Cocaine Trafficking and British Foreign Policy

Abstract

In 1985, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, in its interim report on the Misuse of Hard Drugs, described the prospect of Latin American cocaine exporters targeting the British market as “the most serious peacetime threat to our national well-being”.¹ The seriousness of this assessment shows at least one group of British policy-makers conceiving of the problem in much the same security terms as their counterparts in the USA. The similarity to the US response is no coincidence. In 1985, Britain and its European neighbours were first becoming aware of a potential cocaine threat as a result of US warnings. Their perceptions of the production, trafficking and consumption of cocaine were almost entirely drawn from US experience. Given the lack of knowledge and experience of cocaine in Europe, the US view of the Andean countries as the root of the global drug problem became, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the global view. More than ten years later, it is appropriate to ask whether this threat has been realised and, crucially, whether we would know if it had.