Illegal Drug Trade in Colombia

Illegal drug trade in Colombia (Spanish: Narcotráfico en Colombia) refers to the practice of producing and distributing illegal drugs with psychoactive effects in Colombia. Colombia has had four major drug trafficking cartels which eventually created a new social class and influenced several aspects of Colombian culture.

Coca, marijuana and other drugs had been part of the lifestyle of some Colombians, but the worldwide demand of psychoactive drugs during the 1960s and 1970s eventually increased the production and processing of these in Colombia. Cocaine is produced at $1500/kilo in jungle labs and could be sold on the streets of America for as much as $50,000/kilo. The initial boom in production of drugs in Colombia for export began with marijuana in the 1960s, followed by cocaine in the mid- to late-1970s. The USA intervened in Colombia throughout this period in an attempt to cut off the supply of these drugs to the US.

As of 2011 Colombia remains the world's largest cocaine producer.

Since the establishment of the War on Drugs, the United States and European countries have provided financial, logistical, tactical and military aid to the government of Colombia in order to implement plans to combat the illegal drug trade. The most notable of these programs has been the Plan Colombia which also intended to combat leftist organizations, such as the FARC guerrillas, who have controlled many coca-growing regions in Colombia over the past decades.

Despite Colombia having the dubious distinction of being the world leading producer of coca for many years those plans, slowly but surely, diminished the drug produced, to the extent that in 2010 the country reduced cocaine production by 60%, relative to the peak in 2000. In that same year, Peru surpassed Colombia as the main producer of coca leaves in the world. The level of drug related violence was halved in the last 10 years, when the country moved from being the most violent country in the world to have a homicide rate that is inferior to the one registered in countries like Honduras, Jamaica, El Salvador, Venezuela, Guatemala and Trinidad and Tobago

Colombia has acted in a more aggressive way than most of the countries signatories of the 1988 Vienna Convention against drug trafficking, by including chemicals and drug precursors, that are freely traded in the rest of the world, in the list of nationally controlled substances. Notwithstanding the internal production of drugs, the rate of internal consumption in Colombia is smaller than the one presented in the United States and in many of the countries of the European Union and the absolute drug consumption is even smaller.

Given the fact that the population of the United States is the largest user of illegal drugs in the world, with one in six citizens claiming to have used cocaine in their life, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), after reviewing the efficiency of the actions taken by the Colombian government for more than 20 years, has called for the coke consuming countries - mostly in Europe and North America - to take their share of responsibility and reduce demand for cocaine, explaining that there are limits to what the Andean governments can do if cocaine consumption continues unabated, a position that has been maintained by the Colombian government for many years and recently accepted by the United States government.

The actions of the Colombian National Police against drug trafficking has been so effective that the country has captured and extradited drug lords to the rate of over 100 per year for the last 10 years and currently gives technical advice to 7 countries in Latin America and 12 in Africa. Drug traffickers have resisted those actions by killing nothing less than the five presidential candidates Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, Jaime Pardo Leal, Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, Alvaro Gómez Hurtado and Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, by allegedly planning and financing the Palace of Justice siege that left 11 of the 25 Supreme Court Justices dead, by killing over 3.000 members of the Union Patriótica, a legal political party, and by assassinating countless policemen, judges and witnesses.