The War On Drugs Makes The Climate Crisis Worse, New Report Shows

*“So many chemical products are used. Because it’s criminalized, there is
no control over the waste process. It contaminates water, soil and animals
in the surroundings.”*

*By Alexander Lekhtman, Filter*

Drug prohibition is a driver of the climate crisis, outlines a major report
by international researchers and policy experts. Both drug policy reform
and “ecological harm reduction,” it argues, are essential to climate
justice.

“From Forest to Dust: Socioeconomic and environmental impacts of the
prohibition of the coca and cocaine production chain in the Amazon basin
and Brazil” was produced by a coalition called Intersection – Land Use,
Drug Policy and Climate Justice, involving numerous NGOs.

Its 100-plus pages cover vast historical and geographical expanses, from
the Spanish colonial era to today, and from the jungles of Brazil to the
ports of West Africa. It calls for a system of legal regulation for coca,
but one that doesn’t simply replace the control and violence of trafficking
networks with that of multinational corporations. Instead, the authors
argue, Indigenous communities and family farms should be centered, to
ensure that the coca and cocaine trade won’t harm people and their lands.

“In some regions, coca acts as a direct driver of deforestation,” Rebeca
Lerer told *Filter*. A Brazilian journalist and human rights activist,
Lerer was the editor and coordinator of the report, and founded the
Intersection coalition.

“When armed conflict or the military arrive, it moves coca to more remote
areas,” she explained. “It pushes the frontier of production into
forest-covered areas—then authorities [seek to] eradicate coca, then
usually mining or cattle ranching projects come.”

The cocaine trade is tied to environmentally destructive industries,
details the report, as it provides financing and the infrastructure needed
to move people, goods and services engaged in the illegal wildlife, fishing
and logging trades—to name a few.

“The cocaine trade in the Amazon works as an investment bank for other
environmental crime,” said Lerer, who also serves as the Latin American
secretariat of the International Coalition for Drug Policy Reform and
Environmental Justice, one of the groups that collaborated on the report.

“When the [authorities] repress one [cocaine trafficking] route, they shift
to another forest area,” she continued. Trafficking groups “then involve
traditional communities and local Indigenous lands in these routes.
Repression moves this around without reducing the trade or consumption, and
while increasing violence.”

The first section of the report was written by David Restrepo, research
lead at the Center for Studies on Drugs and Security at the Universidad de
los Andes. He gives a brief history of the coca leaf—from its ancient use
as a spiritual, medicinal and communal substance in the Andes highlands; to
the chemical extraction of the cocaine alkaloid and its launch as a global
commodity; and finally, to the onset of prohibition and the rise of
wealthy, militarized “cartels.”

It’s a story that’s taken another twist even since the publication of “From
Forest to Dust.” On December 2, the World Health Organization opted not to
recommend easing the blanket global prohibition of coca—going against the
findings of the agency’s own expert report.

“Among the millions of people across South America who continue to chew,
cultivate, and revere coca today, the leaf is not considered an intoxicant
but a vital substance for social cohesion and balance with the natural
world,” Restrepo writes.

Traditional use spans peoples like the Nasa in Colombia, *mambe *circles in
the northwest Amazon, and Quechua-speaking highland Peru and Bolivia. But
the plant’s importance to diverse cultures is overshadowed by its potent
white derivative—and authorities’ disastrous attempts to suppress it.

The report covers harmful domestic and international crackdowns, the export
of the United States drug war through initiatives like “Plan Colombia,” and
how enforcement moves the trade around, per the “balloon effect.”

“Prohibition, even in its infancy, generated adaptive supply,” Restrepo
writes. “When one route closed, another emerged.” He criticizes US and
Colombia-led anti-trafficking actions, and notes how Colombia’s 2016 peace
deal with the leftwing militia group FARC fragmented the cocaine trade in
the country, with “dissident factions, paramilitary successors, and
criminal entrepreneurs filling the authority gap.”

In Peru and Bolivia, meanwhile, Restropo explains how coca cultivation has
continued to increase. Prohibition “reshuffles and disperses [the trade],
often into ecologically fragile regions where state presence is weak.” He
cites UNODC data showing that potential leaf yields more than doubled, from
4.1 tons per hectare in 2013 to 8.5 tons by 2023. That single hectare could
produce up to 19 kilograms of cocaine per year.

But changing fortunes in the global cocaine trade have made Brazil an
emerging player, with groups like the Red Command and the Capital’s First
Command taking key roles in manufacturing, the domestic supply and global
export.

Amid these changes, coca-related forest loss has doubled over the past
decade—exceeding 20,000 hectares in some years. The refinement process also
produces significant pollutants from gasoline, sulfuric acid, ammonia and
acetone. Field studies show elevated heavy metal and acid residues in
nearby soils and waterways, and coca processing areas are associated with
more fish and amphibians dying.

But efforts to eradicate coca are also environmentally destructive.
Notoriously, aerial crop fumigation operations have poisoned forests,
waterways, farms and human beings with the herbicide glyphosate.

The report’s second section, jointly written by University of São Paulo
urban geography researcher Thiago Godoi Calil and members of the Mãe
Crioula Institute, continues to document the destruction.

It describes the rise of “narco-deforestation” and “narco-mining”, where
the illicit drug trade is tied to illegal extractive industries like
logging, wildlife and plant smuggling, and to land-grabs and sex
trafficking. The authors note that from 2017-2021, 16 major seizures in the
Brazilian Amazon found cocaine shipments in illicit lumber on its way to
Europe.

In the following section, members of the Instituto Fogo Cruzado cite UNODC
estimates showing that global cocaine production of 3,708 tons in 2023
produced an estimated 2.19 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Every aspect of
the production and supply chain—from cutting and burning forests to grow
coca, to the refinement process, disposal of waste and
transportation—contributes to this. And prohibition means the absence of
mitigating regulations.

“The production itself generates impacts,” Lerer told* Filter*. “So many
chemical products are used. Because it’s criminalized, there is no control
over the waste process. It contaminates water, soil and animals in the
surroundings. There are health hazards for lab workers, and adulterants
used by people with poor expertise.”

These environmental harms go far beyond the interior regions of the
Brazilian Amazon—including out to the oceans, with chemical traces found in
mussels, sharks and other fish.

The multi-billion dollar cocaine industry additionally serves as an
“investment bank” for extractive underground industries in Brazil, the
authors write: “The main ‘indirect’ effects of the prohibition associated
with this refining structure are related to the financing of other illegal
activities and the use of political influence and the armed branches of the
drug trade to corrupt public agents and avoid oversight. For communities
and environmental defenders, this translates into an increase in deaths and
threats.”

To put the scale in perspective, the authors estimate that the cocaine
refinement industry alone could generate up to $6 billion a year in
Brazil—a sum nearly six times larger than the total target for the Amazon
Fund ($1.05 billion), a government-managed philanthropic organization
combating deforestation.

In another section of the report, Mary Ryder and Steve Rolles of Transform
Drug Policy Foundation briefly mention some local efforts—particularly in
Europe—to consider legal regulation of cocaine and other stimulants.

Hower, they write, “More realistic in the short term, perhaps, is the
possibility for coca based products, such as coca tea, coca leaf or *mambe* (that
only contain a small amount of the active cocaine alkaloid) to be imported
and sold in European markets—particularly if coca’s legal status under the
UN conventions is revisited.”

Jenna Rose Astwood and Clemmie James, of the International Coalition on
Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice, conclude the report by
describing an approach they call “ecological harm reduction.”

“The question is no longer why the drug war has failed—but why it
persists,” they write. “The answer: it enables illegal, unregulated
extraction in biodiversity-rich forests vital to our climate future.”

“Despite these impacts, drug policy reform is almost entirely absent from
the climate policy agenda,” they continue. “This omission is dangerous. It
is not possible to protect the Amazon, or meet climate goals, while
ignoring one of the biggest forces driving its destruction.”

Astwood and James call for environmental justice and an end to the drug
war, pointing to what they describe as Indigenous peoples’ “approach rooted
in ecological interdependence.” But they don’t completely endorse the legal
regulation of drugs *unless* it’s combined with efforts to protect the
environment, workers and people who depend on vulnerable lands.

“A legal market, if poorly implemented, can reproduce the harms of
prohibition through unsustainable agricultural practices, corporate
capture, land grabbing, and further marginalization of those already
embedded in the drug economy,” they write. “A just transition to a
regulated drug market must reduce the influence of extractive and criminal
economies by establishing safeguards to prevent exploitative actors from
entering the legal space.”

Their recommended components of this vision include sustainable
environmental practices such as permaculture and companion planting;
responsible land, water and energy use; ensuring food security for rural
communities; and diversifying agricultural systems. Processing and refining
of controlled substances, they argue, should be relocated to urban and
suburban areas where waste can be better controlled.

They also endorse various protections for workers including the rights to
organize, collective bargaining, safe working conditions, fair wages, and
an end to forced and child labor. And land reforms should protect peoples
with traditional ties to ecosystems. Stolen lands should be returned with
just compensation, and resources should be provided for restitution and
community-led redevelopment.

“Prohibition started with the plants, and we think we need to go back to
the plants,” Lerer said. “We need to start by freeing the coca leaf—from
there we should design what this trade should look like from an ecological
harm reduction lens and avoid corporate capture. Illegal cocaine promotes
environmental destruction, but ‘Big Pharma’ cocaine is also not going to
deliver climate justice.”

*This article was originally published by Filter, an online magazine
covering drug use, drug policy and human rights through a harm reduction
lens. Follow Filter on Bluesky, X or Facebook, and sign up for its
newsletter.*

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