The Netflix drama, Narcos, about the infamous Colombian drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, cites a shocking statistic on the human cost of the drugs trade. But is it true?
Agent Steve Murphy is in an airport toilet when he sees two Americans snorting cocaine. He asks them if they know the true price of the drugs they are taking – more specifically, how many people die for every kilo of cocaine?
“Six lives – that’s how much it cost,” he tells them. “What do you think about that?”
It’s a scene from Narcos, a Netflix drama series based on the real-life story of Murphy, an agent with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who was sent to Colombia to track down and arrest Escobar.
That scene was set in 1992. But was it really true at the time that six people lost their lives for every kilo of cocaine processed, shipped and distributed in the US?
The Netflix programme-makers told the BBC the statistic came from a DEA source who couldn’t be named.
But fortunately Elizabeth Zilli, who was the DEA’s head of intelligence in Colombia at the time, agreed to be interviewed.
“I really couldn’t give you a number, but it was extremely high,” she says. “We never totally trusted the statistics we were getting from the [Colombian] government. One never does, no matter where you are.”
Corroborating the figures was difficult, she adds, because the DEA often relied on second- or third-hand information, and informants who may not have been totally reliable.
However, it’s possible to very roughly approximate the cost in human life of a kilo of cocaine in 1992.
In 1992, Colombia had over 28,000 murders, while in the United States – a country with a population seven times bigger – there were around 25,000.
But there’s a problem. We don’t know which of these murders had anything to do with drugs. And coming up with a figure for drug-related homicide is virtually impossible, as Sanho Tree, a drug policy researcher at the Institute of Public Policy, explains.
So let’s start with the highest possible figure and make an assumption we know is not true.
For the purpose of our sum, we will take it that every murder in the US and Colombia in 1992 was drug-related. That gives us a total of 53,000 deaths. So now we just need the cocaine figures. Funnily enough, these are not easy to find either – you can hardly send a freedom of information request to a cocaine cartel.
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