 All right, finally, well, not finally, I've got a bunch of different stories, but this is kind of an interesting story I caught out of last night. You're not gonna see this publicized very many places, but I didn't know this, but it turns out that the cocaine industry right now is experiencing a historic boom. Your guys might have thought that the peak of cocaine was during the 1980s, you know, there's that series called NACO, Pablo Escobar, Medellin cartel, all of that. That was the time where cocaine consumption peaked and the power of the cartels was at its highest. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Today, the industry produces 2000 tons of cocaine per year. The amount of land planted with coca is about 200,000 hectares, 500,000 acres, half a million acres. That's five times more, five times more than it was when Escobar was gunned down in 1993. So the industry is five times bigger than it was in its supposed heyday. What you're seeing as a result is, well, it's hard to tell what the cause and what the effect is, but what you're seeing at the same time is consumption of cocaine skyrocketing. It's grown dramatically in South America. It's growing dramatically in wealthier countries now in Asia and it's skyrocketed in Europe. So cocaine consumption is through the roof. Cocaine prices have actually declined because there's so much supply of it. You know, arrests for cocaine possession in Australia have quadrupled since 2010. US overdoses that involve cocaine have quintupled, quintupled over the past decades as dealers took to Mexico Cain with synthetic opioids. Ecuador has imposed a state of emergency on its large port in Guayaquil. I've been in Guayaquil. I've spoken at universities in Guayaquil. This year because of the cocaine trafficking through the port, car bombs, explosions, contract killings, gang violence. While the US market has always been the traditional market for cocaine, Europe, seizes have tripled in just the last five years in Europe. In Africa, cocaine seizures have increased 10 fold from 2015 to 2019 to a large extent because Africa not only is now consuming cocaine, but it's also, you know, the cocaine often travels from Columbia and other areas primarily Columbia to Africa. And then from Africa it smuggled into Europe. That's one of the main paths into Europe. In Asia, cocaine season Asia has increased 15 fold over the last five years, 15 fold. My guess is that's because consumption among the middle class and the wealthy in places like East Asia, where there now is a massive middle class and a massive number of people who can afford the cocaine has probably increased dramatically. So I'm sure that you're seeing huge spike in cocaine use in place like China, but also in other parts of Asia that have over the last 40 years become wealthy. Great volumes, huge volumes of the drugs are seized in ports of Turkey, Eastern Europe, which are some of the new routes for bringing cocaine into the heart of Europe. The purity of the cocaine, the quality has gone up. So the purity of cocaine in the streets of Europe is now 60% that's up from 37 in 2010. And if you look, if you study the wastewater of cities, you can tell what people are using because there's remnant there. And over the last decade, cocaine remnant residue in wastewater of major cities in Europe has more than doubled. Anyway, the consequence of this other than people using all over the world is a massive increase in violence associated with cocaine. Massive increase in violence in Colombia, where most of the cocaine of the world is still produced, but that of course affects other countries in their region like Bolivia and Ecuador, which also produced quite a bit of cocaine. I was surprised, you're not seeing huge quantities of cocaine coming from Venezuela. I would have expected that and I'm surprised it hasn't happened. You know, one kilo of cocaine, it's interesting how the differences are between countries. A kilo of cocaine costs very little to produce, very little to produce, right? The workers making this get about $1.9 for every 25 kilograms of the leaves they harvest. But let's say it costs, it costs to produce a kilo of cocaine about, in its final form, about $630. That kilo of cocaine, wholesale, not at retail, wholesale, in the United States for $30,000. It wholesale in Germany for $50,000 and in Australia, it wholesale for $160,000. And that's all reflective of the difficulty and the risk of getting it into those particular countries and the penalties that you as a trafficker would suffer if you got caught by bringing it in. It's a function of the risk, risk return, right? So, wow, look at those profit margins. Those profit margins means that more and more organized crime is centered around the shipment of cocaine. They find more and more sophistication in shipping it without getting detected. You put it in a container with bananas. Port inspectors are not gonna delay banana shipments in order to search for drugs because bananas were wrought in the container so they clear it out so they travel with food. They become super efficient at this. But also, on the production side, it turns out that farming cocaine has become super efficient because of the profit margins. Because, and because the Columbia government and the US government, oh, this was interesting. It used to be that the Columbia government used to spray cocaine fields with pesticides, but then in 2015, they stopped. They stopped because the United, the WHO, the World Health Organization, said that the pesticide was probably a carcinogen and therefore shouldn't be sprayed, so they stopped spraying. So since 2015, the cocaine farmers now don't have to deal with those pesticides, have invested heavily in increasing productivity of the land using fertilizers, using more efficient methods, and that has grown. Anyway, violence has exploded. More people are dying, more, more people are using. Profit margins have gone through the roof of the cartels, so more violence is involved, more risk-taking is involved. And this just shows you what would happen if it was legalized. If it was legalized, a $650 pound of cocaine, or kilo of cocaine, sorry, would not sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would sell for maybe thousands of dollars. The profit margins would be small. There would be less cocaine, there would probably be a lot, there would be a dramatic decrease in violence. The violence would all go away. The price of cocaine at the retail market would drop dramatically. People would not have to be violent in order to get the money in order to buy the cocaine. It's true that in the short run, cocaine use would probably rise, particularly among the poor who now could afford it. But then once the coolness of it would disappear, cocaine use would decline. A whole industry would arise to get us off of cocaine addiction. There would be many, many tools to reduce addiction. But think of the tens of thousands, maybe more of lives saved as a consequence of the reduction in violence. Think of the fact that these cartels would be decimated. And again, they would have to resort to productive activity. It's not clear how you, if cocaine production might increase, but profit margins would decrease dramatically. It's likely the Colombian government would actually regain authority over the land in which cocaine produced. Today, they don't have that. The cartels run all that part of Colombia. Basically, it's anarchy there. It's run by cartels that constantly fighting each other, these areas that are super violent. Think about the decline in the Mexican cartels and the ability of law and order to actually be instituted in vast areas in Mexico which now have no law and order because the cartels are running things. You know, the benefits of drug legalization are astronomical. They really, truly are astronomical in terms of just human life. If you value human life, you have to be for drug legalization as a major policy action. And if you look at the country like Portugal that has basically decriminalized drugs, drug use has not exploded about young people in Portugal. Drug use is not a major problem in Portugal. They have normalized it and that normalization has actually produced, resulted in deathless crime and fewer problems. What we need is a global effort, a global effort to decriminalize cocaine, heroin and other drugs. You know, heroin of course is produced in Afghanistan, much of it is and that funds much of the Taliban's effort to basically suppress, oppress their own population Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support. By going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.