Pablo Escobar tried to bomb me in Bogotá. To stop the cartels infiltrating Europe, we should legalise cocaine

Responding to a Guardian investigation into trafficking, former British ambassador to Colombia Keith Morris says the ‘war on drugs’ has failed

I congratulate the Guardian on this investigation (Latin American organised crime ‘may operate in 16 European countries’, 13 October). It has already prompted a strong call from the former Colombian vice-president Marta Lucía Ramírez for effective international cooperation to counter the transnational criminal threat.

I have followed the “war on drugs” pretty closely since I was the British ambassador to Colombia in the heyday of Pablo Escobar, but I was still shocked to learn of the scale of the Latin American criminal presence in Europe, including supposedly political insurgents such as the Colombian ELN and various Farc dissident factions. The fivefold increase in the cocaine trade in the last decade has boosted organised crime on both sides of the Atlantic. It underlines dramatically the failure of the “war on drugs”.

In 2001 you published an opinion piece by me saying that this war was unwinnable and that state supervision of legalised drugs would be preferable. I argued that aggressive law enforcement had greatly damaged producer and transit countries without reducing the flow of drugs to consumer countries. Prohibition ensured that the incentive of high prices for cheaply produced drugs was simply too great. So it has remained.

However, legalised cannabis regimes are now working in Canada, Uruguay and more than 20 US states, providing possible models for cocaine. The situation has been complicated by the development of extremely strong synthetic drugs, such as fentanyl. Of around 80,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2024, 22,000 were cocaine users, while 48,000 had used fentanyl. It strikes me that the availability of such dangerous drugs would make the alternative of legally controlled and safer cocaine worth an experiment, on top of the reduction of violence and corruption that legalisation should bring.

I will soon be 92, and owe that to the good fortune that I and fellow members of our chamber of commerce board walked out of a meeting in Bogotá in January 1993, just 15 minutes before an Escobar-ordered car bomb destroyed our boardroom. I have an obligation to continue making this case. Keith Morris Ambassador to Colombia, 1990-94