Listen here to Prof Enrique Desmond Arias talk about the new book ‘Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets‘.

In ‘Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets’, a new book edited by Enrique Desmond Arias (City University New York) and Thomas Grisaffi (Reading University), the cocaine industry in the Americas is viewed from a different lens, revealing the complexity of the heavily-populated mechanism that guides it from production, through transportation all the way to sales and consumption.

In this episode, Enrique Desmond Arias, Marxe Chair of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the City University of New York and a longtime researcher of organized crime and the drug trade in South America and the Caribbean, talks about the ‘moral economy’ of cocaine networks, the political power of the drug trade and how anti-drug policies that only look at the kingpins are doomed to fail.