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Why Colombia Should Fully Legalize Cocaine

Both Gustavo Petro and Joe Biden misunderstand how supply and demand work. A more radical approach is needed to reduce drug-related crime.

By , a policy analyst on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Colombian President Gustavo Petro pose for a photo after a meeting at Casa de Nariño in Bogotá on Oct. 3.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Colombian President Gustavo Petro pose for a photo after a meeting at Casa de Nariño in Bogotá on Oct. 3.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Colombian President Gustavo Petro pose for a photo after a meeting at Casa de Nariño in Bogotá on Oct. 3. Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images

Colombia’s war on drugs dominated the headlines of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s October visit to Bogotá. Michael Crowley, a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, wrote of policy splits between the Biden administration and Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro, especially regarding their divergent views on the war on drugs.

Colombia’s war on drugs dominated the headlines of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s October visit to Bogotá. Michael Crowley, a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, wrote of policy splits between the Biden administration and Colombia’s new president, Gustavo Petro, especially regarding their divergent views on the war on drugs.

Although they do diverge, both Petro’s and Biden’s stances on the drug war have more similarities than differences—and they are both wrong, as they are oblivious to the drug trade’s market dynamics. The White House has reinforced the traditional strategy of trying to make the price of cocaine so expensive that U.S. consumers won’t want to buy it. This misses the point of how demand for a highly addictive product actually works.

For his part, Petro has correctly condemned the drug war for its failures, but his critique has amounted to mere posturing, with no plan to recognize the inescapable facts of market forces. Nor has Petro considered unilateral legalization, the best possible solution to end the supply side approach that has turned much of the Colombian countryside into a war zone since the 1980s.

Blinken’s Bogotá trip came roughly a year after the White House released what it called its “new, holistic U.S.-Colombia counternarcotics strategy.” But the Biden administration’s approach to the Colombian drug problem is not new, not holistic, and certainly not a strategy that will counter the flow of narcotics into the United States.

As Milton Friedman and other economists warned as early as the 1970s, waging a war against the supply of a product with inelastic demand—which means that price increases will not drastically affect consumers’ willingness to buy—only increases its market value, thus boosting violent criminals’ motivations to enter the drug trade. This is exactly what has taken place in Colombia during the last four decades.


Between 2000 and 2021, successive U.S. administrations provided about $12 billion in bilateral aid to Colombia under different counternarcotics programs, according to a Congressional Research Service report. Nonetheless, the large money transfers did nothing to halt the spread of coca crops, illicit drug production, or the continuous export of cocaine to the United States. On the contrary, coca cultivation in Colombia increased between 2000 and 2020, from roughly 136,000 planted hectares to a record 245,000. The White House’s new policy follows this tradition, doubling down on the dubious theory—prevalent in Washington for decades—that illegal drugs arrive in the United States due to weak institutions in producing and transit countries.

Hence, drug warriors argue, U.S. taxpayers must finance third countries’ security and judiciary apparatuses as well as other aspects of their internal affairs. Biden’s plan, in fact, not only calls for “robust investment” in “citizen security” and “access to justice” in Colombia but also in that country’s “rural development.” Washington has attempted this type of nation-building in Colombia since Bill Clinton’s presidency, with very little to show for it as a result.

It’s misleading to contrast the Biden administration’s traditional, prohibitionist stance on cocaine with Petro’s “new” approach, as Crowley did in the Times. He wrote that Petro has “proposed ending the forced eradication of coca and backs legislation that could decriminalize and regulate cocaine sales”—and Crowley is not alone in subscribing to this view. Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán wrote in the Washington Post in August that Colombia’s “first leftist government” was about to “lead a global experiment,” with officials willing to “turn their country into a laboratory for drug decriminalization,” including that of cocaine.

In fact, Petro’s stance—insofar as he has a coherent drug policy at all—is not only far less radical than these articles make it out to be. It is even timid by international standards, since it keeps prohibition in place.

In part, Colombian law already recognizes prohibition’s failure. The country partially decriminalized drug use decades ago, as Schmidt and Durán mention toward the end of their article. A law approved in 1986 allows individuals to carry up to 1 gram of cocaine—and up to 20 grams of marijuana—for personal consumption.

However, the law makes it a criminal offense to possess the so-called minimum dose when “the person carries the narcotic, whatever its quantity, for the purpose of distribution or sale.” It’s a good example of Colombia’s trademark legalism, which often descends into absurdity, as showcased in Erick Behar Villegas’s recent novel, Perdido en Legalandia (“Lost in Legal Land”). In the case of cocaine, someone can only get ahold of a legal gram of the substance by purchasing it beforehand and, by necessity, illegally.

Even within this Kafkaesque legal framework, Colombia could decriminalize cocaine consumption fully. To do so, Petro—who, in fact, heads the country’s first openly leftist government since that of Ernesto Samper (1994-98)—would have to modify the National Statute on Narcotics (Law 30 of 1986) and the country’s criminal code. These measures require the approval of Colombia’s Congress, but, until now, Petro has lacked the political will to move forward with full decriminalization.

Petro is likely aware that, according to a recent opinion poll, 71 percent of Colombians oppose legal drug consumption. Even if he did decide eventually to spend political capital to decriminalize drug use, Colombia would not be leading a “global experiment.” It merely would follow the example of Portugal, which decriminalized narcotics consumption in 2000 and, since then, has achieved altogether positive results.

But unlike Portugal and other consumer countries, however, Colombia is the world’s largest producer and exporter of cocaine. The Post article further noted that Petro’s government “plans to put an end to aerial spraying and the manual eradication of coca, which critics say unfairly targets poor rural farmers.” In fact, Colombia halted the aerial spraying of coca fields with glyphosate in 2015, during the government of former President Juan Manuel Santos (2010-18). The only novelty is that Petro’s police chief ended all efforts to renew aerial spraying, as the previous president, Iván Duque (2018-22), attempted to do without success.

The Colombian state is still using glyphosate on the ground to spray coca crops, and Petro has frequently expressed his support for both manual eradication—which he confirmed after his latest meeting with Blinken—and crop substitution. This, again, is not a new policy but rather is part of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerrilla group-turned-drug cartel.

Since 2016, the FARC agreement has flopped completely, with thousands of guerrilla fighters still refusing to demobilize and fully immersed in the drug trade. So has voluntary crop substitution, as is evident from the increasing land area with coca leaf under cultivation since 2000. Duque’s critics claimed that this was due to his government’s “failure to comply” with a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime program. In reality, the program failed due to its flawed, bureaucratic design. Most coca farmers have little economic incentive to choose government handouts over the cocaine industry’s staggering profit margins, even if farmers earn the least in the production process.

Petro, however, is as oblivious to the drug trade’s market dynamics as his counterpart in the White House. By prolonging voluntary crop substitution despite its proven record of failure, he maintains the government-led approach to reduce the supply of coca leaf despite cocaine’s inelastic demand. His government has merely supported legislation that eliminates criminal charges for small coca farmers who enroll in the crop substitution program.

Equally bureaucratic and heedless of market forces is a 2020 law proposed by then-Sen. Iván Marulanda, a Petro ally who sought to create a state monopsony over the purchase of coca leaf at fixed prices, with legally certified doctors supplying patients with minimum doses of government-produced cocaine. Marulanda’s bill, which was shelved in Congress due to a lack of parliamentary support, would have banned advertising, branded packaging, and all private sector involvement in the regulated cocaine trade.

Petro abstained from voting for Marulanda’s fantasy project when he was a senator, and he has done nothing to revive the bill as president. One of his supporters in Congress, however, has expressed personal support for the initiative, which is presumably what foreign journalists refer to when they write of Petro’s supposed plan to decriminalize cocaine.

Even if this statist scheme came to fruition, however, it would be far from the “total revolution” that the press has touted. In fact, neighboring Peru has had a state-owned monopsony on coca leaf since 1949, with the National Coca Company (ENACO) having the sole legal authority to commercialize coca products in the country. In 2020, Reuters reported that, according to ENACO’s own figures, around 93 percent of Peru’s coca crop “is converted illegally into cocaine,” as drug traffickers pay a significant premium to obtain the drug’s raw materials. Inevitably, Colombia’s own public sector cocaine bureaucracy would fail for the same reason.

By not allowing the market to operate freely—as it would with numerous buyers of coca leaf and numerous sellers of cocaine—Marulanda’s project would create its own perverse incentives and perpetuate Colombia’s drug problem. Farmers would be motivated to sell coca leaf to drug traffickers at higher prices, and the state would still persecute nonstate sellers of cocaine, thus increasing prices further and motivating more criminals to join the illegal drug trade. Nonetheless, the Colombian left seems incapable of foreseeing the consequences of putting its ingrained anti-market ideology into practice.


If Colombia’s government would accept how the drug trade operates and discard its ideological bias, it could do something genuinely groundbreaking. Petro could not only decriminalize drug consumption but take the additional, logical step for a producer country and unilaterally legalize all production, with full private sector involvement. This would incentivize the creation of numerous private, legal entities that would enter different sectors of the industry in order to produce and sell cocaine in a legal market, as in the case of the legal marijuana companies that have arisen in the United States in recent years.

Fully legalizing cocaine production and sales would end the Colombian state’s current war on raw materials (coca crops), production (cocaine labs), and distribution (drug dealing) inside the country. Producing and selling cocaine would be like producing or selling beer or aspirin: The production and sale of beer and aspirin are usually not violent because the state does not actively persecute these activities. Internally, a legal cocaine market would therefore function largely along formal, nonviolent lines, whereas prohibition creates a black market that incentivizes the rise of illegal armed groups and inherently promotes violence.

Legalizing cocaine also would outsource most of the current, chronic violence that arises from turf wars over coca production areas and drug export routes. Since the Colombian military, police, and legal system would no longer combat cocaine production or internal sales, it would fall mostly to third countries to deal with the consequences—smuggling, violence, very profitable illegal organizations—that result from outlawing a product that is legal elsewhere. For Colombia, a bloody territorial struggle would become a mere customs issue.

Sure, unilateral legalization could isolate Colombia diplomatically and even lead to drastic economic sanctions from the United States and other developed countries. According to a 2010 Princeton University study, cocaine legalization in Colombia would have saved the country $7 billion annually at the time, with about 5,000 fewer homicides and 100,000 fewer people internally displaced each year. Such benefits would outweigh the policy’s costs by far.

Daniel Raisbeck is a policy analyst on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. In 2015, he ran for mayor of Bogotá as an independent libertarian. Twitter: @DanielRaisbeck

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