An Industrial Geography of Cocaine (review)

In An Industrial Geography of Cocaine, Christian M. Allen synthesizes the literature on cocaine production, trafficking, and distribution to generate a model of the industry and its firms, thereby offering insight into the connections between drugprohibition policies and trends towards economic liberalization in the western hemisphere. The book begins by situating the research within theories of location, competitive advantage, and corporate strategy and by outlining the analytical perspective of qualitative research that underpins the study. Allen uses published data from sources such as the National Drug Intelligence Center, the United States Department of State, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and The Economist as well as information gleaned from open-ended interviews with drug enforcement officials. The second chapter uses the framework of competitive advantage to identify the factors that contribute to success in the industry and to discuss the evolution of the business from a vertically integrated form in the 1980s to its current manifestation as a flexible network. The chapter also examines the industry's patterns of innovation and its unique price structure.

The heart of the book is contained within the next four chapters, which provide an exhaustive description of the industry that moves the reader through the production cycle of cocaine. Embedded within this narrative is a series of case studies that focus on the competitive advantages offered by four key locations in the value-added chain: Bolivia, Columbia, Mexico, and the United States. Chapter 3 explores the initial processing of coca first into a paste and then into a cocaine base. It highlights the weight-losing nature of the manufacturing process, which tends to encourage processing facilities to locate close to the coca fields. It also underscores how the ongoing threat of drug seizures contributes to diseconomies of scale that have encouraged the construction of small, difficult-to-identify processing facilities. Chapter 4 explores the competitive advantage Columbia enjoys in refining the base into cocaine and trafficking the drug to markets in the United States and Europe. Particularly helpful in this chapter is the analysis of the country's historical legacy of smuggling, which has generated a culture of contraband acceptance as well as extensive technical expertise in the business. The next chapter examines Mexico's emerging role in the distribution of the drug to wholesalers in the United States as entrepreneurs have increasingly taken advantage of the 1990s liberalization of cross-border trade. Chapter 6 draws upon insights from central place theory to identify a hierarchy of distribution centers in the United States, eventually focusing on a micro-scale analysis of cocaine distribution at the neighborhood level. The final two chapters examine the policy implications and scholarly relevance of the study, with a focus on how legalization of the drug would affect the industry's price structure, operation procedures, and multinational imprint.

The value of Allen's book lies in its integration and synthesis of the extant published material into a coherent, transnational model of the cocaine industry. This exercise enables the author to identify and expand upon several useful insights that no doubt will be of interest to economic geographers. Among the most significant of these are that economic liberalization has tended to increase drug trafficking, which takes advantage of concealment in licit trade; supply-side enforcement and eradication programs appear to have had no measurable or lasting impact on cocaine prices or consumption levels in the United States; and enforcement and eradication programs designed along these lines have stimulated innovation and competitive responses among the industry's firms, ultimately strengthening their ability to manufacture and distribute the drug. It is in this context that the author explores the viability of legalizing cocaine, although he admits that the model cannot predict how this course of action would impact consumption levels in the United States. The book would be particularly useful in an introductory course in economic or industrial geography because it offers a coherent portrait of a product's life cycle that features classic and contemporary concepts in...