From forest to dust: Socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the prohibition of the coca and cocaine production chain in the Amazon Basin and Brazil

Over the last one hundred years, the global drug prohibition regime has established an innovative, resilient, corrupt, extractivist and transnational economic system.

By criminalizing plants of traditional use and their users, prohibitionist policy ensures that the violence of repression and environmental destruction remain localized in certain territories and social groups, while financial profits circulate across borders.

It is a system that rewards logistical control, territorial monopoly and infrastructural camouflage while punishing transparency and community governance. Its intersectional effects are particularly visible in Latin America due to the geographic concentration of coca and cocaine production.

Prohibition transformed coca, a sacred Indigenous plant, into the raw material of a war economy — without ever reducing the production or use of cocaine. Instead, supply and demand continue to break historical records.