Book Review: Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise by Lina Britto

• Published date: 01 September 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677231164031
• Author: Cameron Hoffman
• Date: 01 September 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

ORCID iD

Shawnee Harkness https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8025-0136

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Lina Britto (2020).

Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Paperback. ISBN: 9780520325470.

Reviewed by: Cameron Hoffman, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Georgia State University

DOI: 10.1177/10575677231164031

Columbia is often remembered in only a few contexts in majority thought; as a producer of coffee and

the home of Pablo Escobar, leader of the world’s largest cocaine operation. However, before Escobar

in the 1980s, there emerged a novel drug trade in Columbia in the 1970s that would set the stage for

Columbia’s transition from a coffee republic to a narcotics nation. While most historians have over-

looked this period of history to study the cocaine trade in Columbia, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and

Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise tells the story of how a remote region of Columbia changed

as it played a major role in the global supply of marijuana, before descending into violence and

plunging the trade in the region into oblivion. Furthermore, this book details how government

responses to this marijuana trade sparked the integration of United States and Colombian govern-

ments and laid the groundwork for the war on drugs against the cocaine trade in Colombia. Lina

Britto accomplished this framework using family connections in the region while conducting

further research as a part of her combined journalistic and socio-historical analysis approach to study-

ing this phenomenon.

The book is divided into three parts with two chapters each, for a total of six chapters of content.

Part one, Ascendance, provides crucial background information on the Greater Magdalena region in

the northeast of Columbia, and how factors unique to the region set the stage for marijuana produc-

tion. In this section, the author displays how numerous mostly failed attempts from the Colombian

government to improve the area left the local populace with a culture that did not respect the central

authority of the state. The author also shows that individuals resorted to smuggling to protect their

livelihoods in the wake of these abandoned agrarian reforms. While coffee was the primary smug-

gling export, the region’s smugglers began including small shipments of marijuana in their business

Hoffman 339