.7	Even though I know this sounds shocking, but it's the only way.
1:18.2	It's the only way that you can take away the profits from the organized crime,
1:22.1	and it will have also a very positive economic effect.
1:26.0	That's the economics of the cocaine trade on Business Daily
1:29.0	from the BBC World Service.
	...

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