Marijuana Boom The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise

"Lina Britto’s Marijuana Boom is a stunning history of transitions and dependencies, from one drug to another: coffee, pot, and cocaine. Britto synthesizes a number of scholarly approaches––including commodity and cultural studies and social, economic, and diplomatic history––to present a work far more valuable than the sum of its methods. Connecting the Andean highlands to the greater Caribbean and then outward to the United States, Marijuana Boom reveals how the seeds, so to speak, of today’s narco hellscape were first sown during an earlier, seemingly more edenic moment. A tour de force."––Greg Grandin, Professor of History, Yale University and author of The End of the Myth

"Drawing on rich interviews and archival sources from Colombia and the US, Britto gives us a fascinating new interpretation of the social, cultural and political history of the marijuana economy on Colombia’s Caribbean coast from the 1960s to the 1980s. She elucidates how agricultural development and national integration policies contributed to the birth of the illicit economy; the social organization, cultural practices, and masculine honor codes of local traffickers during the boom; and the inception of the War on Drugs, which she holds responsible for the intense violence of the bust period. Compelling and enlightening, the book sets the marijuana experience in the Colombian national and regional contexts, it challenges the myth that the United States created the marijuana industry, and it helps make sense of the cocaine boom that followed. A major contribution to the new drug history of the Americas by a Latin American historian with family roots in the marijuana zone. ––Catherine C. LeGrand, author of Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936

“Combining the best practices of journalism, anthropology, and history, Lina Britto unearths the neglected history of Colombia’s marijuana boom, decades before the ascendance of cocaine and today’s somewhat more tolerant environment for marijuana’s legalization. Creatively researched in fragmentary archival sources and rich oral histories, Britto's beautifully crafted volume deftly integrates local, regional, national, and international levels of analysis. In the process, it contributes to timely discussions of nation-state formation, gender and racial identities, and the deepening of U.S. alliances and hegemony during the late Cold War.” —Gil Joseph, Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, Yale University

"This fascinating, up-close history of one of Colombia’s lesser known regions provides a human, often intimate counter to one of the dominant narratives in scholarly and popular understandings of Colombia. Rather than attributing Colombia’s marijuana boom of the 1970s to the weakness or absence of the Colombian state, Lina Britto convincingly demonstrates how midcentury state-led development programs generated new dynamics of exclusion and reinforced older social and economic forms, all of which culminated in the bonanza marimbera."––Robert A. Karl, author of Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia

"This book offers an unprecedented historical reconstruction of Colombia’s marijuana export boom, an account that is nuanced and engaging, analytically sharp, and unprecedented in its archival and oral historical depth. Pulling together labor history, social and cultural history, and international political economy, it reveals the crucial connections between local farmers and distant consumers, legal crops and illegal ones, regional elites and international development, and state power and spiraling violence."––Lara Putnam, author, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age