Booming cocaine production suggests the war on drugs has failed

Coca is ubiquitous in remote rural parts of Colombia. Farmers plant the hardy, high-altitude bush, harvest its foliage and sell it in bulk to the small local laboratories that have made the country into the world’s biggest producer of cocaine. The pickers, known as raspachines, are mostly poor migrants from Venezuela or elsewhere in Colombia. Their hands are often shredded and bloodied by their labour, which involves ripping the leaves off the stalk. But it pays more than cultivating most legal crops. And even being on the bottom rung of the drug business confers a certain glamour. “I’m the raspachin,” trills the singer on a jaunty hit from 2015 by Los Bacanes del Sur, a popular folk band. “And I get all the women.”