%0 Book %D 2020 %T Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise %A Lina Britto %X Before Colombia became one of the world’s largest producers of cocaine in the 1980s, traffickers from the Caribbean coast partnered with American buyers in the 1970s to make the South American country the main supplier of marijuana for a booming US drug market, fueled by US hippie counterculture. How did one of the poorest and most isolated regions of Colombia become a central player in the making of an international drug trafficking circuit? Marijuana Boom is the untold story of this forgotten history. Combining deep archival research with unprecedented oral interviews, Lina Britto deciphers a puzzle: Why did the Colombian coffee republic, one of Latin America’s models of representative democracy and economic liberalism, transform into a drug paradise, and at what cost? %I University of California Press %C Berkeley %G eng