Cocaine Highway

Cocaine Highway: The lines that link our drug habit to terror
by Alex Perry

In Cocaine Highway, Alex Perry lifts the lid on a problem few are willing to talk about: direct connections between the recreational drug habits of the relatively rich and privileged in Europe, and the Islamists who fund their war against the west by smuggling narcotics.

Across much of Africa, drug trafficking is escalating in size, speed and international scope. East Africa has seen a sharp increase in the smuggling of heroin en route from Asia to Europe. Nigeria has become a world centre for the production of methamphetamine. Cocaine in transit from South America is corrupting countries and governments, and fuelling instability across the continent. With so many African governments relying on foreign assistance and military support, expedience and simple short-sightedness mean that many western governments inadvertently find themselves ending up as de facto partners to drug traffickers.

Perry navigates this dangerous territory by interviewing smugglers and anti-trafficking agents to reveal sophisticated enterprises that are, in the ungoverned spaces of West Africa, left largely undisturbed. He concludes that foreign interventions in Africa which wilfully ignore the cocaine trade risk not only helping create the conditions that inspire Islamic militancy, but funding it too.