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The Road to NowAuthor: RTN Productions
Bob Crawford (The Avett Brothers) & Dr. Ben Sawyer (MTSU History) share conversations with great thinkers from a variety of backgrounds historians, artists, legal scholars, political figures and more who help us uncover the many roads that run between past and present. For more information, visit TheRoadToNow.com If you'd like to support our work, join us on Patreon: Patreon.com/TheRoadToNow Language: en Genres: History, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Colombia, the US and the War on Drugs w/ Lina Britto
Monday, 2 February, 2026
Most Americans are aware of Colombia's role in the international drug trade, but we know less about the role that Americans' played in the story as consumers, smuggling pioneers, and practitioners of a foreign policy that facilitated the rise of Colombian drug production. In this episode, journalist and historian Lina Britto shares the fascinating story of how Colombia emerged as a major supplier of drugs to American consumers and how this relationship affected people in both countries. She also explains the origins of the "War on Drugs" in the US and tells the story of how Americans hippies in search of marijuana laid the groundwork for the distribution techniques later used by Pablo Escobar's cocaine cartel. Dr. Lina Britto is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University where she specializes in Colombian history and the history of the international drug trade. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020) This is a rebroadcast of RTN #318, which originally aired on November 4, 2024. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
