Drug Trafficking in Cosmopolitan Culture: A View from the Colombian Experience

Abstract

Drug trafficking has been a ubiquitous crime on the American continent since the 1980s, and addressing it has required international policy to function beyond the physical boundaries of the nation-state, whatever its role is: as a producer, as a go-between for its sale, or as a consumer. The manifestations of drug trafficking are criminal, multiple and incalculable. Its behavior as merchandise, subject to supply and demand, has benefitted from the process of globalization, particularly with the availability of technology and IT, which it has made available in local and regional societies. According to Ulrich Beck, Eduardo Pastrana, Irvin Waller, Antanas Mockus and Ariel Francais, drug trafficking is mainly a globalized product, a successful business, a cosmopolitan risk, and a cultural component that is difficult to eradicate with wartime policies because in Colombia violence is not an accidental product, it is multicausal. To address this phenomenon, the only universal regulators are human rights and civil ethics.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5377/rpsp.v2i0.1193