Shared Responsibility

Cocaine´s Ecocide Featured in the Ecologist

Written by Nick Kettles Tuesday, 12 May 2009 00:00

Magazine art from The Ecologist's May 2009 edition.

Renowned freelance jounalist Nick Kettles delved into cocaine´s environmental impact in the May 2009 issue of The Ecologist magazine. Here is an excerpt from the piece:

The environmental impact of drugs
Nick Kettles 19/05/2009

How much rainforest does it take for one celebrity to snort another one under the table? Nick Kettles investigates the devastating environmental impact of cocaine use

The connection between hard-partying celebrities – from A-list to F – and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) might not be immediately apparent to most. But then the free-market makes strange bedfellows of us all. The twin desires to usurp the existing Colombian power-base on the one hand, and maintain the illusion of bright-lights, big-city careers on the other, have collided to throw the spotlight on a largely ignored form of ecocide.

 As controllers of the majority of Colombia’s cocaine production for more than a decade, FARC has been responsible for the slash and burn of more than two million hectares – an area the size of Wales – of both pristine primary- and secondary-growth Amazon rainforest, in the most biodiverse (per square kilometre) country in the world.

As controllers of a large majority of the public’s imagination, celebrities who either openly or clandestinely take cocaine are helping ensure that the Colombian coca farmers who work for FARC stay in business.

The mind boggles at how the ideologies of such diverse groups could find themselves on common ground, but it seems that when it comes to the environment, neither can see beyond the tip of their noses. It’s estimated that four square metres of rainforest are required for the production of every one gram of cocaine. More worrisome is that for every hectare of coca planted, approximately three to four hectares of forest are actually cut down.

The thinly veiled euphemism for cocaine use – ‘partying hard’ – often cited in the tabloids, suggests it is a drug of choice for celebrities. Since his agent refused to take our call, we cannot be sure that when Elton John quipped to Lily Allen, at the GQ magazine Men of the Year Awards last year, that he could ‘snort her under the table’, he wasn’t talking about tobacco snuff.