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

Britto’s account of the 1970s marijuana bonanza in Colombia’s Caribbean coast region, reading it as the product of unfulfilled promises of agrarian modernization, socio-economic exclusion, older smuggling traditions, and shifts in international demand. The book elucidates the social organization, cultural practices, and masculine honor codes of local traffickers during the boom, and traces the violent bust period to the “narcotization” of US–Colombia relations that transformed the country into a War on Drugs laboratory. Increasingly read in tandem with Smith and Morris on Mexico as a companion case for the comparative historiography of development, state failure, and illicit crop economies.